Collection stories: Asia

I first saw the ‘Say Hi to the Leaders’ signboard during one of my visits to the Rachaprasong protest site in Bangkok, Thailand in April-May 2010. My first and immediate thought was that someone should preserve this. A unique collection of handwritten post-it notes pinned on big plastic sheets made into a signboard, standing on the corner of Rachaprasong in front of the Gaysorn shopping mall. Post-its full with messages to the Red Shirt leaders.

About a year ago the IISH bought a flag (banner) of the Indonesian Pemuda Rakyat at an auction. Due to the pandemic the processing of the flag in the catalogue of the IISH was put on hold, but now it is finally accessible (IISG BG L1/501). Pemuda Rakyat (People's Youth) was the youth wing of the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (Communist Party of Indonesia). 

Sometimes you stumble upon little surprises. In this case finding a poster in a small donated collection of Indonesia and East Timor related magazines of the Thailand Informations- und Solidaritätskomitee, München (TISK) on the events of 6 October 1976, which were commemorated in Thailand only weeks ago.

IISH collects all kind of ephemera, not only printed matter. One type of these ephemera are so-called mouth masks or mouth caps. Under these keywords I can find only two in the whole collection (both from Thailand, from the political protests about a decade ago).

The Commoner's Party [in Thai: พรรคสามัญชน] is a new party in the Thai political spectrum. Founded in late 2018, the leftist party decided to take part in the 2019 general elections, the first one after 5 years of military rule since the coup in 2014.

It took more then a while before the ASA archive - or rather the remains of the archive, as there are many gaps in the collection - finally arrived in Amsterdam, but this spring it finally did.

The announcement comes with some delay but that's not to say we're less excited to be able to report that the archives of the Karen National Union (KNU) are now available through IISH (actually they were since late 2013, early 2014).

In 2013 and 2014 we received the first batches of the collection of Roel Burgler.

Thailand Social and Political developments Collection is the new name of what formerly was known as the DOC or documentation collections (DOC Thailand in this case) The Asia Department with support of Collection Processing has started to make new descriptions of her existing documentation collect

Also late last year we received the library and documentation collection of the Committee for Asian Women (CAW), a regional NGO for women workers groups.

Everybody who has ever visited Hong Kong and made a Sunday stroll around Central District knows about the weekly phenomena of Filipino domestic workers reclaiming the streets - or pavements and walkways to be more precise - on their free Sunday.

(this blog was earlier posted on February 4, 2019, but somehow wasn't transferred to the new website environment)