Nepalese ms destruction

[Jonathan Silk]

A question:

>J. Huntingdon wrote:
>
>>About eighteen  months months ago, in Dang ...  The "Maoists" burned  the
>>western branch of the Sanskrit University to the ground. It contained
>>an estimated 12,000 Sanskrit manuscripts, ....


And Michael wrote:

>
>Are you SURE about the mss?  The newpaper at the time (see below)  spoke
>only of printed  books, and a friend whom I asked mentioned only, if I
>recall correctly,  "office materials, files" not mss.  I also  doubt that
>they would have collected 12,000 or even 50,000 mss. in just 14 years...

Michael is the idea person to answer the following: if there were Skt
MSS in this University, would not we expect that they had been
photographed by the NGMPP? (Not that this would make the destruction
of the mss any more palatable, of course).

JAS

--
Jonathan Silk
Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures
Center for Buddhist Studies
UCLA
290 Royce Hall
Box 951540
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1540
phone: (310)206-8235
fax:  (310)825-8808
silk at humnet.ucla.edu