Southeast Asia Visions
About this collection
Southeast Asia Visions is a collection of European travel accounts of pre-modern Southeast Asia from Cornell University Library's John M. Echols Collection. This collection includes more than 350 books written in English and French.
The common thread uniting these accounts is they all contain firsthand observations of life in the region. Over 90% of the selected monographs contain illustrations, of which 20% are in color. Almost one-half of the monographs contain plates and a third contain maps. The graphic materials are an extraordinary resource both for the information contained in them and the remarkable skill with which they were drawn.
As a collection, the aggregation of texts is unique. With the assistance of Cornell University faculty, we have identified texts covering the region as a whole as well as texts on each of the countries of Southeast Asia. Selection criteria included rarity; accessibility to a wide audience, to include language (mostly English) and readability; presence of illustrative matter; and potential for scholarly research. This body of material represents a significant portion of first-person English-language output on the region during the time period covered.
Historical context
The Visions collection includes the written and photographed experiences of Europeans and Americans who traveled to Southeast Asia during the period of imperialism. The peoples of Southeast Asia experienced waves of colonization beginning in 1511 when the Portuguese took Melaka, a strategic and thriving port city on the Malay Peninsula. The Spanish established a colony in the Philippines which they ruled from the 1560s until 1899 when the United States ousted the Spanish and governed the colony until Philippine independence in 1946. The Dutch gradually conquered the areas known today as Indonesia beginning in 1596 and ending after WWII. The British Empire, centered in South Asia, moved into the Malay Peninsula and Burma by the early 1800s but did not withdraw from Burma until 1948 and Malaysia and Singapore until 1957. France established a foothold in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, an area grouped under the rubric of French Indochina and ruled by the French from the mid-to-late 1800s until after WWII.
The complex histories of colonization in Southeast Asia have enabled the production of a vibrant (and ethnocentric) multiplicity of accounts by missionaries, travelers, officials, military officers, captains, naturalists, scholars, children, and even a dog. The Southeast Asia Visions collection includes a selection of historically rich primary accounts which range chronologically from the 1550s to the 1920s. These travelogues, letters, official accounts, journals, autobiographies, guidebooks, and photo albums cover Southeast Asia in the main but also include East Asia, South Asia, Africa, South America and other locales. All sources are in English or French and with a few exceptions are written by European and American men and women.
Using the collection
When searching this collection, it is important to remember that many place names have changed over time. For example, Siam became Thailand, Burma became Myanmar or Indochina became Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Different spellings for the same place have also been used, such as Burma or Burmah. Using all of the different spellings and names when you search for the place you are interested in researching will return you more comprehensive results.
For questions about this collection, please contact Kroch Asia Library reference staff at asiaref@cornell.edu.
More information
- Collection steward
- Gregory Green, Curator, John M. Echols Collection on Southeast Asia
- Metadata creation
- Cornell University Library
- Funding
- Institute for Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant, 2002
- Credits
- This collection overview was prepared by Gregory Green, Curator, John M. Echols Collection on Southeast Asia, 2025.
- Collection sources