Old leaves survive upcountry

Claim (verbatim)

The oldest manuscript stratum on the Southeast Asian mainland survives not in any imperial capital but in the village monasteries of Lanna — and the conjecture holds this is a law, not a fluke: in tropical manuscript cultures, survival tracks distributed custodianship, and centers are where books go to die. Lanna's golden age produced the mainland's most ambitious Pali scholarship — Bodhiraṃsi's Cāmadevīvaṃsa around 1410, Ratanapañña's Jinakālamālī finished by 1528, Sirimaṅgala's Maṅgalatthadīpanī of 1524 — and then the kingdom's center collapsed into two centuries of Burmese overlordship after 1558, while war and depopulation repeatedly emptied Chiang Mai itself. Yet the wat libraries of the hinterland — Lampang, Phrae, Nan — kept their fascicles, and the microfilm-and-digitization campaigns that surveyed them built the region's best dated corpus, the Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts, whose colophons include the celebrated 1471 Jātaka manuscript of Wat Lai Hin in Lampang, the oldest dated manuscript known in Thailand, and the early witnesses that made Northern Thailand indispensable to Pali textual criticism. If survival is peripheral, the pre-1600 stratum should sit demonstrably outside the royal center. Prediction: in the Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts' colophon-dated corpus, at least twenty manuscripts will predate 1600, the oldest being the 1471 Wat Lai Hin Jātaka, and over two thirds of all pre-1600 items will be held by monasteries outside Chiang Mai's old royal-capital wat cluster — the provincial refugia of Lampang, Phrae and Nan — despite Chiang Mai's dominance in production during the golden age (primary clause: the two-thirds peripheral share of the pre-1600 stratum; the verdict follows it). Kill: the Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts (EFEO and Chiang Mai University, built on the Preservation of Northern Thai Manuscripts Project microfilms), queryable by date and holding monastery, with Oskar von Hinüber's surveys of the oldest Pali manuscripts of Northern Thailand as control.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts' colophon-dated corpus, at least twenty manuscripts will predate 1600, the oldest being the 1471 Wat Lai Hin Jātaka, and over two thirds of all pre-1600 items will be held by monasteries outside Chiang Mai's old royal-capital wat cluster — the provincial refugia of Lampang, Phrae and Nan — despite Chiang Mai's dominance in production during the golden age (primary clause: the two-thirds peripheral share of the pre-1600 stratum; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts (EFEO and Chiang Mai University, built on the Preservation of Northern Thai Manuscripts Project microfilms), queryable by date and holding monastery, with Oskar von Hinüber's surveys of the oldest Pali manuscripts of Northern Thailand as control.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The 1471 Wat Lai Hin Jataka as Thailand's oldest dated manuscript and the survival of the deepest Lanna stratum in provincial wats (Lampang, Nan, Phrae) rather than Chiang Mai are established in von Hinuber's and Hundius's studies of Northern Thai manuscripts, and the Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts makes the corpus queryable by date and holding monastery. But the primary clause is a geographic tabulation - at least twenty pre-1600 manuscripts, over two thirds of them held outside the Chiang Mai royal-capital cluster - and that specific count-and-distribution has not been extracted and published. The materials and the qualitative peripheral-survival point are in print; the two-thirds share is un-run. Adjacent.

• O. von Hinuber, 'The Oldest Dated Manuscript of the Milindapanha', Journal of the Pali Text Society 11 (1987)
• Harald Hundius, 'The Colophons of Thirty Pali Manuscripts from Northern Thailand', Journal of the Pali Text Society 14 (1990)
• Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts (EFEO and Chiang Mai University)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.