The village net outlived the citadel

Claim (verbatim)

Lao literary history suffered two decapitations — the Siamese destruction of Vientiane in 1827-28, after which the city was emptied and its temples stripped, and the Black Flag sack of Luang Prabang in 1887, when Vat Visoun burned — yet Laos today holds one of mainland Southeast Asia's richest manuscript inheritances. The conjecture is that the two facts are one: Lao Buddhism ran on a decentralized copying economy in which merit-making commissioned fascicles village by village, so the textual estate was a redundant network with no single point of failure, and the catastrophes that annihilated the royal collections merely trimmed nodes. If that is the true architecture, the surviving corpus should carry the scars in its provenance geography: the capital that was razed and abandoned should show a manuscript age-profile that restarts after its destruction, while the network's surviving strongholds hold the deep stock. The test corpus exists — the Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts, built from the National Library of Laos' nationwide survey of monastery collections, with tens of thousands of dated colophons searchable by province — and the earliest stratum it preserves reaches back to the sixteenth century, older than almost anything the royal centers themselves could show. Prediction: in the Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts, Luang Prabang province will hold at least twice as many dated manuscripts copied before 1800 as Vientiane province, and manuscripts copied before 1828 with Vientiane-area provenance will constitute under a quarter of the national pre-1828 total, despite Vientiane's political primacy through that whole era; the corpus's oldest dated manuscript will fall in the first half of the sixteenth century (primary clause: the two-to-one Luang Prabang advantage in pre-1800 fascicles; the verdict follows it). Kill: the Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts (laomanuscripts.net; National Library of Laos, from the Preservation of Lao Manuscripts Programme, 1992-2002), searchable by copy date and holding location.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts, Luang Prabang province will hold at least twice as many dated manuscripts copied before 1800 as Vientiane province, and manuscripts copied before 1828 with Vientiane-area provenance will constitute under a quarter of the national pre-1828 total, despite Vientiane's political primacy through that whole era; the corpus's oldest dated manuscript will fall in the first half of the sixteenth century (primary clause: the two-to-one Luang Prabang advantage in pre-1800 fascicles; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts (laomanuscripts.net; National Library of Laos, from the Preservation of Lao Manuscripts Programme, 1992-2002), searchable by copy date and holding location.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The decentralized merit-copying architecture of Lao Buddhism, the razing of Vientiane (1827-28) and the 1887 sack of Luang Prabang, and the deep sixteenth-century stratum surfaced by the Preservation of Lao Manuscripts Programme are documented, and the Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts is searchable by date and province. But the primary clause is a provincial ratio - Luang Prabang holding at least twice Vientiane's pre-1800 dated fascicles, Vientiane under a quarter of the national pre-1828 total - and that cross-province tabulation has not been run and stated. The corpus that would settle it exists; the arithmetic over it does not. Adjacent.

• Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts (laomanuscripts.net), National Library of Laos, from the Preservation of Lao Manuscripts Programme (1992-2002)
• Louis Finot, 'Recherches sur la litterature laotienne', Bulletin de l'Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient 17 (1917)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.