The chancery wrote in chalk

Claim (verbatim)

The Burmese state ran on parabaik — folded paperbooks, the blackened sort written with soft steatite pencil, erasable and reusable by design — and that choice of medium is a survival sentence. A chancery that issues orders daily on a medium meant for reuse keeps its record only as long as clerks recopy it; when Than Tun assembled The Royal Orders of Burma, A.D. 1598-1885, gathering every royal order he could locate across ten volumes, he was sampling whatever three centuries of that treadmill plus the fall of Mandalay had left. The conjecture is that such an archive has a measurable half-life visible as violent recency skew: order survival should collapse with distance from the terminal archive rather than track the actual issuing rate, which was roughly steady (late-period daily registers show the chancery's true tempo). The nominal span of Than Tun's corpus is 287 years, and if orders survived in proportion to issuance the seventeenth century should supply roughly a third of the documents; on the half-life model it should supply almost nothing, with the corpus overwhelmingly a late-Konbaung artifact — Bodawpaya's and Mindon's reigns flooding the volumes while whole seventeenth-century decades go dark. Prediction: counting the dated documents in Than Tun's ten volumes, over four fifths will postdate 1780 and under five percent will predate 1700, with at least three seventeenth-century decades represented by fewer than five surviving orders each — a survival curve incompatible with proportionality to issuance and consistent with a sub-century archival half-life (primary clause: the four-fifths post-1780 share; the verdict follows it). Kill: Than Tun (ed. and tr.), The Royal Orders of Burma, A.D. 1598-1885, 10 vols (Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto, 1983-1990), whose chronological document lists make the count direct.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: counting the dated documents in Than Tun's ten volumes, over four fifths will postdate 1780 and under five percent will predate 1700, with at least three seventeenth-century decades represented by fewer than five surviving orders each — a survival curve incompatible with proportionality to issuance and consistent with a sub-century archival half-life (primary clause: the four-fifths post-1780 share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Than Tun (ed. and tr.), The Royal Orders of Burma, A.D. 1598-1885, 10 vols (Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto, 1983-1990), whose chronological document lists make the count direct.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Than Tun's ten-volume Royal Orders of Burma is exactly the corpus whose chronological lists make the count 'direct', and the parabaik-treadmill and recency-skew intuition is familiar from the administrative-history literature (Lieberman). But 'direct' is not 'done': no one has counted the dated documents to state that over four fifths postdate 1780, under five percent predate 1700, and specific seventeenth-century decades fall below five surviving orders each. This is the textbook materials-in-print, arithmetic-un-run case - the demographic result is latent in Than Tun's volumes but not computed. Adjacent.

• Than Tun (ed. and tr.), The Royal Orders of Burma, A.D. 1598-1885, 10 vols (Kyoto: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, 1983-1990)
• Victor B. Lieberman, Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c. 1580-1760 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.