The Asia Library in the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies
Asia Library, the foremost library of its kind in Sweden, was founded in August 1999. The library has a national responsibility to provide contemporary documentation about East and South-East Asia. All the newer material is only in English.
Since 2019 the Asia Library is one of the three libraries at the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology at Lund University, the HT libraries. The Asia Library is located in the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies in Lund. In total, there are 26 libraries at Lund University. You can search their material in the shared catalogue, LUBcat.
Below, you will find some of the special collections available at the Asia Library.
Karl Reinhold Haellquist’s Memorial Collection
In the year 2000 Karl Reinhold Haellquist, a historian and South Asia specialist working at the Nordic Institute for Asian Studies (NIAS) in Copenhagen, passed away leaving behind a large private collection of books, journals, videotapes and pamphlets on various aspects of South Asian studies.
Parts of the collection, approximately 600 volumes, are available at the Asia Library.
One special section contains the Mahatma Gandhi Book Collection, consisting of works by or about Gandhi. The collection reflects Haellquist’s lifelong interest in Gandhi, and many of the books contain review clippings and other notes.
An overview of the available titles in the collection can be found here (links to Libris).
Kampuchea collection
The Kampuchea collection was made available at the Asia Library in 2001 and was collected by Israel (Izzy) Young, a member of the Sweden-Kampuchea Association.
The collection consists mostly of a large number of newspaper clippings and documents from a variety of sources from 1967 to 2000, along with about 70 books. The majority of the books are in English, about 20 are in French, and a few are in Swedish.
The newspaper clippings and documents are organized chronologically, with an emphasis on the 1970s. Some documents are organized by subject, for example document from the Swedish Committee on Vietnam, Laos and Kampuchea, the trials of Pol Pot and the Voice of Cambodian Nationalists. A large amount of the documents are in French.
An overview of the collection can be found here (links to a PDF).
If you wish to see the collections, please contact the staff at the Asia Library (see this link for contact information).
