Sir William Gregory and the Colombo Museum: Sri Lanka’s Pali Buddhist Manuscripts

Sir William Gregory was a high-ranking British colonial official, who served as Governor-General of the Crown Colony of Ceylon. Today, Sir William is best remembered as owner of the Coole Park estate in County Galway and husband of Lady Augusta Gregory, patron, co-founder, and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Within Ireland, little attention has been given to the appraisal that Sir William received for his work in establishing the Colombo Museum in the administrative capital of Ceylon. The chapter evaluates William Gregory’s work with regard to the collection of the island’s ancient Buddhist manuscripts at the museum and it assesses his contribution to the evolution of textual Pali studies and “textual” Buddhism in nineteenth-century Britain, as part of a colonial “re-discovery” of Ceylonese history during the Victorian period.