1 “Counting to 37: Sir Richard Carnac Temple and the Thirty-Eighth Nat” “Any review of studies of Burmese belief in the supernatural must begin with Sir Richard Temple and his publication in 1906 of The Thirty-Seven Nats.” Sarah Bekker, Burmese Traditional Views of the Supernatural, 1982 1 Introduction 2 In 1894, following a distinguished career in what was then British- controlled Burma, Richard Carnac Temple, the former administrator of Mandalay and Port-Commissioner of Rangoon, sailed home to England. He left behind a master carver named Maung Kyaw Yan, whose Rangoon workshop was busy carving 37 teakwood statues of nats. These would shortly follow Temple to England, and then on to his new posting as Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. 3 Aside from his military and civil service duties for the British Empire, Temple, whose portrait is shown at Fig. 1, was a prolific author who penned many articles for the Indian Antiquary: a Journal of Oriental Research, which 1 Sarah M. Bekker, “Burmese Traditional Views of the Supernatural: Past and Present Accounts,” (Cornell University Library, 1982) 1. 2 The author uses English spellings without diacritics for the types and names of the nats. Other Burmese words employ the transliteration from the Myanmar-English Dictionary, with the important exception of the word နတ , which retains the usual English spelling of ‘nat’. Department of the Myanmar Language Commission, Myanmar-English Dictionary (Naypyitaw: Ministry of Education, 2000). The Burmese script for all Burmese language words, and their transliteration, is given in the glossary at the end of this article. 3 A fuller biography of this remarkable man is given in Patricia Herbert’s essay at the end of the 1991 Kiscadale republication of Temple’s book. See Patricia Herbert, “Sir Richard Carnac Temple and the Thirty-Seven Nats,” in The Thirty-Seven Nats: A Phase of Spirit-Worship Prevailing in Burma (London: Kiscadale Publications, 1991), I-VI. The majority of Temple’s collection of nat statues are now held in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.