The Sinhalese Human Exhibitions on the Route from Lviv to Kyiv (1891) – textual and visual press sources

The route taken in 1891 by the ‘caravan of Sinhalese and Tamil people’ was organised by the Hagenbeck company, and passed through Lviv, Odesa and Kyiv. The research on ethnic shows in modern-day Ukrainian lands focuses on the complex relationship between ethnic-show business, racial knowledge production and popular education. Very little of the relevant source material has survived, and the scarce information testifying to the presence of ethnic shows is mostly found in the local press of the day. Based on the nineteenth-century Polish-language, Ukrainian-language and Russian-language press, we constructed a database containing visual and textual data about the Sinhalese group that performed in Lviv, Odesa and Kyiv in 1891.This data collection contains the source material used for the article. The collection is made available on an open access basis. Details are available in the intro file entitled 'readme'.