Paul Ambroise Bigandet

(13 August 1813 – 19 March 1894) was a French Catholic missionary who served as Bishop of Lower Burma from 1856 to 1894.

After receiving his education in the town, he went to Paris, trained for two years at La Société des Missions Etrangères, and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1837.

In 1842, he was transferred to the mission of the Straits Settlements at Penang where he spent 14 years, serving at one time as priest of the Church of the Assumption in George Town.

When he arrived there were only a few small, struggling missions, and the country was in disorder having just been annexed by the British government.

[2][3] Bigandet was a Pali scholar, the language of Theravada Buddhism, and wrote The Life or Legend of Guadama: the Buddha of the Burmese, which was first published in 1858, and became the standard work of the religion of the Burmese in the nineteenth century.