Joseba Estevez started collecting stories in 2010 as part of his research on the Lanten society and cosmos. The endangered status of the oral stories required, nonetheless, a more urgent approach to record as many stories as possible before they were lost, and to facilitate their promotion and transmission.

For these reasons and within the consortium created by the University of Münster, the University of Hong Kong, and the National Library of Laos, a project to revitalise the Lanten Stories was launched. The project had two main goals: To preserve the stories and to promote literacy amongst the Lanten children and women.

The Lanten Stories Project was supported by the Basic Education Quality and Access in Lao PDR – BEQUAL within the framework of their Innovation Fund.

The Lanten Stories project ran from 2017 to 2020 led by the Lao Ministry of Education and Sports and the Lao Ministry of Information, Culture, and Tourism and supported financially by the European Union and Australian Aid. The project was co-directed in Laos by Joseba Estevez (Co-I) and the director-general of the NLL, Khanthamaly Yangnouvong (Co-I) and supervised by Helene Basu (PI), Institute of Ethnology, University of Münster (Germany).

The Lanten Oral Stories project had three major aims:

• The preservation (digitisation) of all the available Lanten stories in Laos;
• The creation of teaching materials, namely illustrated books for children in Lao and English languages employing a selection of these stories;
• The promotion and transmission of these stories in the Lanten communities by means of dedicated mobile libraries and literacy campaigns in Lao language targeting children and women.

Over a period of two years, the Yao Dao Project team in Laos collected  115 stories in vernacular Lanten (Kim Mun language) that were translated into Lao and English. These stories were classified by themes and the maturity of their contents, which resulted in 70 stories being approved for children.

Three teams of illustrators initiated the challenging transformation of some of these selected stories into illustrated books for children.

The Lanten lack an imagery of their own. Their Daoist paintings, employed in the rituals, were sold to collectors and tourists over two decades ago. The only illustrations available are those appearing in their Daoist manuscripts or coming from non-Lanten sources (e.g. television, school material, magazines). Hence, the team invited different artists, each with their own techniques and approaches in their repertoire, who were invited to provide the potential readers with as many styles and motifs as possible.

Captivating the interest of the children and triggering their imagination was a major objective. In addition to this, the illustrators were instructed to retain the Lanten culture in the creation of this imagery. The Lanten identity and traditional way of living appearing in the paintings of the illustrated books is true to the original. Various Lanten consultants and storytellers curated the process in order to upkeep the Lanten culture in the illustrated books. 

The main approach in terms of techniques was twofold: Traditional illustration carried out by Saotula Khounphomxay, a well-known and talented Lao artist and one of our collaborators at the National Library of Laos; and digital illustration, which was developed by various artists engaged at Clay House Studios, the personal project of Souliya Phoumivong,  animator, educator, and founder of the studios and also one of our collaborators in Laos. Indeed, a stop- motion short film animating one of the Lanten oral stories is in our wish-list agenda ~