This project aims to preserve a corpus manuscripts of unique cultural value in Lanten society. Written in Classical Chinese supplemented with the Lanten language, these manuscripts mediate the transfer of the religious knowledge and verbal and non-verbal expertise enabling ritual experts to communicate with the deities of the Lanten pantheon.
This project aims to preserve a corpus of manuscripts that constitutes a resource of unique cultural value in Lanten society. Written in Classical Chinese supplemented with lexemes from Lanten language, these manuscripts mediate the transfer across the generations of the religious knowledge and verbal and non-verbal expertise enabling ritual experts to communicate with the Deities of the Lanten pantheon. To that end the manuscripts contain instructions for rituals of healing, marriage, death, ordination, and exorcism, specifying the sacrificial procedures and the Deities involved. EAP791 has enabled the digitisation of 768 manuscripts. Copies of the digital images have been provided to EAP in London, the National Library of Laos in Vientiane, the University of Münster and the University of Hong Kong. During the digitisation process, the team established that not only many old ritual texts, now lost, had survived in the form of relatively recently reproduced manuscripts (from 1900 onwards) but that manuscripts without a date contained invaluable texts as well.
