Ceremony for the ordination of two Lantien men into Tao priesthood

Location: Ban Nam An, Muang Long District, Luang Namtha

Lantien people, or more correctly "Kim Mun Lantien Sha" originally migrated to Northern Laos from China. Their religion is Taoism, and all their religious manuscripts are in Chinese writing.

They have over the few centuries they have been in Laos kept fairly much to themselves as people, and preserved their culture.

I was fortunate enough to be invited by the priest of Ban Nam Lue, Mr Lao Lee, to attend several of their ceremonies over the past two years, in order to photograph them.
Most ceremonies take two or three days, with mainly the men participating in the formal proceedings, and the women being busy with cooking to feed the family and guests.

In order to not disturb the atmosphere during the proceedings, I restricted my photography by not using flash. This leads to somewhat grainy and sometimes high contrast images, due to often very low lighting levels in the house.

I wish to express my gratitude to Mr Lao Lee and the people of Ban Nam Lue and Ban Nam An for granting me the privilege of attending their sacred ceremonies. I hope my work will in the longer term assist in preserving knowledge about the ancient Lantien traditions.

Most of this gallery (Photos 18 onwards) is dedicated to an ordination ceremony in Ban Nam An, Muang Long, Luang Namtha province. I was contacted a few days before the ceremony via friends of mine in Luang Namtha, by Mr Lao Lee. He wanted to know if I was interested in coming with him to Ban Nam An, about 100 km from Luang Namtha, to attend the ordination of two Lantien men into Tao priesthood.
It was rather short notice, but I gratefully accepted, and drove North to meet him (a two day drive from Vientiane where I lived at the time). The morning after my arrival in Luang Namtha I went to meet him. He asked if his wife and (grand?) son could come along, since their daughter had married a man in Ban Nam An, and they hadn’t seen her for many months.

I had arranged for a guide from Green Discovery (a private sector guiding service in Luang Namtha) to accompany us, since my Lao language skills still weren’t sufficient for a three day stint in a village where almost certainly no one else would be able to speak or understand English. So the five of us set out in my pickup truck around 11.00 a.m. for a trip that should have taken about two to three hours. We finally didn’t get to Ban Nam An until around five that afternoon, since the road was very windy, and some of my passengers had only rarely traveled in cars, and were very carsick for most of the journey. This required multiple stops on the way, and driving very slowly.

After some discussion with my guide, we had decided not to overnight in the village. It would probably be full with other visitors who had come to attend the ceremony, and we needed a clean place to sleep with guaranteed electricity, so I could recharge batteries for my cameras and laptop, and download the results of each day’s shooting. So after we dropped of Mr Lao Lee and his family in the village, we drove on to the next little town, Chiang Kok, on the Mekong river, opposite Myanmar. We managed to get there just at dusk, to my relief, because I don’t like driving an unknown, unsealed road far away from anywhere after dark. We managed to get probably the best accommodation there, two small wooden cottages overlooking the river. Spartan, hard bed, virtually no furniture, but they did have a generator that ran from dusk to about 9.00 at night. After that pitch dark.

Next morning got to the village after about an hours drive. The ceremony was starting up. It would take about 3 days altogether.
Most of the ceremony would take place in a house belonging to the family of one of the men. The two men had spent the previous day sequestered and fasting in a little corner of the main room, behind a set of curtains. I am not certain how long, it may have been more then one day in fact. During the first part of the ceremony, they were still behind the curtains, but were brought out of there during the first day.
Part of the ceremony also took place outside. There was a long pole with a banner, like flagpole, around which various men would from time to time walk or dance, and several other rituals were performed outside.
Sometimes, some of the rituals looked like a well known scenario acted out by men who had done this part before. A lot of time was spent reading old manuscripts, consulting with the elders about details of the ceremony, copying texts on pieces of paper or paper bags (Messages to the spirits), which at the end of the ceremony on the third day were burnt (Sent to the spirits?) An “altar” was constructed covering one wall of the room, covered in little colored pieces of paper with text hadwritten on them. This was constructed the days before the ceremony, and taken down on the last day.
A range of the present men took an active role in the ceremony, which involved chanting, ‘Communicating with the spirits”, dancing (Sometimes dancing with a sword), making music, making offerings.

At some stage during the first afternoon, the two ‘novices were dressed in red robes, and started themselves taking an active part in the ceremony.





The room was also most of the time full of spectators, which included children of all ages, and the occasional dog. Most women were busy in the kitchen or outside to produce the large meals required to feed this big gathering. To do so, about half a dozen pigs were slaughtered. All of it was used in one way or other for food, the pigs blood used mixed with rice to make a special dish obviously relished by the people. Apart from food, there was a regular ritual consumption of rice whiskey (LaoLao)

I will add some further comments to individual photos.


Altogether, I have taken photographs at three different Tao ordination ceremonies, the first during an unexpected stop over in ban Sop Doud, about 12 km downriver from Luang Namtha, in 2003. This was a surprise, and I wasn’t really properly prepared for the occasion. We only stayed for an hour and my photographs taken in a very dark room were not very successful. My Sony 717 wasn’t really able to deal with high ISO settings required for this available darkness.
This Ban Nam An ordination I was better prepared, but afterwards still a bit disappointed with the quality of my results. My main lens was a 4.5-5.6 17-85 mm canon zoom, and camera was the canon 20D. The camera can give acceptable results at 1600 ISO, be it a bit grainy, but the relatively slow lens meant I either had to work on a tripod (Very inconvenient in a full room when you never know what will happen next), OR use slow shutterspeeds, which can never freeze the movement adequately. I was initially so disappointed with the results that I put them aside for a while. It was really only this year that I got back to them and spent some serious time trying to improve the results .

My third attendance at an ordination was early 2007, again by chance. I was in Luang Namtha for only a weeks, and that morning had visited a neighbouring Khmu village. On my way back to the Guesthouse that afternoon, I decided to stop off at Ban Nam Lue and pay my respects to Mr Lao Lee. His wife told me he was at a ceremony in another house. When I realized what was happening, I brought out my cameras. That time I was in fact better prepared for low light. My camera then was a 5D, and lenses a fast 24 mm/1.4 and 50mm/1.4, much better able to cope with low light. Some of those photos can be found in another gallery “Lantien ceremonies”



I am NOT an anthropologist, but a photographer. So for the time being, my actual knowledge about what happened at this ceremony and why is rather sketchy. I hope to find out more over the next few years.
My guide proved to be not very useful in helping translate any information about the ceremony offered by Mr Lao Lee, because he simply didn’t have sufficient knowledge of English for complex issues.
Practical obstacles

In practice, the three days were also full of unexpected hitches for me.
Because my laptop uses a fair bit of battery power, and I could not recharge it while in the village, I’d use a small battery powered harddrive to download the pictures from my camera, check they are there, then delete the pictures from my card to re-use it.
During one of these procedures on the first day, I must have made a mistake, didn’t download it properly, didn’t notice it during the check, and lost about 250 exposures. Now I travel with 2 hard drives, and back up twice. Also switch on laptop briefly to check if all is in fact downloaded.

On the second day in the morning I noticed that my fuel in the truck was getting a bit low. I didn’t know of any fuel sources this side of Muang Sing (about an hour east), so decided to first drive to MS, fill my tank, then on to the village. This would also allow my guide to phone his wife (No mobile phone reception where we slept or in the village.) I wanted also to phone my wife, since I had been out of tough for a few days. Arrived at a gas station, told my guide to tell the woman to “fill her up”, and walked away from the truck to make my phone call. Paid, drove off. About a kilometer down the road, a few loud bangs and some black smoke, and the truck stopped.
They had filled it with petrol instead of diesel.
The gas station was new, pumps imported from China, no signs on the pump yet. The attendant who saw me approaching guided me to a stop at a pump. 99% of all pick up trucks in Laos are diesel, I was assuming but hadn’t checked. I simple relied on the attendant to know (Diesel engines sound different from petrol) or my guide to know. Attendant probably was new, my guide drives a motorbike but never owned a car or truck. I in fact didn’t know the Lao word for Diesel, the issue had never arisen. Now I know. And I know the spelling in Lao script!
We were stuck at the side of the road until late afternoon before it was all fixed, as a result I missed an entire day of the ceremony.

Maybe the “Spirits” wanted to teach me a lesson.

I shall try and add to this document as I learn more. Anyone who wants to provide more information if they have it, please contact me by email.