Historical background
During the Lane Xang era Buddhist
wats (temple complexes) began to proliferate throughout the countryside, acquiring an important community role as a place of worship, education and social encounter.
As places of learning the
wats gradually became repositories of religious texts and a range of other popular, learned and literary writings, including works on history, traditional law and customs, astrology, magic, mythology and rituals, traditional medicine and healing, grammar and lexicography, as well as poetry and a very large number of epic stories and folk tales. These were stored in libraries (
ho trai), small chapel-like structures located close to the
sim or main sanctuary. Today there are an estimated 2,800
wats throughout the country, many of which still house rich collections of palm leaf manuscripts, some dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries. In recent years the Lao-German
Preservation of Lao Manuscripts Programme (PLMP) has successfully preserved the manuscript holdings of some 830 Buddhist monasteries; inventories are being made in a field survey covering the whole of Laos.
Little is known of the system of Lao royal administration during the pre-colonial period, but it is reasonable to assume that royal decrees and other state documents were stored by the Lao kings for safe keeping in dedicated record repositories. Gilded manuscript boxes dating back to the 18th century have survived in various historical collections, most notably those of the
Luang Prabang National Museum.
In 1929 a Pali School was established by Prince Phetsarath to address the needs of monks who wanted to teach Pali or conduct research and therefore required a higher level of study than was currently available in temples. A palm leaf manuscript library known as the Phouthapanditsapha was established under the school within what is now the grounds of the Presidential Palace, and this is the first known library in Vientiane.
While the French colonial government established national libraries in both Việt Nam and Cambodia, no major library institutions were established in Laos until the early 1940s, when a municipal library was opened in a wooden building at Ban Anou in central Vientiane.
Three years after independence in 1956, this branch library became the Vientiane General Library under the Ministry of Education of the Royal Lao Government, functioning thereafter mainly as a resource for local schools. In 1960 it was relocated to Thanon Lane Xang (between the
Lyéee de Vientiane and Dok Mai Daeng Hotel, today the site for Vientiane's future city library) and again in 1964 to the Ministry of Justice compound on Patuxai Circle, where it was designated in the following year as the National Library within the Directorate of National Library, National Museum and Archaeology of the Ministry of Education, Fine Arts, Sports and Youth.
Since 1975 the
National Library has been moved again on several occasions – to what is now the Lao National Museum building in Thanon Samsenthai from 1983 to 1986, and to a small building on Nam Phu Square from 1986 to 1987.
In 1987 it relocated to its current premises, a French colonial residence dating from 1923.
