Neighbours offered quick nods, hurried hints. The streets felt familiar yet hostile, reshaped by war. Still, Anne refused to turn back.
This is the journey that unfolds in “As the Rising Sun Sets”, one of the immersive story trails in the Ceritalah app.
Behind this app is the Maitree House team, a Penang-based digital heritage studio set up by Peta Khan, an Australian multimedia storyteller, a decade ago.
Based in George Town, she and her Malaysian team spent years in conversation with ThinkCity about how to “bring more oral histories and stories to the streets of our town” without “over-cluttering with heritage markers”.
Choosing which stories to tell was equally deliberate. “It’s very much about listening to the community first,” Khan said.
When some suggested spotlighting the Chinese clan wars, temple custodians declined. “They did not want to tell that story.”
So the team engaged different stakeholders – and honoured the histories residents themselves chose to share.
That same philosophy extends beyond the two-hour Story Trail of “As the Rising Sun Sets”.
Ceritalah, which is in its beta phase right now, also offers free “community memory boxes” at kopitiams, temples and old family businesses, as well as augmented reality artworks created with local artists and site custodians.
At its core, Khan told FMT Lifestyle, Ceritalah is about “authentic, meaningful community storytelling.”
Using self-guided maps and augmented reality, the app aims to bring history to life – grounding digital layers in real voices and lived memory.
For Khan, Ceritalah is a cultural preservation project.
Too many oral histories, she noted, were stored in archives. The question that drove the team was disarmingly simple: “How can we bring these stories so people can just listen to them on the side?”
To build the story trails, the Maitree team sat down with Penang’s last surviving World War II witnesses – men and women now in their nineties – and recorded their memories. Those interviews were then shaped into a semi-fictional scripted drama.
What ultimately surfaced in those interviews was not only horror, but the resilience of the community, she said, and how neighbours banded together, endured, and carried on. That understanding shaped more than just the script; it shaped the philosophy behind the app itself.
If the heart of the story is human endurance, then the technology must never overshadow it. “We don’t want to take away from the real experience of being in that beautiful heritage site,” Khan said, nor from “listening to a site custodian or tour guide.”
At the same time, she recognises reality: visitors are already walking through Georgetown with their phones out, snapping photos and checking maps. “We want to meet that market,” she said, while ensuring that the community stories are retold.
Without that grounding, Khan warned, something vital will be lost. Too often, places are reduced to Google descriptions or AI generated storytelling that is oversimplified and fragmented, she said, with no nuances, or authenticity by those who have first-hand knowledge of Georgetown and Penang.
Which is why, for her, the measure of success is surprisingly simple. “Success would be just people enjoying the stories and connecting with the stories.”
Beyond that, the goal is to build a sustainable model – one that ensures Penang’s stories are not a one-off experiment, but something that endures.
Find out more about Ceritalah here and follow them on Instagram.