The Dongba Culture
The Naxi is a minority with a long history and a brilliant culture. With a population of 300,000, this group mainly live in Yulong County, Lijiang City of Yunnan Province. It has become known worldwide for having kept its own ancient and unique Dongba Culture and thus claimed to be a small group that has created a grand culture.
The Dongba Culture or the traditional Naxi Culture, derived its name from the Dongba scriptures preserved in the Dongba hieroglyphic language. Dongba scriptures are classics of the Dongba religion which, characterized as worship of ancestor and nature, was based on the Naxi primitive religion integrating cultural factors from the Han, the Tibetan and other nationalities.
Initially created in the Tang Dynasty, the Dongba writing has a history of over 1,000 years; phonetically it is articulated in the Naxi vernacular as "Sijiu Lujiu" meaning to paint woods and stones just as they are seen. This pictographic language came to be called the Dongba language since it was employed to write down scriptures by Dongba of the religion; based on ideographic symbols, this language also takes in some phonographic loan characters and diacritics.
"Dongba scriptures", as the name suggests, means scriptures written in the Dongba language. The existent Dongba scriptures add up to approximately 20,000 fascicules of more than 1,500 types, involving such fields as philosophy, history, religion, medicine, astronomy, folklore, literature and art. In addition to the abundant records about inviting gods and driving away ghosts, about praying for happiness and longevity and about warding off calamities and disasters, there are a 1arge number of ancient literary works of the Naxi people, such as fairy tales, narrative epics, proverbs and ballads. The most well known are the creation epic Genesis, the heroic epic War between White and Black, and the tragic epic Migration of Herdsmen, which are called the three major Naxi epics and acclaimed as the three pearls in Dongba literature. Dongba scriptures are, therefore, also nicknamed as encyclopedias of the Naxi ancient society.
Many other countries have built their own collections of Dongba scriptures, for instance, the U.S.，the U.K., France, Japan, Germany, Italy and Austria. In the U.S. alone, the collection in the Library of Congress plus that in Harvard Library numbers over 4,000 volumes. In China, Dongba scriptures have been collected by the Library of Yulong County, the Library of Yunnan Province, China National Library, the Library of Central Nationalities University, and libraries in Taiwan.
For better protection, research and development of the Dongba Culture, in1984 the Naxi Dongba Cultural Museum was founded at the Black Dragon Pool of Lijiang. The museum has more than 10,000 Dongba cultural relics and various other historical relics and offers the "Dongba Culture Exhibition", thereby attracting more than 100,000 visitors each year; meanwhile, it also compiles and publishes Newsletter of Dongba Culture and has established the Lijiang Naxi Dongba Cultural School; for its outstanding work over the past years, this museum has been rated as one of the ten excellent prefectural and county museums in China, awarded the honor of "Advanced Cultural Unit in China", and listed as one of the bases for patriotism education of the province.
