Naxi Dongba Scriptas seen in Lijiang’s shop signs

The Naxi are one of the 55 officially recognized National Minorities who live in today's China. Their home is the fertile Lijiang plain in the province Yunnan in Southwest China. They are related to the peoples of the Tibetan plateau and speak a Sino-Tibetan language.

Today there are only a handful of Naxi priests left who can still perform the rituals and ceremonies, and read and write the Dongba script.

In the middle of the 1980s, the newly-founded Institute of Dongba Culture in Lijiang asked the surviving priests to help in the translation of the remaining texts into Mandarin, of which the institute had collected more than 5000.

In the 1930s and 1940s Joseph Rock, an Austrian explorer, brought many of the texts to the West, thus saving them from destruction.

Today these Dongba scripts are to be found at Harvard University, the Library of Congress and the State Library in Berlin.