Dongba Script and Dongba Painting: Notes on Naxi Culture
This article by Wang Bomin examines the Dongba script and pictographic paintings of China's Naxi ethnic minority, known locally as "sikelujiu" ("traces on wood and stone"). The author traces their origins to Naxi worship of wood and stone as symbols of yin-yang duality, evolving from simple ritual markings into a distinctive pictographic writing system used for religious texts, poetry, songs, and love tokens, transmitted through priestly and family lineages. The article discusses the Dongba script's structure—roughly 1,000-1,500 characters organized into thirteen categories (humanities, body parts, actions, dwellings, tools, plants, animals, food, numerals, cosmology, rituals, etc.)—emphasizing its human-centered logic. Drawing on fieldwork at the Dongba Culture Research Institute in Lijiang, the author situates this living heritage within broader arguments about preserving China's diverse ethnic cultures as constitutive of a richer, multifaceted Chinese and East Asian civilization.
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