A World-Renowned Thousand-Volume, Hundred-Fascicle Edition: The Complete Translated and Annotated Naxi Dongba Classics
This article introduces the Complete Translated and Annotated Naxi Dongba Classics (《纳西东巴古籍译注全集》), a 100-volume, thousand-fascicle bilingual (Chinese/English) edition of Naxi Dongba religious and literary texts, launched by Yunnan People's Publishing House at the 1999 Kunming World Horticultural Expo as a state "Ninth Five-Year Plan" key publishing project. It sketches the Naxi people's history and the century of foreign scholarly interest in Dongba culture (Terrien de Lacouperie, 1885; Jacques Bacot, 1913; Joseph Rock, 1920s–40s), then describes the edition's rigorous four-tier format — original Dongba pictographs, IPA transcription of Naxi pronunciation, literal Chinese gloss, and free Chinese translation — and its organization into five categories of Dongba ritual (blessing, exorcism, funerary, divination, and other rites). It closes by praising the twenty-year decipherment effort by Lijiang's Dongba scholars and researchers, and by calling the Dongba scriptures an "encyclopedia" and "living fossil" of ancient Naxi society with implications for the study of ethnic migration in northwest and southwest China.
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