A Review of Western Naxi Studies
This article traces the 150-year history of Western scholarship on the Naxi people of southwest China across four periods. The germination period (late 19th century) saw Naxi customs recorded in explorers' travelogues (Cooper, Garnier, Gill, d'Orléans) and the French missionary Desgodins's discovery of Dongba pictographic scriptures, later reported by Terrien de Lacouperie. The establishment period (early 20th century) centered on Jacques Bacot's 1913 Les Mo-so, the first dedicated Naxi study, based on real fieldwork and priest-assisted translation. The mature period (mid-20th century) was dominated by Joseph Rock, who spent 27 years in the region, collected over 7,000 Dongba scriptures now held at Harvard, the US Library of Congress, and German and French institutions, and produced the field-defining Na-khi–English Encyclopedic Dictionary, earning the title "Father of Naxi Studies." The development period covers German, British, and Japanese scholarship, growing Sino-Western exchange, and the argument that Naxi studies deserves recognition as a branch of sinology alongside Tibetology and Mongolian studies.
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