A Summary of the Extant Dongba-Script Land Contracts from the Late Qing and Republican Periods at Bowan Village, Shangri-La County
Based on fieldwork at Bowan village in Shangri-La's Baidi area, this article presents the first translation and study of ten Naxi Dongba-script land contracts dated 1902-1939 (late Qing to Republican period), collected chiefly from the Raori household. The contracts record land sales, redemptions, and a dispute mediation involving farmland, a threshing ground, and a garden, including one bilingual Dongba-Tibetan settlement document and two pairs of successive transactions on the same parcels. The authors date each contract by cross-referencing its sexagenary-cycle year against named individuals' known lifespans, then analyze the contracts' shared formal structure -- date, contracting parties, transaction object, reason, price, validity guarantee, and signature/mark -- showing an early but tersely worded standardized format. They argue such documents have significant value for local social, economic, and legal history, but that fieldwork must be intensified soon, since fluent readers of Dongba script are increasingly rare.
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