The Harvard-Yenching Library holds 598 volumes of Naxi Dongba manuscripts. Among them are the “double red” manuscripts — volumes bearing two prominent crimson circles — whose source has been traced to Xiachangshui village in Huangshan Town, Yulong County, Lijiang, and whose transmission runs from the Qing-dynasty Dongba priest Mu Zhi (木知) to his grandson Mu Fuguang (木福光), then through the American scholar Joseph Rock, to the library (Li & Peters 2024).
598 volumes of Naxi Dongba manuscripts, held by the Harvard-Yenching Library at Harvard University. A printed catalogue of the collection is being published by China Social Sciences Press; this library holds digitised copies of two of its volumes — vol. 1 (2011), 452 pages, and vol. 5 (2018), 575 pages — with OCR and aligned English translation, and a rights status recorded per title.
Some volumes carry a singular adornment: two prominent crimson circles. Research on their dedicatory postscripts, combined with fieldwork, established three things that were previously unknown:
Li, Xiaoliang, and Andrew Peters. 2024. “The origin and era of Harvard's collection of ‘double red’ circle Naxi Dongba manuscripts.” Journal of Chinese Writing Systems 8 (4): 282–293. doi:10.1177/25138502241300182.
Dongba is a pictographic, largely mnemonic script used by Dongba priests for ritual texts; it cannot by itself render the language unambiguously, and is sometimes supplemented with the geba syllabary — see What is the Dongba script? The language itself is described at What is the Naxi language?
Rock's own work on the Na-khi — including The Ancient Na-khi Kingdom of Southwest China (1947) and A Na-khi–English Encyclopaedic Dictionary (1963) — is catalogued in this library, and his place-name romanisations are kept as a separate field on every gazetteer record. See Joseph Rock and the Naxi.
NaxiAI. “The Harvard-Yenching Naxi Dongba collection.”
https://naxiai.com/harvard-yenching-dongba.