A Script the World Registered Without Being Able to Read

Dongba is the traditional religion of the Naxi people of the Lijiang region of Yunnan, China, led by dongba priests who conduct funerals, exorcisms and rites of protection using one of the last pictographic writing systems still in ritual use anywhere. This article does not reproduce dongba manuscript text or pictographs; reproduction and translation of the surviving manuscripts is controlled by the dongba priesthood and by the archives that now hold them, and reading the script correctly requires training within that priesthood rather than familiarity with the pictographs alone.

What is public, and internationally recognized, is the existence and significance of the corpus itself. In 2003 UNESCO inscribed the Ancient Naxi Dongba Literature Manuscripts on its Memory of the World Register, a documentary heritage listing that recognizes the manuscripts' importance without requiring, or granting, general access to their content or translation. The dongba tradition draws on Naxi shamanism together with substantial influence from Tibetan Bon and Chinese Taoist practice, a synthesis scholars have traced through the manuscripts' own history, and it continues today in reduced but living form, still carried by trained priests rather than surviving only as an archived curiosity.