Joseph Rock and the Manuscripts Now on a UNESCO Register

Naxi Dongba religion of northwest Yunnan is documented through both its own written corpus and the work of an unusual outside recorder. Dongba priests kept a large body of ritual texts in a pictographic script, addressing deities and demons including the mountain warrior god Sanduo, and a substantial portion of that manuscript corpus is now inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register as Ancient Naxi Dongba Literature Manuscripts, in recognition of its status as one of the last pictographic writing systems still in ceremonial use into the modern era.

Outside documentation of Naxi religion owes an unusual amount to one individual: Joseph Rock, an Austrian American botanist and explorer, lived among the Naxi for extended periods from the 1920s through the 1940s, studying and photographing Dongba ritual and manuscripts for the National Geographic Society and publishing The Ancient Na Khi Kingdom of Southwest China through Harvard University Press in 1947. Rock's collection and description of Dongba texts, made as Dongba priesthood was already declining under twentieth century political change in China, is credited with preserving detailed knowledge of manuscripts and ritual sequences that might otherwise have been lost entirely, even though his own translations have since been revised by Naxi and Chinese scholars working from the original pictographic texts.