The Naxi tribe is one of China’s most interesting ethnic minorities. Scattered mainly around Yunnan Province, with small settlements in Sichuan and Tibet, they were first visited by Western ethnologists in the early part of the 20th century and have been studied and written about ever since. There are about 280,000 Naxi and most live in Lijiang Autonomous County in northwest Yunnan.
The Naxi have a culture that’s rich and diverse with their own music, art and most unique of all, their thousand-year-old pictographic writing system which is similar to hieroglyphics. The Naxi language is also the only remaining pictographic written language in use.
The Naxi priests are called Dongba and they are an important part of the language. The Naxi are Buddhists and their ancient Buddhist texts are passed down through generations of priests who are the caretakers of the texts. Only priests are allowed to learn the written script and begin studying the pictographs when young, only becoming fluent after many years of study. Because of the complexity of the written language and the role of the priests its preserving it, the Naxi language is named Dongba.
The language has approximately 2,200 pictographs. When put together, some sentences appear as a series of pictures that have many possible interpretations without any fixed meaning. This highly symbolic language requires years of study to fully understand, a domain of the priests who begin studying the scriptures as young children.
The religious scriptures are also a record of Naxi life, recording everything from politics to poetry to Naxi legends in about 20,000 encyclopedic volumes. In 1957, the Naxi adopted a writing system based on Latin characters in order to promote literacy. Sadly, only a few Naxi today can read the Donga pictographs, though there are efforts to encourage its study.