Dongba Culture Museum
Naxi courtyard museum of pictographic manuscripts and ritual relics beside a mirrored mountain pool.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Dongba Culture Museum in Lijiang opens in the 1940s, when as many as four thousand priests could still read the world's only pictographic script still used in prayer, before bonfires condemned thousands of manuscripts as superstition. It follows the Naxi muleteers of the tea-horse road to Tibet, who each hired a dongba, part shaman and part scribe, to read pictographs naming mountains, gods, and the hazards of a mountain crossing. Look at a manuscript under the glass here, a line of tiny drawings, a man, a tiger, a bent tree, where each symbol carries a whole idea rather than a sound.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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