Dongba Kingdom Scenic Spot
Open-air Naxi heritage park centered on a vast pictographic wall of ancient shaman script.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Dongba Kingdom Scenic Spot in Lijiang opens with a ninety-nine-meter wall of roughly fourteen hundred Naxi Dongba pictographs, a hieroglyphic script tradition credits to a chieftain named King Moubao Azong in the thirteenth century, and asks how many people alive can still actually read it. It traces how a Dongba priest never read these pictures the way ordinary writing is read, glancing at a single symbol to recite a chant that could run an hour or carry a whole funeral rite, so the same picture might unlock different words for different priests. You'll hear what happened to thousands of these hand-painted scriptures during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Look closely at the wall and pick out a sun, a river, a running deer among the symbols.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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