Experts are racing against time to keep alive the world’s last pictographic writing form—that of the Dongba shamans of China’s ethnic Naxi group. Wang Kaihao reports.
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, the world’s last pictographic language says volumes about the traditional Naxi culture.
But experts fear this historical portrait of the Chinese ethnicity will be erased from modern times without more international partnerships.
The manuscripts created by the Naxi’s Dongba shamans in Yunnan province record religious ceremonies and traditions. They were a focus of the session on cultural heritage’s digitization at the 5th International Symposium on Test Automation & Instrumentation in Beijing in September.
“Time is running out,” Beijing Association of Dongba Culture and Arts head Zhang Xu says.
Zhang says she found only two shamans—both elderly—practicing rituals according to the scriptures during a visit to a mountain village in Yunnan’s Shangri-La county.
“It’s similar in other villages,” she says.
“If we don’t hurry, nobody will know what the manuscripts say. Those who do are passing away.”
The pictographic manuscripts were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Heritage list in 2003.
Zhang’s association joined other domestic institutions to start a database to collect manuscripts in 2012 and plans to finish by 2017.
Sinologists introduced Dongba scripts to the West in the early 1900s. The first Naxi dictionary was developed by Austrian-American Joseph Rock, who devoted his life to studying the Dongba.
Less than half of the world’s 30,000 Dongba manuscripts are in China.
Harvard University, the US Library of Congress and European institutions—including University of Manchester, British Library and Berlin State Library—house large collections. Private collectors own many others.
“Many of the manuscripts in China were burned decades ago because of historical and political reasons,” Zhang says.
“It’s difficult to repatriate works that are overseas. Fortunately, most institutions share digitized versions.”
Her team has traveled the world to take high-definition photos of the pages and ask Dongba shamans to decipher them. They plan to publish a detailed catalog.
Zhang, who’s a former TV program director, also realizes the importance of filming the shamans’ explanations.
But funding is the problem. Zhang believes her association must partner with others.
German anthropologist and Zurich Ethnographical Museum’s former director Michael Oppitz says only about a third of the existing manuscripts have been digitized. Oppitz proposed a “united pool of Naxi manuscripts” in 1999.
“Though people’s studies are separate at first, needs of cultural comparisons through time and space urge different institutions to join hands for their wider-range studies,” Oppitz says.
He points to the similarities between Dongba art and Tibetan thanka paintings, and between ethnic cultures in southwestern China and Southeast Asia.
“The pictograph is a medium between painting and writing,” he says.
“It represents Naxi people’s identity and show an aesthetic genius, which is rare in other places. We will know so much more if people do the research together.”
The Beijing symposium offers hope, since UNESCO appealed to all custodians to “support the virtual reunification” in a document on the meeting.
“There are some young inheritors of the old Dongba shamans, with different levels of skills, but they do not have the capacity to interpret more complex Dongba scriptures. The boom of tourism has also made some of the Dongba shamans abandon their traditional lifestyles,” the document says.
An agreement has been made to build an international database under UNESCO’s framework, which will make it easier to fund such projects as Zhang’s, UNESCO communication and information adviser Andrea Cairola says.
But a detailed timeline has yet to be released by the UN agency.
“Through these efforts, the study of the old manuscripts may provide new social, scientific and philosophical concepts, creating an essential link between the ancient world and modern civilization,” Zhang says.
CNTVNA 