Naxi

族About this people

The Naxi people are concentrated in Lijiang Naxi Autonomous County in northwestern Yunnan, at the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau where the Jinsha River makes its great bend northward. Lijiang old town (Dayan), a UNESCO World Heritage site, is built on a grid of stone-paved canals and courtyard houses and serves as both the cultural heart of the Naxi and one of China's most visited ancient towns.

The Naxi possess a remarkable intellectual heritage: the Dongba script, a pictographic writing system used by the Dongba shamanic priests (dongba) to record a vast corpus of religious texts covering cosmology, myth, healing ritual, and ceremony. The Dongba script is the only living pictographic writing system in the world — still used by trained priests to produce ritual manuscripts. Dongba cultural knowledge also encompasses a rich oral literature, sacred dances, and elaborate ritual objects. The Lijiang Museum holds an important collection of Dongba manuscripts.

The Naxi are also noted for preserving the Naxi Ancient Music (Dongjing Music), an ensemble tradition of classical Chinese and Daoist melodies dating from the Song and Ming dynasties that has faded elsewhere but is maintained by elderly musicians in Lijiang. Naxi women traditionally wore a sheepskin cape (pishi) with embroidered panels and a row of symbolic discs representing the stars. The landscape of the Naxi homeland is dramatic: Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Tiger Leaping Gorge (a major trekking route), and the valley town of Baisha with its Ming-era frescoes are all accessible from Lijiang.