Lijiang: Protecting and passing on Dongba culture

Located about 600 km northwest of Kunming in Yunnan province, Lijiang is on the UNESCO world heritage list. There the Naxi people created the Dongba culture, the soul of Lijiang. Dongba culture originated from the Dongba religion about 1,000 years ago. Now, it has become a calling card of Lijiang. The 1,300 Dongba characters are the only living primitive pictographs in the world. It is not only a great treasure of China, but also of the world.

A delegation of more than 170 Dongba experts and scholars carried out two days of field research in Lijiang between July 18 and 19, focusing on Dongba cultural protection and inheritance by visiting nine sites including Dongba research institutes, schools, museums and a Naxi folk art base.

A Dongba cultural class in Huangshan primary school, which was founded by Guo Dalie and his wife in 1999, aims to provide Dongba cultural education to local children. The school teaches subjects like Dongba characters, songs and dance, and painting. This bilingual education – in Mandarin and the Naxi language – has born fruit. A total of 217 students have graduated from the class over the past 13 years and two of them continued their further education on ethnic historical and linguistic studies in university.

In the last few years, some experts have been introducing Naxi nursery rhymes in kindergartens and primary schools.

"To protect Dongba culture, education about the Dongba language and characters among children has to be the starting point," said Yang Guoqing, a leading expert on Dongba culture. "It is an effective way to pass on and develop Dongba culture and ensure that the culture flourishes and has successors."

Many folk organizations – more than 100 in Lijiang – also join in the protection of Dongba culture in their daily lives.

He Liyuan used to be a dancer in ethnic song and dance troupe. He quit his job and came back to his village when he saw the decline of Dongba culture.

He established a team in 2009 to collect declining Dongba folk songs and maintain the dying art.

Now there are 14 members in this team, ranging in age from 6 to 81, with half of them older than 50. After farm work, He gets these villagers together and rehearses on a meadow behind the farm house.

"Many folk songs are dying out and the folk artists are very old, so saving Dongba folk art is a task that we can't delay," He said.