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Lijiang Museum of Dongba Culture
Located within the courtyard of the Wufeng (five-phoenix) Tower in Yuquan Park, the museum collects mainly the Dongba cultural relics of the Naxi people as well as historical and cultural relics of Lijiang.
The Naxi ethnic group has a long history, and its origin can be traced back to the ancient nomadic Diqiang tribe. The majority of the Naxi have settled in the northwestern part of Yunnan as a compact community after long years of migration. Now, the Naxi population in Lijiang exceeds 200,000. In the ancient city of Lijiang and surrounding villages, traces of the unique Naxi historical culture and folk customs can be found.
Just as the ancient culture of other ethnic peoples in the world, the Dongba culture is a religious culture. It includes pictographic records, drawings on different sorts of materials, music, dance, sacrificial rituals and folk customs. Created more than 1,000 years ago, the Naxi pictographs are still used today. For instance, more than 20, 000 volumes of the Dongba Sutra are written with such pictographs. The sutra is regarded as an encyclopedia for the study of the culture of the Naxi ethnic group.
Over the course of social and historical development, the Naxi people have developed the tradition of worshipping nature, gods and ghosts, thus giving rise to a great number of shamans in charge of various sacrificial and religious rituals. These rituals feature the performance of ancient dances peculiar to the Donaba culture. The Naxi people are good at studying and assimilating the cultural achievements of other ethnic groups. One example is Naxi music. Called the Dongjing (Cave Sutra) music of Lijiang, it is a combination of the quintessence of the ancient Naxi music with the Confucian and Daoist musical traditions of the Han people. It is considered a "living fossil of the ancient music of China."
The most representative artistic legacy of the ancient pictorial art of the Naxi ethnic group includes timber slat painting?paperboard painting, bamboo painting and scroll paintings featuring celestial beings.
As the Dongba culture is so unique and enriched, lots of scholars in the world have been attracted to collect, investigate and study it over a century. The Dongba scriptures are the core of the Dongba culture. As a result, both domestic and overseas scholars have collected a considerable number of copies of Dongba Sutra over the process of their research into the Dongba culture. At present about 30,000 copies are collected in the world, of which some 10,000 copies are in the United States, Germany, Britain and France, and some 20,000 copies are in Taiwan, Nanjing, Beijing, Kunming, Lijiang and Zhongdian. A total of 7,836 copies are collected by the libraries of the US Congress, Harvard University and University of Washington.
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