Discovering Dongba

Yesterday dawned a bit wet and drizzly, so we headed off on foot to Elephant Hill and the Dragon Pool Park, which lies just a bit upstream from the old town in Lijiang. We did get a glimpse of "new" Lijiang, with no desire to go there. The water flowing down from the mountains in small waterfalls and streams makes a small lake at the base of Elephant Hill.


On a clear day you are supposed to be able to see Yulong Xueshan (Jade Dragon Snow Mountain), the big snow capped 18000 ft mountain we saw yesterday, reflected in the water, but not on this day.

One of our destinations was the Dongba Institute. Dongba is the name of the Naxi religion, a system of folk beliefs deriving from Ban, a pre-Buddhist Tibetan religion. It is also the name of the Naxi language, which I mentioned yesterday.

The written Dongba language is a pictographic language, the only one in the world still in use. Thomas has been carrying around his Dongba dictionary and translating signs for us.

To our delight, at the institute was a young man, a student of the Dongba language, who spoke very good English, and who was willing to spend a great deal of time with us explaining everything. He showed us the plant which the Dongba used in ancient times to make exceptionally long lasting paper.

This book is 400 years old. It is used with students who are learning to read. There are other texts much older, still in good condition because the plant used has insecticidal properties. Thomas and I asked a lot of questions and the student really got warmed up and took us for a tour of the school where he and the other students learn Dongba.

This is the teacher's table, with his head dress and chops (seals). The head dress is passed on from one shaman to the next , father to son, along with the language and the secrets of the shamanistic rites. The student offered to get the shaman to write a message out for us in Dongba script.

The message he wrote out for us was a wish for health, happiness and long life for the family. I will get an up close photo for Thomas to translate when he blogs about Dongba. Check out the video if you can. The audio is an English grammar consultation between Michael and the student.

We went for a nice walk along the river. One observation that kept recurring was the clash between the simplicity of the Naxi culture, for whom these waters are sacred and the ornate Han Chinese contributions to the park, like this pavilion.

This was once the personal temple of the ruling Mu family, but it is not used for anything now and was not in very good shape.

I liked this photo because it captured the feeling of the crumbling pavilion with the lush green world waiting right outside the door.

Here are the guys...after our hike they had a chess tournament in our Lijiang headquarters, Lamu's House of Tibet, while the girls and I had rest time. We actually had pizza for dinner, which resembled actual pizza quite closely. We have only one more day here, and are not sure how to spend it -- might try to take a bus to the cable car up the mountain, or maybe ride ponies around the old town...tomorrow's departure is quite early, so if I don't blog until Saturday night you will know why. And by the way...happy Kitchen God Day. If you have had a portrait of the Kitchen God above your stove, today is the day to smear some honey on his lips and burn him in a fire so that he will make a favorable report about you to the Jade Emperor in heaven. Then you can hang a new one for the coming year...he likes to keep track of the family's activities.