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From: "Don Osborn" <dzo@xxxxxx>
To: qalam @ yahoogroups . com
Subject: Naxi Dongba pictographs
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 01:57:01 -0000
Last summer (June) my family and I had the chance to travel to China's Yunnan province and visit the town of Lijiang. This is an absolute gem of a town, a UNESCO heritage site that was rebuilt after a 1996 earthquake in the traditional style. I highly recommend it as a destination if you are traveling in China.
Anyway, Lijiang is also the center of the Naxi (na-shee) minority culture in the region. The Naxi have their own pictographic script called Dongba that has been mentioned on this group previously (ref. message nos. 709, 731, 732, 733, 2354, 2365). We had the chance to visit the center for the Dongba masters - experts in the script. Interestingly there was a tradition that it be taught only to men but that has changed, and women are now studying it.
At the bookshop I saw a Naxi-Chinese dictionary for which I'll pass on the English title: Naxi Pictographs and Transcription Character Dictionary. ISBN: 7-5367-2126-9 (the author's family name is Li, but more than that I can't tell you). A quick web search on the ISBN yielded a page with in Chinese at http://www.bookchinese.com:7751/bookdescript.asp?bookid=006299(approve sites)
Don Osborn
Item retrieved from the downloaded archives of Qalam. Its last functioning group archive URL was:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/qalam/conversations/messages/4057
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