The Naxi people of Lijiang: Dongba script, old town and music

Who the Naxi are and where they live

The Naxi live in the Hengduan Mountains, mainly in north-west Yunnan and south-west Sichuan, with a small number in Tibet. Their heartland is Lijiang: the county around the city is the Yulong Naxi Autonomous County (玉龙纳西族自治县), home to Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Other Naxi areas include Ninglang and Weixi in Yunnan and Yanyuan in Sichuan.

The 2020 census counted 323,767 Naxi. Lijiang is home to 11 ethnic groups, of which the Naxi and Tibetans are the largest, according to Yunnan’s official tourism site. Most Naxi have traditionally been farmers, growing rice, maize, wheat, potatoes, beans, hemp and cotton.

Officially, the Mosuo of the Lugu Lake area in Yunnan are classified as part of the Naxi, although the Mosuo of Yongning have their own recognition at provincial level; see our page on the Mosuo people.[1][7][11][13]

Language and the Dongba script

Naxi (纳西语, Nàxīyǔ) is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Sino-Tibetan family; Britannica notes that it is closely related to the language of the Yi. Linguists divide it into a fairly uniform Western dialect, which includes the speech of Lijiang’s Dayan old town, and a more varied Eastern dialect. The 2000 census put the number of speakers at about 310,000.

The Naxi are famous for Dongba (东巴), a pictographic writing tradition: many signs are small drawings of the things they stand for. It was written and kept by the Dongba, the traditional Naxi ritual specialists and scholars, and was used alongside Geba, a syllabary also used for everyday records such as inventories, contracts and letters. UNESCO puts the number of Dongba characters at more than 2,000; other counts give about a thousand, partly because new signs could be coined.

In Lijiang today you will see Dongba on shop signs and in public spaces in the old town, next to Chinese and English, and on crafts and souvenirs. A Latin-based alphabet for Naxi was introduced in 1957 but is rarely used in daily life.[3][5][6][7]

The Old Town of Lijiang

The Old Town of Lijiang (丽江古城) was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in December 1997. The listed site has three parts: Dayan (大研) old town, including Black Dragon Pool; the Baisha (白沙) housing cluster, about 8 km to the north; and the Shuhe (束河) housing cluster, about 4 km to the north-west.

Water from the snow mountains runs through the town in a branching network of canals fed by Black Dragon Pool, with wells and springs; the main street and lanes front onto the canals and are crossed by many bridges. The two-storey, tile-roofed, timber-framed houses, which UNESCO calls representative of Naxi culture, mix Han and Tibetan elements in their gateways, screen walls, courtyards and carved beams. A typical Naxi house is a courtyard with one to four buildings around it, of mud brick and wood.

The town was hit by a severe earthquake shortly before it was listed. In recent decades a falling water table, linked to climate change and mass tourism, affected the canals, and changes to the water supply have since restored them.[1][2][4]

Naxi ancient music

Naxi ancient music (纳西古乐, Nàxī gǔyuè) has three parts: Baisha xiyue (白沙细乐), Dongjing music (洞经音乐) and Huangjing music (皇经音乐). Tradition links Baisha xiyue to the 13th century, when, the story goes, Kublai Khan left an ensemble and scores with the Naxi chief Mu; Dongjing music was ritual music popular in China under the Ming and early Qing, which came to Lijiang and blended with Naxi style. The score was transcribed in 1962 by music researchers working with local Lijiang musicians.

The best-known group is the Dayan Naxi Orchestra, re-formed in 1981 by the musician Xuan Ke, which plays instruments such as the dizi flute and a Naxi lute largely from memory, and first toured abroad, to England, in 1995. Performances in Dayan old town charge a fee; in Shuhe, Baisha and some villages, music is played for a donation.[4][8][9]