Difficulty: Summiteer (Level 3)
Stepping into the Old Town of Lijiang, a city in China’s Yunnan province, feels like entering the set of a Chinese period drama.
The Old Town is a thriving shopping district. And if you pay attention to the signage, you will see drawings underneath almost all of them.
This is not graffiti – it is Dongba script. It is the only hieroglyphic script still in use today. It uses pictures and symbols instead of letters.
Dongba is the traditional religion, culture and priestly class of the Naxi ethnic group. Most live in Lijiang. Others are spread across parts of Yunnan, Sichuan and Tibet.
The Dongba script traces its roots back over 1,000 years, with scholars estimating its origins between the seventh and 10th centuries during the Tang and Song dynasties.
Created by Naxi shamans for sacred rituals, these pictographs survived for centuries in Yunnan’s isolated canyons, drawn on countless religious manuscripts over the generations.
