Naxi

The people Naxi (, literally “ethnos group adopted by the west”) are one of the many ethnic minorities of the China, of origin Tibetan, which lives in the Yunnan, mainly in the prefectures of Lijiang and Diqing.

History

The Naxi people are resulting from the old tribe Qiang, people of wandering pastors of the borders of the Tibet, which lived in the North-West of China the valleys of the yellow Fleuve and the Huangshui. According to various Chinese sources, during the imperial dynasty of the Qin (221 - 206 av. J. - C.), first Naxi have to flee in front of the troops of Qin Shihuangdi, and at the end of a constant wandering migration, finally settled in the Western areas of China of the South, located upstream river Jinsha. Today, approximately: 300000 Naxi live in a very mountainous zone with the junction of the provinces of the Yunnan, Sichuan and Xizang, the autonomous region of the Tibet.

The king of Li Jiang (currently called Lijiang and previously integrated into the kingdom of Nanzhao) and in the Yunnan having heard of the lesson of the 8th Karmapa, Mikyö Dorje, invited the Karmapa young person to visit his country. The third day of the fourth month of the year of rat of fire 1516 Karmapa met King of Jiang which came to its meeting at the border from the Tibet. The 10th Karmapa, Chöying Dorje, was him also received by the king of Li Jiang year 1645. The 10th Karmapa travelled much through the Nepal, the Burma, until North of the Yunnan and it built several monasteries in the areas which it crossed. Thus, for example, Ogmin Namling with Lashiba, was the first Buddhist monastery built in this area of populated Yunnan of Naxi. This monastery was founded by the 10th Karmapa, Chöying Dorje. The religious stones of Mani can be also found in certain Naxi hearths, especially among the sub-group Mosuo .

Culture

As this old culture was based on the religion and that its priests were called “Dongba”, it took the name of “ culture Dongba ” and its religion that of “ religion Dongba ”. The worship of nature, and more particularly that of water and the mountains, is one of the bases of the religion dongba of Naxi.

In the legend dongba, Cong it is marrié with the goddess Cheng, they are the both ancestors of the Bai, Naxi and the Zang (majority ethnos group of the Plateau of Tibet).

Naxi are one of the rare Chinese minorities having to them proper writing (writing dongba). What does not cease surprising and resulted in regarding this culture as remarkable, it is that the ancestors of Naxi could create a written form of more than two thousand characters, by using special pictograms to express their habits and to transcribe their writings. The writing naxi is regarded as the only hieroglyphic writing still of use in China. As as an old Egyptian, each character is equivalent to a mot. the majority of the words represented is in connection with the ancestral lifestyle of Naxi and relates to agriculture, the religion or the war. But the Chinese writing evolved/moved during millenia, starting from pictograms and of original ideograms, to become a system of idéo-sound records complexes, of which it is most of the time very difficult to guess the origin. The writing naxi, it, remained original. It uses a simple system of representation, making it possible to guess the direction of many pictograms without too many efforts, because they are purely descriptive: thus, the character “ tree ” resembles a tree, the character “ man ” with a man, etc Naxi speak a series about dialects probably closer to the qianguic languages or milk-Burmeses that other branches of the family Tibéto-Burmese. The naxi is a insulating Langue with four Your S.

Naxi of north (area of Yongning 永宁) are known to have a company matriarcale (see bibliography). The women live with their brothers, and do not have stable husbands. The men at night return visit to the women at them and the relations are free. The children thus know only seldom their fathers, which makes of their family system a system matrilinéaire. For Naxi, the hereditary features are contained in the bones, and are transmitted by the women. Naxi of Lijiang (丽江) have a pictographic writing being used to note the mythological accounts of the traditional religion Dongba, which is a survival of the religion pre-Buddhist Bonpo of the Tibet. The Dongba religion is a kind of lamaïsé paganism, a chamanic form of Animisme, in which the faith draws its name from its priests, that one precisely calls “Dongba”. The culture naxi is indeed influenced at the same time by the cultures Tibetan E and Chinese E.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a linguist and Austrian botanist, Joseph Rock'n'roll, wrote the first dictionary naxi, contributing much in that to the safeguarding and the diffusion of the culture naxi, in particular through the magazine National Geographic.

Like any minority culture, the culture dongba tends to disperse and disappear slowly. There remain nothing any more but some Masters able to read the writings of this culture.

It is for these reasons, in order to safeguard this rare inheritance and nonreproducible of humanity, that the collection of the last “literary manuscripts Dongba” of Naxi, survivors of the Autodafé S of large the Cultural revolution of 1966, (during which irreplaceable million works was stupidly destroyed by the red Gardes like all cultural works), was registered on the “ Liste Memory of the world ” of UNESCO, in 2003, during the 6th meeting of the IAC ( International Advisory Committes ) for the Program Mémoire of the world of this organization, which was held with Gdańsk, in Poland.

Today, the Research institute on the culture dongba of Lijiang is charged to make research and to preserve the traces of this culture. Close to Lijiang, a village naxi is protected, used by Naxi and being used for preserving and showing the culture Naxi (religion and ritual, weaving, manufacture of paper, alcohol, etc…). One can also see in the old working of Lijiang, of the artisanal houses using the traditional methods naxi. He Pinzheng (和品正), a researcher of this institute, Naxi ethnos group, in particular compiled a dictionary of the writing and the language dongba naxi (see writing dongba#Bibliography for the references).

The signposts of Lijiang are at the same time in writing dongba, Chinese, and often in English.

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