Lijiang Museum of Naxi Dongba Culture

Cultural heritage

The Lijiang Museum of Naxi Dongba Culture stands beside the Black Dragon Pool Park and adjacent to Yuquan Park, built in the traditional Naxi courtyard forms of "three wings and a screen wall" and "four halls around five courtyards." Its holdings exceed twelve thousand artefacts, including sixty-seven first-class national treasures and nearly three thousand Naxi Dongba items, making it China's richest museum of Dongba artefacts; it presents Dongba pictography, painting, ritual objects and ancient scriptures, the key place to understand Naxi Dongba culture and the Dongba scriptures inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World.

Visiting: Wandering between the Naxi courtyards, one meets the strange forms of Dongba pictographs, the intense colours of scroll paintings and ancient wooden-plaque paintings, the priest's ritual vessels and scriptures quietly displayed; gazing through the cases at scenes of myth and then up at Jade Dragon Snow Mountain beyond, the animist worldview of Dongba culture takes on a living shape.