Scholars announced this week that the Dongba characters, developed by the Naxi ethnic group in Southwest China 3,000 years ago, have been translated.

A set of 100 books with the full translation of the Dongba classic has been compiled and 20 of them have been published, at a price of 50,000 yuan (US$6,000) per set. The printing of the remaining 80 books is expected to be finished at the end of this year.

This was the country's largest project ever for collecting and collating the ancient books of ethnic groups. The project, involving Chinese Naxi culture scholars and Dongba shamans, began in the early 1980s and cost 4 million yuan (US$500,000).

The Naxi ethnic group has about 240,000 people living in the rugged snow-capped mountains of Yunnan Province, who are faced with the challenge of protecting their unique and rich spiritual and cultural heritage.

The Dongba characters were developed by copying animals and other objects found in nature and are regarded as a "living fossil." They are the only purely hieroglyphic characters still in use.

Dongba writing was handed down by shamans from generation to generation, but there are now only three remaining in Lijiang, home of the Naxi, a UN World Heritage site.

The Dongba classics were first discovered by an American botanist in 1922. With over 2,100 characters, they are considered more primitive than the inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones discovered in central China.

However, the American failed to decipher the Dongba writing despite a lifetime of effort.

One factor making the Dongba language difficult to read is the lack of complete sentences, only juxtaposed single words, according to Li Jingsheng, a scholar on Dongba culture.

Several characters may tell a complete story, and sometimes, a character in one script might not have the same meaning in another script.

Only with the help of native Dongba masters was it possible to understand the Dongba classics, also known as "Book from the Heaven."

Some 14,000 volumes of Dongba classics can be found in Naxi communities, and another 10,000 volumes are in libraries and museums in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain, all of which have researched the characters.

Dongba classics have been translated over the past years covering the philosophy, religion, history, folk customs, music, dance, fine arts, medicine, astronomy, geography, biology, dress, farming, and weapons of Naxi society over the past millennium.

The Institute of Dongba Culture, which was set up in 1981 in Lijiang County, has employed Dongba masters as senior advisers to aid in the complete translation of the classics.

(from China Daily)