Lost ritual scripts of Dongba Culture retrieved

Xi Shanghong, a 74-year-old priest of the Naxi people, an ethnic group mostly inhabiting China's southwestern Yunnan Province, was more than happy to know that a copy of a lost script of an ancient ritual praying for longevities and abundant offspring was discovered in the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden. In addition to the two copies found in the British Library in 2013, the latest discovery strengthens his hopes to revive the religious ritual in Xi's lifetime. Known as Dongba Culture, the rituals, songs, customs and handicrafts representing the unique lifestyle of the Naxi people, has long aroused immense interest of Western explorers, botanists, writers and missionaries as studies of ethnic culture flourished among occidental academic societies, some 100 years ago, said Zhang Xu, head of Beijing Association of Dongba Culture and Arts (ADCA), a non-governmental organization working to protect and revive it. Zhang made her remark at an annual session focusing on ADCA's efforts in rescuing and preserving Dongba Culture via digital platforms. The forum, on Christmas Day in Beijing, was held under the auspices of the Beijing Foundation of Social Science Circles. According to Zhang, early researchers of Dongba Culture failed to pass down their academic legacy to later generations, causing a loss of the culture in the past few decades. To carry on the mission to save the culture from extinction, she leads a team looking for manuscripts preserved in different foreign libraries, including those in the United Kingdom, France and Sweden, so that copies of the pictographic recordings can be passed on to local priests, like Xi, who are able to resume the chants and rituals based on them. However, as the priests, experts in the history and religious rituals of the Dongba Culture, are ageing, the rescue of the unique ethnic cultural heritage becomes more pressing. Dongba Culture, listed as one of the "Memory of World Heritage" by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and enjoying National Social Science Foundation support, is supposed to be preserved for future generations with the help of data collection through various digital platforms. A living fossil of pictography, the booklets of Dongba Culture reflect the minds and thoughts of early civilization. However, with extinction increasingly possible, the job to share the unique culture plays a significant role in reinvigorating the heritage, Zhang said. The digital platform incorporates multi-disciplinary research, international partnerships and first-hand data collection and analysis through which the ancient documents can be found, shared and spread with the help of computing technologies, such as, the avant-garde virtual or augmented reality approaches, said Wu Guoxin, deputy researcher from Beijing Information Science and Technology University (BISTU) and a council member of ADCA. According to Chen Ruoyu, deputy director of computer science and technology program of BISTU, the digitalized Dongba documents are based on the sampling of metadata collection as the pictographic brochures are scanned, recognized and converted into XML formats that can be searched using the XQuery language. The search engines are divided into local searches, searches in English, web searches and searches of periodical analysis. "By integrating the ancient culture into the digital platform, I can see the rise of a promising scenario of Dongba Culture," said Bai Gengsheng, Naxi scholar and team leader of the major programs of National Social Sciences Foundation. Source: china.org By Ding Chunyan and Wu Jin from China Travel & Tourism News http://ift.tt/1iB6EFm