LC's Naxi Manuscripts

Naxi Manuscripts is a collaborative project between Prof. Ching-chih Chen of Simmons College, Boston and Dr. Hwa-wei Lee, Chief of the Asian Division of the US Library of Congress (LC). The collection of 3,342 Naxi manuscripts features ceremonial writings of the Naxi people of Yunnan Province, China. This Naxi collection is the largest one outside of China and is unrivaled in quality, quantity, and variety among Naxi collections in Europe, the People's Republic of China, and Taiwan. It contains many unique examples of the only living pictographic language in the world today. Naxi pictographs differ from Chinese characters in that they appear more like Egyptian or Mayan hieroglyphs, with many recognizable figures of animals and objects. Because of the uniqueness of the language, studying the manuscripts can be quite difficult for scholars. The online presentation at the Library of Congress features 185 manuscripts, a 39.5-foot funerary scroll, and a collection of over 1,000 images with annotated information provided by the LC Asian Division. 

This unique collection is essential to education and research, but most of them are not accessible due to distance, form, and technical barriers. In collaborating with Ching-chih Chen, this valuable collection of images with extensive metadata and annotations is added as a part Global Memory Net, which provides new ways for academic users to access and exploit these significant research images via a global network in a way not possible before. For additional information on this unique collection, consult the Naxi Manuscripts Collection at the Library of Congress.

Similar to the use of Emperor Project's images, users can explore this image collection by clicking the following project label.  Links to the LC's Naxi Home Page is available when each image is selected.


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