Nakhi Erotic

The Nakhi are the people of the Lijiang basin, where the Jinsha river makes its first great bend beneath Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in northwestern Yunnan, with a spillover into southwestern Sichuan. Most outsiders meet them through a script. Dongba pictographs, small drawn figures on hand-copied paper, are often called the last pictographic writing still in working use, and the ritual books written in them earned a UNESCO Memory of the World listing in 2003. The script belongs to the Dongba priests, though, not to daily life. Ordinary Nakhi write Chinese and speak Naxi, a Sino-Tibetan language now usually given its own small Naic branch shared with the Na, or Mosuo, of Lugu Lake, whom the Chinese state counts as Nakhi in Yunnan. Tibetan lies to the north and Bai to the south, and Nakhi has taken from both while staying its own thing.

Religion is layered rather than chosen. The Dongba tradition is a priest's craft of chanting, offering, and exorcism, shaped partly by Tibetan Bon, and its chief concern is keeping peace with the Shu spirits who own the mountains, springs, and forests. Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese popular religion sit on top without any sense of contradiction. A household may call a Dongba for a funeral and also burn incense to Sanduo, the warrior-protector identified with the snow mountain itself, at his festival in the second lunar month. History turned on a few points. The Mu clan ruled Lijiang as hereditary chieftains under the Ming, took their Chinese surname from the first Ming emperor, and sent caravans north on the tea road to Tibet. In 1723 the Qing replaced them with appointed officials and imposed Confucian marriage rules on a people who had courted freely. The wave of double suicides by young couples that followed is still remembered in song, along with the belief that the mountain shelters lovers who died together. Lijiang's old town, rebuilt after the 1996 earthquake, became a World Heritage site and then a mass tourism engine that now employs a large share of Nakhi families.

The custom most visible on the street is the women's sheepskin cape stitched with seven embroidered discs, said to show her carrying the stars and moon on her back. It points to an old division of labor in which women ran the fields, markets, and shops while men studied, traded far from home, or played in the Dongjing orchestras that survive as Naxi ancient music. Older women still wear the cape every day. Younger Nakhi mostly do not, and Naxi is losing ground to Mandarin in town, though it holds firm in the river villages.