Last summer (June) my family and I had the chance to travel to
China's Yunnan province and visit the town of Lijiang. This is an
absolute gem of a town, a UNESCO heritage site that was rebuilt after
a 1996 earthquake in the traditional style. I highly recommend it as
a destination if you are traveling in China.

Anyway, Lijiang is also the center of the Naxi (na-shee) minority
culture in the region. The Naxi have their own pictogrphic script
called Dongba that has been mentioned on this group previously (ref.
message nos. 709, 731, 732, 733, 2354, 2365). We had the chance to
visit the center for the Dongba masters - experts in the script.
Interestingly there was a tradition that it be taught only to men but
that has changed, and women are now studying it.

At the bookshop I saw a Naxi-Chinese dictionary for which I'll pass
on the English title: Naxi Pictographs and Transcription Character
Dictionary. ISBN: 7-5367-2126-9 (the author's family name is Li, but
more than that I can't tell you). A quick web search on the ISBN
yielded a page with in Chinese at
http://www.bookchinese.com:7751/bookdescript.asp?bookid=006299

Don Osborn