A Brief Discussion on the Dongba Script Land Contracts from the Late Qing and Republican Periods at Bowan Village, Shangri-la County

Land contracts are important histor-ical records showing the changes in landowner rights, and reflect the social, economic, political and cultural development of a specific historical period. Dongba script land contracts are one of the significant categories of the practical texts of the Naxi that are written in Dongba pictographs, and as such are valuable to researchers. Li Xi’s article, Lijiang Baoshan Naxi xiangxing wenzi kao ( An Ex-ploration on the Bricks Inscribed with Naxi Picto-graphs in Baoshan of Lijiang) , is the earliest pub-lication related to land contracts written in Dongba pictographs. As a member of the team that com-piled Zhongguo shaoshu minzu guji zongmu tiyao · Naxi juan ( Ancient Manuscripts Contents of China’s Ethnic Minorities · Naxi Volume ) , I in-cluded seven Dongba script land contracts in the book, and provided a translation of the content of the contracts. Yu Suisheng has done a detailed re-search on several Dongba land contracts. In his Naxi dongba diqi yanjiu shuyao ( A Review of Naxi Dongba Land Contracts) , a comprehensive discus-sion on the collection, publication and research of the land titles is provided. Except from this, there has been little research on Dongba land contracts in the academic circle. Bowan village belongs to Sanba township, Shangri-la county, Yunnan province; it is a vil-lage in Baidi, the sacred place of the Naxi Dongba religion;and the Dongba culture flourished in this area throughout history. Until the 1950s, in addi-tion to being used for writing religious manuscripts, Dongba pictographs were also used to write con-tracts, record accounts or write letters. In our fieldwork, we found that Bowan village is one of the villages where Dongba literature has been well preserved in modern-day Naxi areas. This article mainly focuses on a discussion of ten Dongba script land contracts from the late Qing and Republican periods at Bowan village, and makes a preliminary research on their form, content, date of author-ship, as well as the land title system. According to the research,this batch of Dong-ba script land contracts record the date by using heavenly stems and earthly branches; and the trading objects include farmland,threshing ground, or yards. Although they span a distance of around 40 years,the style of the contracts are basically the same,that is, all the land contracts include a date for making the land contract, the contractors, the objects used in trade, price considerations, and guarantee . It