The books that did not close: Survival and revival of Naxi pictographs in southwest China - POUPARD

Name: The books that did not close: Survival and revival of Naxi pictographs in southwest China - POUPARD
Start: 2026-02-06T19:00:00+08:00
Location: Hong Kong Museum of History 香港歷史博物館

Schedule

Fri, 06 Feb, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC+08:00

Location

Hong Kong Museum of History 香港歷史博物館 | Hong Kong, HK

The Hong Kong Anthropological Society
in association with
The Hong Kong Museum of History*
Presents
The books that did not close: Survival and revival of Naxi pictographs in southwest China
An anthropological lecture by Duncan POUPARD
Friday, 6 February at 7:00 p.m.
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road South, Tsim Sha Tsui
All are welcome! Space, however, is limited to 139 seats.
The lecture is conducted in English.
Picture writing and hieroglyphs are often seen as writing technologies that belong firmly to the past. But what does it mean to write in pictures, and how can a tradition of "picture writing" survive into the present day? From the 1920s to the mid-20th century, the botanist/anthropologist Joseph Rock was the first to seriously study the Naxi pictographs of southwest China, a tradition he thought would disappear if he did not record it. In 1952 he made a dire prediction: “A very few years more and the Na-khi books will be undecipherable...they will remain closed books, no Rosetta stone would prove of value.” But three quarters of a century later and the books remain open. This unusual writing system has survived in different forms: supported by tourism in Lijiang, the cultural capital of the Naxi people, and revived amongst the remaining ritual specialists of the remote mountain villages in the extended Himalayas. The writing is now touted as the world's “last surviving pictographs.” This talk will show how scholars and local specialists come together to preserve ancient traditions, but also how those traditions are changing with the times.
Duncan Poupard is Associate Professor in the Department of Translation, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the translation, transmission and preservation of minority writing and literature in China, specifically of the Naxi people and their unusual ritual texts. He is the author of A Pictographic Naxi Origin Myth from Southwest China (2023, Leiden University Press).
For more information, please contact [email protected], www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas,
www.facebook.com/hkanthro,@HKASTalks
* The Museum makes no representations on the content of this lecture.