Part One - Introduction

Summary

It is sometime in the early 1930s, deep within the alpine pastures and high mountain peaks of the land of the Naxi people. In this remote Himalayan region of southwest China, a Dutch missionary, Cornelia Elisabeth (Elise) Scharten, sits in the open courtyard of an old wooden house with a local Naxi “sorcerer”, a ritual specialist who can commune with the spirit world. The ritualist is reciting from an ancient manuscript written in pictographs. After pausing and discussing the meaning of certain words (they are talking in the Tibeto-Burman Naxi language, for Elise Scharten has been living here for over fifteen years, and is already fluent), Scharten types an English translation using her typewriter, a technological marvel in this remote mountain town on the ancient “Tea Horse Road”. This typewritten manuscript would become the first cover-to-cover translation of the most important Naxi myth: the origin story of mankind, a tale of incest, a cataclysmic flood, and a hero's quest to win the hand of a divine bride. Once complete, the original pictographic manuscript and its translation were taken back to Scharten's native Netherlands, where they have lain untouched in a museum archive for almost a century. Now, with modern technology, we can bring this old Naxi manuscript, along with its oral reading and typewritten translation, back to life.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, unusual pictographic books began to flow from a remote corner of southwest China into the libraries of the western world. At first this flow was nothing more than a mere trickle, a few curios sent home by French Catholic missionaries, but by the early twentieth century, they were being acquired in their hundreds and thousands, bought up in bulk by renowned plant hunters and explorers, and filling up shelves in such venerated institutions as the Library of Congress, the British Library and the German State Library at Marburg. This was a literature that could no longer be ignored, or, in the words of Austrian writer Felix Braun, “eine literarische Entdeckung, die fortan in der Geschichte der Weltliteratur nicht mehr ubersehen werden kann” (Koc 1969). What made these books so attractive? For one, they possessed the air of mystery that came with being “magical” books almost indecipherable to all but a select few ritual specialists, but perhaps more importantly, they were written in what looked like an ancient form of picture writing