Translation and annotation of the travel notes of a33mi21 Cave written by He Xiudong Dongba

Abstract

a33mi21 Cave 阿明洞 as the holy land of the Dongba religion is located in Baidi 白地, Sanba 三坝, Shangri-la, Yunnan province. Li Lincan, a grandmaster in the study of Dongba characters and the deputy director of the Taipei Palace Museum, paid homage to the a33mi21 Cave in 1942 and wrote an inscription. In 2005, his son Li Zaizhong, following in his father’s footsteps, paid a formal visit there again, and He Xiudong Dongba from Tacheng 塔城, traveling with him, recorded the pilgrimage journey in Dongba characters and translated it into Chinese, which is the first travelogue published in the Naxi language and has considerable research value. This paper has a verbatim translation and annotation of the travelogue and conducts preliminary research from the perspectives of the author and the age, the paper and the line, the frequency and number of words and text structure, the word relationships, the variants and transformation of the words, lexical features, and so forth.