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 could be noted that they have already formed a unfiorm set of clauses, and the format has already been basically fixed. However, the word-ing is very simple, and not so clear or precise. The value of Dongba land contracts is un-doubted. Yu Suisheng stated that “Strictly speak-ing, the research on the Dongba land contracts has not yet formally begun. One reason is that the pub-lication of data is limited in number, and the other
is that it has not gotten enough attention in the aca-demic field yet.” Moreover, Yu mentioned that an in-depth research should be done from the per-spectives of literature, literary form, language, written characters, society and history. Seen from the practical situation of these Dongba land con-tracts at Bowan village, this article is only a pre-liminary discussion. Therefore, in the future, we should pay more attention to the collection and publication of related data, we should especially do a comprehensive multi -disciplinary study on the land contracts . While writing this article, we feel that wheth-er we can translate the content of the land contracts correctly depends on whether we conduct detailed fieldwork. Due to the dramatic social change in China over the past one hundred years, and the relatively simple text of Dongba script land con-tracts, the customs of the legal and land systems, the currency, the background for making the con-tracts and the status of the go-between related to the land contracts should all be acquired from practical fieldwork, otherwise, it is not possible for us to interpret these land contracts. However, the
number of people who are familiar with the social history of Naxi areas during the Republican era are few and far between, and the number of people who can interpret the Dongba pictographs correctly are even fewer. Therefore, if we do not strengthen fieldwork, many existing Dongba script land con-tracts will lose their value.