Paper Card Paintings
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About Donba Paper Card Paintings
Dongba Paper Card Paintings can be traced back to around the 3rd century AD, influenced by the Naxi tribe’s original religion and the ancient Qiang people’s sacrificial culture, and they share certain connections with the “human-faced wooden cards” from the Northwest regions during the Han Dynasty. With the formation of the Dongba religion, paper card paintings gradually became systematized and turned into important ritual tools used by the Dongba priests during ceremonies.
The paper card paintings use homemade earth paper as the medium and can be divided into four types based on their form, size, and content:
1. War God Paper Card Paintings
There are five cards representing the Five War Gods of the Directions. Their size is similar to that of the Dongba scriptures. The upper part of each card depicts the “Xiūqǔ” divine bird (also called the Divine Roc) with outstretched claws in flight. Below are the War Gods holding weapons and riding various animals: the giant-pawed red tiger, white lion, jade green dragon, golden elephant, and the “Xiūqǔ” divine bird. These represent the War Gods of the East, South, West, North, and Center directions, respectively.
2. Nature Spirits and Animal Paper Card Paintings
These cards are slightly smaller than the Five War Gods cards and include both colored and sketched images. The figures generally depict the divine bird “Xiūqǔ,” the evil-fighting spirit “Shu,” the golden giant frog, peacock, and the Youma war god, among others.
3. Divination Paper Card Paintings
Divination cards correspond to various methods of fortune-telling. For example, “Zuo La Ka” cards are used to read a person’s birth date and time (the Eight Characters), consisting of 30 rectangular divination diagrams, each governing two years’ fortune, together covering the full sixty-year cycle. Another is “Bag Ka” (frog male-female five elements divination), where a single card painted with a “golden yellow giant frog” and animals representing the twelve zodiac signs arranged around the four directions is used for divination according to the five elements and eight trigrams. There is also a set of 33 pull-out cards, each attached to a cotton thread; these are drawn like lots by the seeker, and the Dongba interprets the images. The colored images on the divination cards often blend depictions of humans, gods, ghosts, or animals with monochrome pictographic text, sometimes overlapping within the artwork.
4. Five-Panel Crown Paper Card Paintings
The Five-Panel Crown is named for the five gods depicted on it. It resembles the ceremonial crowns worn by mainland Taoist priests, shamans, the Qiang tribe’s Shibi, and Korean ritual leaders, suggesting it originated from mainland China. However, because of differing religious forms across ethnic groups, the content of the Five-Panel Crown varies. The Dongba Five-Panel Crown features the Dongba leader Dingbashiluo at the center, the war god Divine Roc, the guardian god Youma, the war gods Langjiu Jiu and Dala Benming. Regional variations exist; for example, around Tacheng, the crown also depicts the Eight Auspicious Symbols and the Laughing Buddha, clearly influenced by Tibetan Buddhism. The Five-Panel Crown is made of paper layers stacked and mounted, tied on the head with red cloth bands. The crown is brightly colored, symmetrically composed, with simple shapes emphasizing the Dongba’s solemn and majestic style.
Cultural connotation
Naxi Dongba ritual paintings carry profound cultural connotations and vividly embody the fusion of Naxi spiritual beliefs and diverse cultural influences. From a religious perspective, these paintings serve as an essential medium in Dongba ceremonies, conveying the Naxi people’s primitive nature worship and belief in spirits and ghosts. Through pictorial depictions of deities and supernatural beings, they create a bridge for communication between humans and gods.
On an ethnic level, the art of Dongba ritual paintings integrates ancient Qiang totems, Tibetan Buddhist religious elements, and the symbolic system of Han Daoism, forming a unique visual language that reflects the Naxi’s historical absorption and innovation of various cultures.
Functionally, these paintings hold dual value: they are indispensable ritual implements for Dongba priests during ceremonies and also act as “textbooks” (painting manuals called “Cuomo”) for preserving and transmitting Dongba painting techniques. Through fixed visual patterns, they maintain the normative structure of religious rites.
This combination of faith carrier, cultural symbol, and educational tool makes Dongba ritual paintings a crucial key to understanding the cultural genes of the Naxi people, highlighting the profound wisdom of ethnic minority art that “carries the Dao through form.”