With the help of ethnic masters, Chinese scholars have successfully translated the world's only living pictographs into modern languages.

Scholars announced this week that the Dongba characters which were developed by the Naxi ethnic group in southwest China 3,000 years ago have been translated into modern Chinese and English.

A set of 100 books recording the full translation of the Dongba classic has been compiled and 20 of them have been published, at a price of 50,000 yuan (some 6,000 US dollars) per set. The remaining 80 books are expected to be off the press at the end of this year.

This was the country's largest project ever for collecting and collating the ancient books of ethnic groups. The cooperative project involving Chinese Naxi culture scholars and Dongba shamans began in the early 1980s and cost four million yuan (about 500,000 US dollars)

The Naxi ethnic group, numbering only about 240,000 people in the rugged snow-capped mountains of southwestern China's Yunnan Province, is facing the challenge of protecting its unique and rich spiritual and cultural heritage.

The Dongba characters were developed by copying animals and other objects found in nature and are regarded as a "living fossil," and the only purely hieroglyphic characters are still in use.

Dongba writing was handed down by shamans from generation to generation, but there are now only three remaining in Lijiang, home of the Naxi and a UN World Heritage site.

The Dongba classics were first discovered by an American botanist in 1922. With over 2,100 characters, they are considered more primitive than the inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones discovered in central China.

However, the American failed to decipher the Dongba writing despite a lifetime effort.

One factor making the Dongba language difficult to read is the lack of complete sentences, only juxtaposed single words, according to Li Jingsheng, a scholar on Dongba culture.

Several characters may tell a complete story, and sometimes, a character in one script might not have the same meaning in another script.

Only with the help of native Dongba masters was it possible to understand the Dongba classics, also known as "book from the heaven."

Some 14,000 volumes of Dongba classics can be found in Naxi communities, and another 10,000 volumes are scattered in libraries and museums in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Spain, all of which have researched the characters.

Dongba classics have been translated over the past years covering the philosophy, religion, history, folk customs, music, dance, fine arts, medicine, astronomy, geography, biology, dress, farming, and weapons of Naxi society over the past millennium.

The Institute of Dongba Culture, which was set up in 1981 in Lijiang County, has employed Dongba masters as senior advisors to aid in the complete translation.