At the base of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, twelve kilometers from the Old Town of Lijiang, the Lijiang Dongba Kingdom occupies one hundred and sixty acres of high-altitude earth. In 2003, a Naxi local named Zhang Chun began designing this sanctuary, directing a thirty-six-million-yuan investment to carve his people's cosmology into physical form. Three years of construction culminated in the site's opening in July 2006. Today, general manager Zheng Lihua oversees this space, preserving a living heritage.

Visitors encounter the physical language of the Naxi on the Pictographic Character Wall. This massive stone barrier stands 4.9 meters high and stretches ninety-nine meters long. Its rough surface bears over fourteen hundred hand-carved pictographic characters, organized into eighteen categories like astronomy and geography. Nearby, the Five Grains Bridge spans toward the God's Sea, representing ancient agricultural and water-worshipping traditions.

Further inside, the Shenlu Map, or Scroll of the Sacred Road, unfolds as a monumental stone-relief carving. It measures ten meters wide and two hundred and fifty meters long, making it the longest ancient religious stone carving scroll in China. It depicts the cosmological journey of the soul. At the Totem Square, a giant sacred egg sculpture symbolizes the origin of life, watched over by a central stone carving of the supreme deity, Dingba Shilo. Nearby, three open-air sacrificial altars host ceremonies: the forty-nine-meter-wide Worshipping Heaven altar, the Worshipping Wind altar, and the Worshipping Nature altar, where the annual Ji Shu ritual advocates for ecological harmony.

In the Ancient Naxi Ancestral Village, the scent of drying mulberry paper drifts from the Papermaking Yard. The village consists of ten specialized heritage courtyards built from traditional wood-log cabins, known as mu leng fang. Visitors can hear the rhythmic clanging of hammers in the Handmade Copperware Yard and touch the coarse pine logs of the Great Dongba Courtyard. In July 2023, the site expanded with the four-hundred-square-meter Zhang Chunhe Painting Collection Exhibition Hall, bridging ancient symbols with contemporary art. Under the cold shadow of the snow mountain, this sanctuary preserves the memory of a people who write their world in pictures.