Dongba Culture Museum, founded in 1984, formerly known as Lijiang County Museum, is the first county museum in Yunnan. In July of 1999, it was officially changed to the present name. Dongba Culture Museum with a collection of more than 12,000 pieces of cultural relics, and it has played an important role in the protection, heritage and promoting of Dongba culture in the past years。

Dongba Culture Museum features in Dongba culture, with an area of 7 acres, is a comprehensive national folk museum which including history, nature and art. The main building of the museum is in the form of typical Naxi courtyard-style, which according to topography and making full uses of the landscape environmental conditions to form a group of ancient buildings with courtyards.

Dongba culture is the traditional culture of Nakhi (Naxi), named after it is persevered in Dongba religion and has a history nearly 1,000 years. Early in the 19th century, the Dongba culture has caused the attention of foreign scholars. Apart from the collection of Dongba hieroglyphs in the museum, there are more than 1400 Dongba hieroglyphs still retained in the folk, which known as the world's "only living hieroglyphs".

The Dongba culture is a most inclusive term referring mainly to the language and scriptures. On August 30, 2003, the Dongba classical literature was accepted as a written world heritage by UNESCO.

For better protection, research and development of the Dongba Culture, Naxi Dongba Cultural Museum was built. The museum has more than 10000 Dongba cultural relics and various other historical relics and offers the "Dongba Culture Exhibition", which attracting more than 100,000 visitors each year.