By 1949 there were dongba practising only in the rural areas of Lijiang. We have no figure on the exact number, but according to interviews many Naxi villages had a dongba at that time, or would invite one from a neighbouring village. After the Communist take-over the dongba's activities were prohibited as expressions of feudal superstition (mixin), and partly for this reason there are extremely few dongba today.

[In Portland, Oregon, an address book was removed from a kitchen table in the home of movement activists who were the victims of a series of admitted FBI blackbag jobs in the 1960's.

An ivy-clad farmhouse surrounded by trees, it stood on the sunny side of a sloping hill at the foot of which the Darigle river curved its way through gold-furzed inches to disappear under a stone bridge into the woods beyond.

If, when convinced itself of the truth and rectitude of this profession and mode, it suffer the teachers of those who dissentᵃ from them to neglect such parts of the former as do not seem strictly essential to the being of Christianity, and to frame a form of worship, or to reject all forms as they think fit, it acts with a moderation that ought to satisfy, and even gratify, the recusants. But if it extend its indulgence so far as to suffer its Articles of Religion and its form of worship to be unreservedly vilified, and treated, daily and hourly, with the grossest abuses, and even charged with blasphemy; and such doctrines to be openly avowed as, according to its own faith, are no better than downright blasphemies; it then exceeds the bounds of moderation, and falls into that extreme of semperlenity^✸ and unconcern for the honour of our God and Saviour, which forebode the downfal of that Religion, which it has, on the most convincing reasons, espoused.