Written similarly to the Chinese script, in top to bottom columns, from right to left, N\u00fcshu characters are made up of four types of strokes: dots, arcs, horizontals and verticals and are more rhomboidal in shape than classic square characters. Unlike the standard Chinese script, which is logographic (each character represents a word or part of a word), N\u00fcshu is a phonetic script, with each of its 600 different characters representing a syllable. Some 1,500 characters have been identified in the script altogether, including variants for the same pronunciation and meaning.
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N\u00fcshu originated in an area where Han and Yao people used to live and mix by marrying each other and having their cultures intertwine, in a male-dominated society where women were not allowed to get educated. In traditional Chinese marriages, which were often arranged, young women joined their spouses\u2019 families, were under the strict control of their husbands, their names were not mentioned in family trees and they often had to move far away from their families. After leaving their parental homes, many of them faced a life of hardship, which created a need for a secret script that they could use to communicate among each other, become literate, maintain relationships and express their most intimate thoughts and feelings. The secret script was mostly passed from mother to daughter, but there also used to be a tradition of \u201csworn sisters\u201d, women who were not blood relatives, but swore to lifelong loyalty and friendship to each other. On the third day after one of them got married, she was given \u2018The Third Day Book,\u2019 where her mother and sisters wrote about their sadness over the lost daughter and sister and their wish for her marital happiness. The women treasured their books, decorated them with embroidery, ink and pieces of cut paper, leaving a few blank pages at the end to write their own wishes, hopes, fears and misfortunes.
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Many women found the books so valuable that they requested to be buried or burnt with them, which is why nowadays there is not much evidence of this specific script or why its age cannot be determined with certainty. It is thought to have been devised by a concubine belonging to an emperor of the Song dynasty (960-1279). A bronze coin minted during the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a rebel kingdom of China (in power from 1851 to 1864), which introduced some important social reforms and adopted several gender equality policies, is considered to be the oldest known N\u00fcshu artefact. The following is engraved on the coin in eight N\u00fcshu characters, \u2018All women in the world are members of the same family.\u2019 Fortunately, many handicrafts created by women in the N\u00fcshu script, pieces of calligraphy, written poetry and embroidery on different fabrics (aprons, handkerchiefs and scarves) were saved.
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This original script started being studied at the beginning of the last century but the activity soon stopped on the account of major social, cultural and political change in China that made it possible for women to learn to read and write in the official Chinese script. At the same time, traditional cultures were pushed aside and gradually started fading into oblivion. While some elderly women tried to teach their daughters and granddaughters N\u00fcshu, most refused to do so, considering it to be worthless, so a decreasing number of women could preserve this custom. When the research started again in the 1980s, only a dozen women could read and only three of them could write N\u00fcshu. Yang Huanyi, the last woman who was able to speak and write N\u00fcshu, passed away in 2004 aged 98.
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Recognising the value of this unique script as the world\u2019s cultural heritage, the Chinese government has taken a number of steps in the last 20 years to preserve it, first by opening a Research Centre to document and study the N\u00fcshu culture and then the N\u00fcshu Museum on the Island of Puwei and also by having a dictionary of 1,800 characters compiled, including grammar notes. This is how the nearly extinct N\u00fcshu became a tourist attraction of sorts, which motivated women in Jiangyong County to re-learn the secret language of their mothers and grandmothers and to gain such economic freedoms that their predecessors never used to enjoy, while cherishing this legacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
N\u00fcshu (\u5973\u66f8, literally \u201cwomen\u2019s script\u201d) is believed to be the only writing system in the world created and used exclusively by women from the rural communities in Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China. Although sometimes described as a language, N\u00fcshu is a local dialect of the Chinese language with its own distinctive script used by women to maintain a women\u2019s support network in a male-dominated society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2212,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n