Xin Hu, for BBC©
In the Xiao River valley, located in the Jiangyong county of Hunan province, what is considered the world’s only script exclusively designed by and for women was created. Nüshu, which literally means ‘feminine writing’, was derived from Chinese characters, which were turned into rhomboids, formed by dots and three kinds of strokes, written with very fine lines. The script was inscribed on paper and fans but also embroidered on clothing and belts. The earliest known usage of Nüshu is a bronze coin dated between 1851 and 1864, which reads: “all the women in the world are members of the same family” (Xiaorong, 2018).
Nüshu was passed down over generations of women, as it was used to communicate with female family and friends in a feudal society where these did not have access to formal education or any kind of relevant social position and were relegated to private and interior spaces. The largest number of speakers (or, rather, writers) of this language were found in the village of Shangjiangxu, where it was used to send friendly messages with auspicious wishes. Some of these communications followed rituals, with young girls making formal vows of loyalty to each other and becoming best friends or jiebai zimei (‘sworn sisters’); a very close relationship that could even prove necessary to their position in society. After marriage and moving into their husband’s house, sometimes in other villages, communication through Nüshu would be their form of contact (Sala, 2018).
Another use for Nüshu was the writing of autobiographies. This way, some women were able to leave a written legacy beyond their husbands, as the women in Jiangyong county were responsible for writing a biography, with women helping each other or writing about others after their death. However, Nüshu was about comfort and transmitting feelings. In a social context where it was not acceptable for women to talk about regrets, their life difficulties, sadness, or grief, the private use of Nüshu created a unique space for women to use their voices and contributed to the creation of very strong and close social ties that provided invaluable support (Lofthouse, 2020).
As an example of the types of writings, this is the partial translation of the Nüshu embroidery from the blue cloth depicted below, discovered in 1982:
Sitting alone in an empty room, I’m thinking of nothing,
But writing a piece to lament my misery.
I was born a female of withered fate,
Who had no father to take care of me from the age of three …
When I turned twenty,
It was my two brothers who presided over my marriage.
Five or six years after I married,
I had borne neither a daughter nor a son, a constant worry.
My parents-in-law worked out bringing in a second woman [i.e., a concubine].
Having her company to rely on, I was happy …
For four years, our lives went well …
But someone must have said something to change her heart
And she ran away,
Which made us, husband and wife, angry and dismayed (Liu, 2017).
Credit: Women’s Culture Museum of Shaanxi Normal University
The women’s script also played an important part in the local culture. Women used it to record folk songs, riddles, and poems, as well as writing new songs to promote morality. “The content of Nüshu works comes from women’s everyday lives – marriage, family, social interactions, anecdotes, songs, and riddles. These are rich in folk custom and are important for the study of linguistics, grammatology, archaeology, anthropology, and other human and social sciences,” explains Zhao Liming, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing (Xiaorong, 2018).
However, there are not as many remains of Nüshu as one would expect. There are two reasons behind this loss. The first one is that authors would be buried with their creations or ask for them to be burned so they would be able to read them in the afterlife, leaving very few examples behind to their families (Fan, 1996). Afterwards, in the 1950s, with access to formal education and the rural exodus, some women adopted Chinese as their language and ceased to learn and inherit Nüshu (Ferrari, 2020).
The second reason, however, is politically motivated. In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution to fight against what he regarded as the last vestiges of the power of feudalism, capitalism, and revisionism in the country. When the Chinese Communist Party came to know of Nüshu, it deemed it a feudal artifact; one of the remains of the past that it was striving to eliminate. Thus, despite its messages being part of a private but relevant revolution against feudal practices in which women were involved and undermined, books and letters written in the language were burned (Ferrari, 2020). It was a man, however, who ended up in a labour camp for trying to preserve his female relatives’ language. Zhou Shuoyi learned Nüshu exceptionally well from his aunt and decided to start researching the language in 1954. However, with the Cultural Revolution—he explained to China Daily—he was labelled “a rightist”, forced to burn all of the research files, and sent to a labor camp for 21 years (China Daily, 2004). In 2003, he published the first Nüshu dictionary, which contributed to spreading knowledge of its existence and promoted interest among researchers worldwide (Ferrari, 2020).
The language was rediscovered in 1982 by Chinese scholar Gong Zhebin, who found several scripts in the village of Yao, in Jianghua County, and, after talking to villagers, decided to travel to the adjacent Jiangyong County to find out more about the writings, where he found out about its widespread use (Xihuan, 2021).
This discovery received attention from linguists and researchers. Afterward, the Chinese government decided to invest in its rebirth, listing Nüshu as part of the National Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2006. As such, users of the Nüshu are given the status of ‘inheritor’, being entitled to subsidies to preserve this tradition through education and research. Furthermore, in 2001, the first Nüshu school was opened in the village of Pumei in Jiangyong County, and in 2007, the National Nüshu Museum was founded there, too (Xihuan, 2021). In 2005, a five-volume collection titled Collection of Chinese Nüshu was published by a team led by Zhao Liming at Tsinghua University, containing the translations of 95% of all existing original documents written in Nüshu (Xiaorong, 2018).
The use and rediscovery of Nüshu revealed a part of history that is usually unknown or ignored: the side of it that women had to live. In what has been interpreted as a proto-feminist attitude, Chinese women in the county of Jiangyong created a space for themselves to make their voices heard and to listen to others. These communications would prove an immeasurable source of emotional support in a time when women and men experienced such different lives and conditions that the only people who could understand would be those going through the same as the writer. Despite being confined to interior spaces and to sharing objects embroidered or painted with messages, Nüshu created channels of communication for a necessitated community.
About the Author
Ariadna Mañé is a Spanish journalist. She is currently enrolled in the Central and Eastern European, Russian, and Eurasian International Master’s programme in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She believes anyone interested in International Politics should be knowledgeable about China, as a continuously growing world power affecting the construction of the present and the future. You can find her on Twitter and on LinkedIn.
The opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not represent the views of European Guanxi.
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Sala, I.M.,2018. What the world’s fascination with a female-only Chinese script says about cultural appropriation [Online]. Quartz, 24 May. Available at: https://qz.com/1271372/what-the-worlds-fascination-with-nushu-a-female-only-chinese-script-says-about-cultural-appropriation [Accessed 10 January 2023].
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Xihuan, H., 2021. Studies on the Heritagisation of ‘Nüshu’ in China: Heritage Discourses and Identity-Making. Thesis (PhD). University of Leicester. Available at: https://leicester.figshare.com/articles/thesis/Studies_on_the_Heritagisation_of_N_shu_in_China_Heritage_Discourses_and_Identity-Making/18319025/1 [Accessed 10 January 2023].