In Jiangyong, a county in Hunan in southern China, the women once had a writing of their own.
It is called Nüshu, and it was used by the women of the Xiao River valley for centuries, passed down quietly from mother to daughter. It took the square shapes of Chinese characters and pulled them thin and diamond-shaped, fitted to the local dialect instead of the standard tongue. Around six hundred to seven hundred characters, one for each sound. Enough for what it was for.
It was not meant for the outside. It went into letters between sworn sisters, into folk songs and riddles, into the third-day letters a bride received from her closest friends three days after her wedding. Some of it was embroidered into cloth, handkerchiefs, belts, headscarves. Where women were not taught to read the standard script, they made one that was theirs.
It nearly went quiet. The last woman who could write it fluently, Yang Huanyi, died on 20 September 2004. But a museum had already been set up in Jiangyong, official "Nüshu transmitters" were named from 2003, and the script is being taught again now.
Most of what survives reached us in thread and in songs, from women who were never supposed to have a script at all.
Sources:
- Nüshu, Wikipedia
- The forbidden tongue, The Guardian, 23 September 2005
- Ford Gift to Fund Nushu Language Museum, China.org.cn
— Abigaëlle