Chinese character 鞝

It describes shoe assembly or leather used for saddles.

In Mandarin pinyin, the standard way to write Mandarin sounds with Latin letters, the shoe-work verb is shàng (roughly “shang,” with a falling tone); saddle leather is zhǎng (roughly “jang,” with a low tone that rises).

For 鞝 vs 绱, the difference is written form: simplified Chinese uses 绱 for the shoe-work verb, while 鞝 is an older form associated with it; 緔 and 上鞋 also appear as spellings of the term. The oldest named dictionary trail reaches the Yùpiān, a Chinese dictionary compiled around 543; the later Kangxi Dictionary quotes that entry. That date belongs to the dictionary, not to the character’s invention.