Nüshu Script (Women's Writing)

Nüshu (女书) means simply 'women's writing'. It comes from Jiangyong County in the far south of Hunan province, China, where women of the sinicized Yao villages along the Xiao and Yongming rivers wrote it for their own local speech, Xiangnan Tuhua, which they themselves call the Dong language. Girls in old Jiangyong were not sent to school and were not taught the Chinese characters men used, so they passed this script on among themselves, mother to daughter and friend to friend, and sang what they wrote as much as they read it.

Nüshu is not Chinese characters for women. It is a syllabary: each character writes one syllable of the local dialect, so the same character can stand for every word that sounds like that syllable, with tone often left to context. Scholars have collected some 600 to 700 characters in the surviving texts, about half of them visibly reshaped from Chinese characters and the rest phonetic signs. The standard set encoded in Unicode has 396, and that complete set is the grid above. The Chinese characters themselves are on the Chinese Characters page.

What a Nüshu text looks like is as distinctive as how it works. The characters are tall, slanted, thin-stroked and lozenge-shaped, made of dots, arcs and straight slanting lines rather than the square boxes of Chinese writing; local people called the look 'mosquito writing'. Texts ran in vertical columns from right to left, like classical Chinese, and were written with a brush or a sharpened bamboo stick on paper, painted on fans, and embroidered or woven into belts, handkerchiefs and cloth-bound books.

How Nüshu works: syllables, readings and the order of this chart

Every Nüshu character on this page has a reading from the Unicode source data for the script, written as the consonant it starts with, the vowel part and a tone number: 𛅰 is i5, 𛅱 is na33, 𛅲 is tsha5, 𛅳 is ie21, 𛅴 is poe5. The tone numbers describe pitch: 44 high and level, 42 falling, 35 rising, 21 low falling, 33 mid level, 13 low rising, and a short 5 for the clipped 'checked' syllables. The Jiangyong dialect has seven tones, and all seven appear in the readings here.

Nüshu never had a traditional chart order of its own, the way kana have the gojūon or Hangul its jamo order; women learned characters text by text, from songs and letters. Unicode lists the 396 characters in the order of its Chinese source reference, which is not alphabetical. This page therefore arranges them the way Nüshu dictionaries do, by sound: syllables that start with a vowel first, then those starting with lip sounds (p, ph, m, f, v), tongue-tip sounds (t, th, n, l), the hissing ts, tsh and s, the soft palatal tc, tch, nj and c, and the back sounds k, kh, ng and h. Within each row the characters run through their vowels and tones, so 𛆔 fu44, 𛆕 fu35 and 𛆖 fu13 sit side by side.

Because the script grew in different villages and hands, several syllables have more than one accepted character. Unicode kept these as separate letters: sai44 is written 𛇹, 𛇺 or 𛊛; liu44 is 𛅾 or 𛆽; pai35 is 𛇅 or 𛇆; i5 is 𛅰 or 𛆼. They appear next to each other in the grid. The one sign that is not a syllable is 𖿡, the Nüshu iteration mark, which repeats the syllable before it, much as 々 does in Japanese; Unicode put it in the Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation block rather than the Nüshu block, but it belongs to this script alone.

Sworn sisters, third-day books and the last native writers

Nobody knows when Nüshu began. The informal character simplifications it builds on were in use in vernacular Chinese writing from the Southern Song and Yuan periods (1127–1368), and its use seems to have peaked in the late Qing dynasty, in the 1800s. Its heart was friendship between women. Girls of the same age swore sisterhood (jiebai) and wrote songs and letters to one another in Nüshu; when one of them married and left for her husband's village, her sworn sisters and mother gave her a sanzhaoshu, a 'third-day book', a cloth-bound booklet of Nüshu verses of blessing and lament, delivered on the third day after the wedding. Women also wrote autobiographical laments, prayers and the words of songs they sang together at festivals.

The first mention of the script in print dates from 1931, and for most of the 20th century almost no outsider knew it existed. Japanese occupation in the 1930s and 1940s suppressed it, and during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) it was treated as superstition and many texts were burned. The local official Zhou Shuoyi studied it from the 1950s and eventually compiled a dictionary with some 1,800 variant forms; in 1982 the Wuhan University scholar Gong Zhebing brought it to the attention of linguists, and Zhao Liming of Tsinghua University led the field work and the character comparisons that later made Unicode encoding possible.

By then the women who had grown up writing it were very old. Yang Huanyi, generally described as the last proficient native writer, died on 20 September 2004 at the age of 98. He Yanxin, the last woman to have learned Nüshu the traditional way inside her family, died on 23 October 2025, aged 86. In 2006 China placed Nüshu on its national list of intangible cultural heritage; a Nüshu museum and 'Nüshu Garden' stand in Puwei village on an island in the Xiao River, and officially recognised 'inheritors' (传承人), mostly local women, teach the script, write it to order and perform the songs. Today's Nüshu is a revived and curated tradition rather than a living secret, and the inheritors are the people to ask about any serious use of it.

Nüshu in Unicode: how to copy, type and display the characters

Nüshu entered Unicode in version 10.0 in June 2017, after a decade of proposals from Chinese scholars with Michael Everson and Deborah Anderson, as the Nushu block U+1B170 to U+1B2FF with 396 characters, plus the iteration mark at U+16FE1. The Unicode Standard spells the name 'Nushu' without the umlaut for technical reasons. The characters have no descriptive names, only their code point (NUSHU CHARACTER-1B170 and so on), which is why the readings on this page come from Unicode's separate NushuSources data file rather than from the character names.

Tap any character above to copy it; this is the easiest way to get Nüshu into a document, because no operating system ships a Nüshu keyboard. In Microsoft Word you can also type the five-digit code and press Alt+X: 1B170 Alt+X gives 𛅰. In HTML and CSS use 𛅰 or \1B170.

Be honest with yourself about fonts. Nüshu is in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane and no Windows, macOS, iOS or Android system font covers it, so most readers see empty boxes unless they or their site install a font. Google's free Noto Sans Nushu (a clean, even-stroked design) and Noto Traditional Nushu (brush-written forms in the traditional slanted style) are the two to use, and both are on Google Fonts under the Open Font License. On Linux the fonts-noto package includes Noto Sans Nushu. For a web page, load one of them with @font-face and the characters will render for everyone; for a social bio or a username, assume that most people will see boxes.

Nüshu meaning, translators and respectful use

People search for a 'Nüshu translator', and it is worth knowing what one can and cannot do. Nüshu writes the sounds of one Chinese dialect, so a Chinese text can be transcribed into it syllable by syllable by someone who knows how each word is pronounced in Jiangyong; English or Mandarin words cannot be 'translated' into Nüshu letters the way a name is spelled out in Greek or runes, and automatic tools that map Latin letters to Nüshu characters produce decoration, not writing. If you want a real phrase, a name or a tattoo, commission it from one of the Jiangyong inheritors, who do this work, and keep the vertical, right-to-left layout.

The script's modern fame comes from Lisa See's 2005 novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, about two sworn sisters in 19th-century Jiangyong who write to each other on a folding fan, and Wayne Wang's 2011 film of it; from Tan Dun's 2013 multimedia symphony Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women for harp, orchestra and his own films of the singers; and from Violet Du Feng's 2022 documentary Hidden Letters, which follows two young inheritors and asks hard questions about tourism and marketing. Nüshu is often called a 'secret' script. Local women did not hide it; men simply did not learn it. The better word is the one its writers used: it was theirs.