Tangut character 𗁛

It is a Tangut character glossed as “a surname.”

Li Fanwen’s 2008 Tangut–Chinese dictionary gives that gloss; scholars write its reconstructed reading as lạ². The gloss is broad: it does not name a particular family or tell you how to write a present-day person’s name in another writing system.

The Tangut people ruled the Western Xia state. Li Yuanhao’s government promulgated their script in 1036 for state writing and to mark political and cultural independence. The earliest transmitted Tangut document is an official record from 1072. Tangut writing continued after Western Xia fell to the Mongols in 1227; later religious and monumental records include an inscription from 1502.

Why does 𗁛 look different across fonts?

A box can mean missing Tangut font support; stroke styles also vary.

Unicode’s structural description breaks 𗁛 into parts, and Tangut sources record variant shapes. A font without Tangut coverage may show a box; fonts with coverage may draw the strokes differently without changing the encoded character.

Tangut was designed with principles familiar from Chinese characters, but it is a separate script. Historical discussions compare its design with Khitan script, and some classifications group Tangut with Khitan and Jurchen scripts. These are connections between writing systems; they do not make 𗁛 interchangeable with a character in another script.