Tangut character 𗖾

The Unicode label identifies the glyph; it does not translate it.

“Tangut 175BE” identifies the encoded character, not the English translation of a Tangut word. To interpret 𗖾 inside a word or sentence, use a Tangut dictionary and the surrounding text.

Why was the Xixia script created?

It gave the Tangut language a state-backed writing system.

Western Xia’s first emperor, Li Yuanhao, ordered a distinct script around 1036; Yeli Renrong and other scholars developed it. Tangut was the language of the state in what is now northwestern China. Its writing served government records, private use, and religious texts, and helped distinguish Western Xia’s written culture. Older manuscripts used vertical columns arranged from right to left, with characters read from top to bottom; digital layouts generally run from left to right.

Tangut writing continued after Western Xia fell to the Mongols, through the Yuan and Ming dynasties, but was obsolete by the end of the Ming dynasty. It was rediscovered in the late 19th century. Pyotr Kozlov’s 1909 excavations at Khara-Khoto yielded thousands of documents and transformed the study; scholar Nikolai Nevsky helped decipher Tangut in the early 20th century.

Why can 𗖾 look different in different fonts?

The font determines the visible glyph shape.

Display is font-dependent: apps using a font without Tangut coverage may show a box or replacement mark. Reference works preserve different Tangut glyph shapes; Unicode sometimes encodes source forms as one character when that source does not use their shape difference to distinguish entries. Different drawings therefore need not represent different encoded characters.