Tangut Character 17935

It names the action of tying. A Tangut dictionary gives the English gloss “to tie”; this character alone does not say what was tied, which comes from the sentence around it.

Tangut was the language written in the Western Xia kingdom. Its square characters resemble Chinese writing, but Tangut is a separate script, not a Chinese character.

Historical Tangut books sometimes show the same character in different shapes. Unicode groups some forms as one character when the source does not treat them as separate entries; a font outline alone does not prove a different word.

Why was the Tangut script made?

It was created to write Tangut. Also called Xixia, the script was devised around 1036 under the first emperor of Western Xia, a kingdom in what is now northwestern China. It served official, private, and religious writing.

A manuscript fragment from Khara-Khoto, probably from the 12th or early 13th century, translates Chinese stories about the emperor Taizong and his ministers. Other Tangut texts from the site include a Chinese work on government. In 1502, two Tangut-inscribed Buddhist pillars in Baoding commemorated monks, showing the script survived long after Western Xia fell.