Tangut Ideograph-179B3

Scholars read it *dzju² and gloss it “host.” The star marks a sound reconstructed from medieval rhyme dictionaries (Tangut is long extinct), the ² its tone; plain-text sources write it dzju2. The “host” gloss comes from a study of Buddhist meditation fragments — the phrase “host reception.”

Created around 1036 for the Western Xia (Xixia) state, the script served official and Buddhist texts, outlasted the state's 1227 fall to Mongol armies, and faded by the end of the Ming dynasty. Its characters reuse Chinese-style strokes — yet none is a copied Chinese character — and the writing direction was vertical, right to left; modern transcriptions run left to right.