Tangut Ideograph 1819A

A safe standalone English gloss cannot be inferred from the label.

A study of The Ode on Monthly Pleasures, a Tangut poem, glosses the pair 𘕡𘆚 as “beautiful.” That gloss belongs to the two-character word, not automatically to 𘆚 alone. Another study records 𘆚 in the Tangut translation of the Classic of Filial Piety, a Chinese text about family duty, and reconstructs its reading in scholarly notation as ²ge₄.

The script's history gives this character its setting, not a separate origin story. Tangut writing was created around 1036 under Western Xia's first emperor to support state rule, a distinct identity, and a Buddhist canon.

How did Tangut writing change over time?

It began as a state script and survives mainly in historical records.

Although Tangut forms drew visual influence from Chinese writing, Tangut was a separate script created for the Western Xia state. Its creation also followed the earlier Khitan example of developing a state script.

After Western Xia fell, Tangut continued in religious, official, private, and translated writing through the Yuan and Ming eras. A surviving Khara-Khoto manuscript probably dates to the 12th or early 13th century; the Tangut library there was discovered in 1908–1909. Sources from the late twelfth century and the thirteenth century and beyond are mostly Buddhist, with later material tied to Yuan printing and religious life. As of 2026, Tangut is mainly a subject of scholarship.

How do I type or display 𘆚?

Use Unicode-aware input and a font that includes Tangut.

Some specialist tools convert older encodings that stored Tangut alongside Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text into Unicode. Display also depends on font coverage: a missing glyph may appear as an empty square, and Tangut fonts can draw the same encoded character in different styles.