Tangut character for an army unit

A word for a basic unit in the Tangut army. Li Fanwen’s Tangut-Chinese dictionary gives this gloss. Chinese-language historians call the army’s smallest unit chao (抄); it grouped regular soldiers with support staff, whose names and equipment appear in military registers.

Tangut script was created around 1036 under Western Xia’s first emperor to write Tangut. It served official, private, and religious texts. After Western Xia fell to the Mongols in 1227, the script stayed in use under Yuan and Ming rule, becoming obsolete by the end of the Ming dynasty.