5 ms·

Nushu has a rather interesting (and recent!) history of discovery by the wider world. No one is really quite sure when Nushu was created. We have records that d

Nushu has a rather interesting (and recent!) history of discovery by the wider world. No one is really quite sure when Nushu was created. We have records that during the first half of the 20th century, several people from the outside world stumbled across the existence of Nushu. However, the study of it really began in earnest with a scholar named Zhou Shuoyi, who toiled away with one of the few remaining readers, Hu Chishu, of it from the 50s through the Cultural Revolution. Hu gave him a set of Nushu documents. Then during the Cultural Revolution he was targeted by the Anti-Right movement and his original Nushu documents were burned. Hu had by this time also passed away. A then-recently-minted philosophy PhD student, Gong Zhebing, who happened to be canvassing the area heard of the script from some locals, who had only known of it as a script that occasionally replaced a few Chinese characters, or was used for decorative purposes. Gong managed to find Zhou and together the two of them tracked down a surviving woman who knew the characters, an 81-year-old by the name of Gao Yinxian. She had a cache of Nushu documents that Gong and Zhou were able to translate into Chinese characters. Gong and Zhou also recorded samples of her singing some of these documents. Gong then published in 1983 his groundbreaking "A Report On the Study of a Type of Special Script," (关于一种特殊文字的调查报告) which led to the widespread recognition of Nushu and is the main source of the events I've related above. At the time of publication, Gong knew of only two (!) surviving women who could read Nushu, Gao being one of them. This was a script that was potentially on the knife's edge of survival, having already been threatened once by the Cultural Revolution. If you can read Chinese I'd recommend a look at Gong's original article here: https://www.ixueshu.com/document/ff408e73ad9fa2af318947a18e7f9386.html https://www.ixueshu.com/document/ff408e73ad9fa2af318947a18e7... as well as well as a summary article detailing the discovery process of Nushu (女书:谁是第一个发现者和第一个研究者 as published in 学术研究 by 蒋书红 and 孙雍长) https://wenku.baidu.com/view/943f24631ed9ad51f01df20a.html https://wenku.baidu.com/view/943f24631ed9ad51f01df20a.html Otherwise, if there's sufficient interest in this thread, I can try taking a crack at translating them. No promises though. They're pretty lengthy articles.

k_sze 7y ago
> Then during the Cultural Revolution he was targeted by the Anti-Right movement and his original Nushu documents were burned. Hu had by this time also passed away. Every time I read this kind of stuff, it makes me feel really mad and sad at the same time. Some people would blame Mao, some would blame the Gang of Four, some would blame the CCP as a whole. I personally don't know who to blame. Yes they were all pretty awful, but it also took a whole bunch (we're talking about millions) of other gullible people to enact that madness. As a Chinese, I feel really sad that we lost so much of our heritage and intellectual progress for essentially a power grab of four people. Nüshu is just a tiny example. The fact that we had such a big number of gullible and arrogant people who were willing to turn on their compatriots in some of the most inhumane ways possible, it makes me really sad.
- hnnmzh 7y ago
  I share the same feeling with you, but I gradually grow out of it. Why? it happens all the time. Information will decay (and it's probably a Poisson process). Let's start from events happened in the ancient past 1. 尚书，the Book of Documents It has been largely lost. The "New Text" version is only a portion left. The "Recovered Old Text" version was made up by someone. It was said the there used to be 3240 articles and Confucius reduced it to 120 articles. Where did the rest go? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Documents 2. Also it was mentioned in the Book of Documents that "唯殷先人，有典有冊"(my translation: your Yin ancestors have scrolls and books). Yin is another name of Shang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty So where did those books go? Where did the Xia and earlier documents go? 3. Needless to say: the First Emperor burned a lot of books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of_scholars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o... Interestingly, the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips are documents preserved prior to the First Emperor burning of the books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Bamboo_Slips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Bamboo_Slips Also I think it's "lucky" that Qin reunified China. Qin uses Small Seal Scripts which is closer to the Large Seal Scripts that Zhou uses. The other states? Their font changed too much. Chinese would have been different had one of the other states won. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_seal_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_seal_script BTW the Zhongshan state's scripts are very artistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongshan_(state) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongshan_(state) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E5%9B%BD https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E5%9B%BD http://www.9610.com/xianqin/zhongshan.htm http://www.9610.com/xianqin/zhongshan.htm https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%B8%89%E5%99%A8 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%... https://baike.baidu.com/pic/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%B8%89%E5%99%A8/2229639/0/f11f3a292df5e0fee1ba9c445c6034a85fdf72d0?fr=lemma&ct=single#aid=1298159&pic=b3b7d0a20cf431ad891e467c4b36acaf2fdd98a2 https://baike.baidu.com/pic/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%B... 4. The Nine Cauldrons Where did they go? Lost in the river? When the Zhou king left the capital, he probably brought a lot of documents with him. Where did they go? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Tripod_Cauldrons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Tripod_Cauldrons 5. 石鼓文， The Stone Drum Writings I call it China's Rosetta Stone. They were still intact by Song dynasty. People cherished them so much and even embedded gold to the strokes. What happened next? When the northern invaders came, they cut out the gold pieces and in the process destroyed the writings. Sigh.... https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9F%B3%E9%BC%93%E6%96%87 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9F%B3%E9%BC%93%E6%96%87 I will stop here. There are so many of these events in more recent history. It's the nature I guess....

k_sze 7y ago

> Then during the Cultural Revolution he was targeted by the Anti-Right movement and his original Nushu documents were burned. Hu had by this time also passed away. Every time I read this kind of stuff, it makes me feel really mad and sad at the same time. Some people would blame Mao, some would blame the Gang of Four, some would blame the CCP as a whole. I personally don't know who to blame. Yes they were all pretty awful, but it also took a whole bunch (we're talking about millions) of other gullible people to enact that madness. As a Chinese, I feel really sad that we lost so much of our heritage and intellectual progress for essentially a power grab of four people. Nüshu is just a tiny example. The fact that we had such a big number of gullible and arrogant people who were willing to turn on their compatriots in some of the most inhumane ways possible, it makes me really sad.

hnnmzh 7y ago
I share the same feeling with you, but I gradually grow out of it. Why? it happens all the time. Information will decay (and it's probably a Poisson process). Let's start from events happened in the ancient past 1. 尚书，the Book of Documents It has been largely lost. The "New Text" version is only a portion left. The "Recovered Old Text" version was made up by someone. It was said the there used to be 3240 articles and Confucius reduced it to 120 articles. Where did the rest go? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Documents 2. Also it was mentioned in the Book of Documents that "唯殷先人，有典有冊"(my translation: your Yin ancestors have scrolls and books). Yin is another name of Shang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty So where did those books go? Where did the Xia and earlier documents go? 3. Needless to say: the First Emperor burned a lot of books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of_scholars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o... Interestingly, the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips are documents preserved prior to the First Emperor burning of the books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Bamboo_Slips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Bamboo_Slips Also I think it's "lucky" that Qin reunified China. Qin uses Small Seal Scripts which is closer to the Large Seal Scripts that Zhou uses. The other states? Their font changed too much. Chinese would have been different had one of the other states won. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_seal_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_seal_script BTW the Zhongshan state's scripts are very artistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongshan_(state) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongshan_(state) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E5%9B%BD https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E5%9B%BD http://www.9610.com/xianqin/zhongshan.htm http://www.9610.com/xianqin/zhongshan.htm https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%B8%89%E5%99%A8 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%... https://baike.baidu.com/pic/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%B8%89%E5%99%A8/2229639/0/f11f3a292df5e0fee1ba9c445c6034a85fdf72d0?fr=lemma&ct=single#aid=1298159&pic=b3b7d0a20cf431ad891e467c4b36acaf2fdd98a2 https://baike.baidu.com/pic/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%B... 4. The Nine Cauldrons Where did they go? Lost in the river? When the Zhou king left the capital, he probably brought a lot of documents with him. Where did they go? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Tripod_Cauldrons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Tripod_Cauldrons 5. 石鼓文， The Stone Drum Writings I call it China's Rosetta Stone. They were still intact by Song dynasty. People cherished them so much and even embedded gold to the strokes. What happened next? When the northern invaders came, they cut out the gold pieces and in the process destroyed the writings. Sigh.... https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9F%B3%E9%BC%93%E6%96%87 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9F%B3%E9%BC%93%E6%96%87 I will stop here. There are so many of these events in more recent history. It's the nature I guess....