Poster Design By Louise Renée Eringaard

Hunan province in China is home to the only writing system invented by and for women: Nüshu, meaning “women's script”. Nüshu originated in Jiangyong County, with its center being Puwei village, and it has been passed on and practiced among daughters, mothers, sisters, and other female relatives for centuries. It was rediscovered in 1982 and rose to international attention, yet its origin remains unknown.

During feudal society in China, women in Hunan province were traditionally prohibited from receiving an education (Sun et al. 2023). Moreover, even if literacy and education in China have long been the key to social mobility, success, and power (Liu 2004), Fei argued that writing was unnecessary for people in the countryside of China. This is because the life of peasants typically evolved around the same space all their lives, they had no spatial or temporal obstacles to overcome that would require written forms of communicating experiences (ibid.). Yet, it was among peasant women that Nüshu was invented. Their strong need to communicate their lived experiences, but their inability to express them openly led to the creation of Nüshu as an act of defiance against patriarchy. The communication of Nüshu did not happen in secret but was openly visible and audible in the region. Liu (2004b) makes the argument that Nüshu did help to empower women, but at the same time, it is also a record of women´s failure to achieve recognition from men. Men did not bother to learn the script, nor was it ever recognized in the imperial historical archives. It is assumed that due to Confucian norms, men and authorities were not interested in Nüshu and its practised space (Liu 2004). It also suffered great repression during the Cultural Revolution, when the script was condemned as the writing of “witches”, and many women stopped using it (Liu 2004b). 

Nüshu is also called “the script of tears” because women used it to record their sorrows and pain, for example, in their marriage or family life. Indeed, the theme of lamentation is the most common in Nüshu texts. The struggle of Chinese women against the patriarchy is a long-standing and very complex issue:

“Women in China have had to confront a powerful array of patriarchal traditions, ancient and modern, that include the enduring Confucian belief system and more recent Communist ideologies, compounded by the demands of a new market economy and the influx of Western knowledge systems – a profusion of “isms” (Schaffer & Song 2007)

For this reason, the invention of Nüshu has a very high value because it symbolizes the strength and resilience of women who created a fascinating form of empowerment through strokes in the ground or a piece of paper or fabric. It is influenced by Chinese characters and is also referred to as “mosquito writing” by some locals. The tools for writing the characters were easy to craft for peasant women: A sharpened bamboo stick was used as a pen, and ink made from the leftovers in a wok could serve as ink (Lofthouse 2020). Nüshu is a phonetic language, read from right to left, with each symbol representing one syllable. It is a non-spoken language, only used in writing and singing (Luo et al. 2022). The oral tradition of women in which they used Nüshu in songs is referred to as Nüge.

Sun et al (2023) p. 5, Original calligraphy from Tsinghua University

The community of Nüshu writers and singers offered a protective source of solace and friendship connection between women, often in the form of embroidered Nüshu words in everyday items like handkerchiefs that got exchanged as gifts. Nüshu was also used to record the efforts and sacrifices of women. For example, one script described the efforts of a woman and her daughter to save their husband and father from a tiger attack, an event in which both women sacrificed their lives (Liu 2004). Women with very close friendships were called “sworn sisters” (“Lao Tong”) and formed close groups in which they communicated in Nüshu (Lofthouse 2020). Sisterhood in Jiangyong is of very high cultural importance and is referred to as jiebai. Jiebai was established for economic reasons and companionship and even resembled marriages sometimes since matchmakers would travel between villages and propose jiebai relationships to different families. Communication in a jiebai-relationship was done in nüshu and included invitations to festivities or letters of moral support. The sisterhood of “Lao Tong” and “jiebai” are concepts that unite feminism in China and Western feminism, which are ultimately very different (Schaffer & Song 2007) but find unison in women uniting in female friendships in their struggle against the patriarchy. 

The last known native Nüshu user died in 2004, which increased the urgency to protect this Chinese cultural heritage. Since that year, a Nüshu museum has been built, and people of different generations have embarked on a journey to preserve and study the language. The script has been listed in several registers of cultural heritage sites, which facilitates the use of funding for its protection (Chen 2018). Dateline, an Australian documentary series, documented the story of Yulu Chen (Bell and Du 2024), a 24-year-old Chinese self-proclaimed ambassador of Nüshu who created a women-only WeChat group called “Nüshu Sisterhood Chat.” The group was a great success, so much so that several groups had to be made. Today, other platforms in China also feature Nüshu groups which not only offer a space of exchange about Nüshu but they are also used to discuss misogyny, individual struggles and what it means to be a woman in today´s society in China. Nüshu was created as a safe space for women to communicate without men understanding them. It now helps groups of women to open up about episodes in their lives they are not comfortable communicating elsewhere. The issues that women talk and write about have not changed much over centuries and are a valuable yet painful connection between Chinese women today and their female ancestors.

Bell, C. & Du, F. (2024, 19. Oktober). Yulu became obsessed with a secret, female-only language. Now she's revived it online. SBS News. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/dateline/article/this-secret-female-only-language-is-being-revived-online/adlxs4phk

Chen Xiaorong (2018, 24 January) Nüshu: from tears to sunshine. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/nushu-tears-sunshine-0

Liu, F. W. (2004). Literacy, gender, and class: Nüshu and sisterhood communities in southern rural Hunan. Nan nü, 6(2), 241-282.

Liu, F. W. (2004b). From being to becoming: Nüshu and sentiments in a Chinese rural community. American Ethnologist, 31(3), 422-439.

Lofthouse, A. (2022, 25. Februar). Nüshu: China’s secret female-only language. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200930-nshu-chinas-secret-female-only-language

Luo, W., Lu, Y., Timothy, D. J., & Zang, X. (2022). Tourism and conserving intangible cultural heritage: Residents’ perspectives on protecting the nüshu female script. Journal of China Tourism Research, 18(6), 1305-1329.

Schaffer, K., & Xianlin, S. (2007). Unruly spaces: Gender, women's writing and indigenous feminism in China. Journal of Gender Studies, 16(1), 17-30.

Yuqian Sun, Yuying Tang, Ze Gao, Zhijun Pan, Chuyan Xu, Yurou Chen, Kejiang Qian, Zhigang Wang, Tristan Braud, Chang Hee Lee, and Ali Asadipour. 2023. AI Nu􏰀shu: An Exploration of Language Emergence in Sisterhood -Through the Lens of Computational Linguistics. ACM/IMS J. Data Sci. 37, 4, Article 111 (August 2023), 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610591.3616427