WITH WORK-WORN fingers, a hunched Yang Huanyi etches wispy characters onto a sheet of blue cloth. Her delicate strokes resemble those used to write standard Chinese, but what appears is something quite different. Elongated and narrow, the characters belong to a single-sex writing system found only in a series of villages in southwest Hunan province. At 95 years old, Yang is the last accomplished reader and writer of nushu.
Nushu, meaning 'female writing', is a script preserved over hundreds of years by Chinese women living in the remote region of Hunan, says Professor Zhao Liming, a nushu expert at Tsinghua University in Beijing, who has spent more than a decade learning about this mysterious script, created by women from the countryside as a means to communicate with each other.
In the backwater villages that make up the township of Shangjiangxu in Hunan's Jiangyong county, about 300km northwest of Guangzhou, women endured a social status inferior to men, a situation that existed across feudal China. Learning to read and write was a privilege reserved only for males. Women, many of them with feet bound, were confined to the female domain of kitchen, backyard and bedroom. Faced with social isolation, yet spurred by the need to interact with each other and articulate their innermost thoughts and heartaches, the women invented a writing system of their own.
On the outset, nushu - the exact age of which is unknown - looks similar to traditional Chinese script resembling ideograms, and reading from right to left. But from there, nushu breaks away from nanshu, or 'male writing'. The female script is ladylike, resembling embroidered stitches. The characters are slimmer and diamond-shaped with curved edges.
Traditional Chinese uses about 5,000 characters. Nushu practitioners relied on only 500 to 600 basic characters. These were based on phonetic sounds, rather than an expression of ideas like in standard Chinese. These phonemes are similar to some dialects heard in Hunan.
Only women knew how to read and write this script. Mothers handed it down to daughters, never to sons. 'It wasn't that women deliberately excluded men from learning nushu,' says Zhao. 'But the men, who had a chance to go to school, had no need to learn nushu, and no interest in it. It was seen as a woman's thing - and anything to do with women was inferior, insignificant.'