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Greece's disappearing whistled languageįlanked by the Xiao river, the elegant Nüshu Garden and museum features a classroom and exhibition halls.

How the South Korean language was designed to unify.

Today, Zhou remains the only male to have ever mastered the female-only script. In 2003, a year before his death and that of the last surviving fluent native “speaker”, Yang Huanyi, Zhou published the first Nüshu dictionary, helping to elevate and promote its significance around the world. But after his release, Zhou continued translating the script tirelessly into Chinese. And as women began to receive more formal education in the 1950s, the language further declined. “They burned all of my research files, and I was sent to the labour camp and wasn't released until 1979, after spending 21 years there.”Īs part of the Revolution, China’s communist leaders were keen on eradicating the country’s feudal past and anyone found using Nüshu was denounced. “I was labelled a ‘rightist’ because of the research I had done on the language,” Zhou recalled to China Daily in 2004.

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Older women often composed autobiographical songs to tell their female friends about their miserable experiences or to promote morality and teach other women how to be good wives through chastity, piety and respect. Though Nüshu wasn’t spoken, women at social gatherings sang and chanted songs or poems that varied from nursery rhymes to birthday tributes to personal regrets or marriage complaints using Nüshu phrases and expressions. Convivial words of friendship and happiness were embroidered in Nüshu on handkerchiefs, headscarves, fans or cotton belts and exchanged. Nüshu provided a way for women to cope with domestic and social hardships and helped to maintain bonds with friends in different villages. Influenced by Chinese characters, its style is traditionally more elongated with curved, threadlike strokes sloping diagonally downwards and was sometimes referred to as “mosquito writing” by locals because of its spindly appearance. Each symbol represents a syllable and was written using sharpened bamboo sticks and makeshift ink from the burnt remains left in a wok. Nüshu is a phonetic script read right to left that represents an amalgamation of four local dialects spoken across rural Jiangyong. The script was passed down from peasant mothers to their daughters and practiced among sisters and friends in feudal-society China during a time when women, whose feet were often bound, were denied educational opportunities. Some experts believe the female-only language dates to the Song dynasty (960-1279) or even the Shang Dynasty more than 3,000 years ago. Meaning “women’s script” in Chinese, Nüshu rose to prominence in the 19th Century in Hunan’s Jiangyong County to give the ethnic Han, Yao and Miao women who live here a freedom of expression not often found in many communities of the time.

It was here, hidden amongst the rocky slopes and rural river villages where Nüshu was born: the only writing system in the world created and used exclusively by women. Mountains cover more than 80% of the area, leaving many isolated hillside hamlets to develop independently of one another.

China’s south-eastern Hunan province is a dramatic jigsaw puzzle of precipitous sandstone peaks, deeply incised river valleys and fog-shrouded rice paddy fields.