Nushu ("women's script") is a mysterious ancient script used exclusively by women in Jiangyong County, Hunan province, south-east China. It is the only known writing system created and used solely by women.
The characters are thin, slanting and graceful, locally nicknamed "long-legged mosquitoes" and "the words of ants". Standard Chinese ideograms are chunky by comparison. Each character represents one syllable, making it visually easy to learn, but singing it well (it was sung rather than spoken) required knowledge of the local dialect. It was a natural medium for rural women denied education, as they all were until Mao's time.
Nobody knows for certain how old nushu is. Some accounts attribute it to a beautiful concubine in the medieval Song dynasty; others credit Yaoji, the goddess of clouds and rain.
Young unmarried women would meet to sing and sew nushu on fans, handkerchiefs and belts. When a bride left to live in the groom's house, the "Third Day Books" of commiserations and hopes were written in nushu, women to women. The script was overwhelmingly filled with the grief and bitterness of women who had exchanged their own families for abusive husbands, hateful mothers-in-law and bound feet. Its most common images were of closed rooms, lost friends and pain like the slash of a sword. Yet it was not a language of resistance: many Third Day Books reminded a woman of her "Three Obediences" -- as a child, to her father; as a wife, to her husband; as a widow, to her sons.
Women kept nushu to themselves, though its secrecy was disputed -- men would have ignored it anyway in China's patriarchal society. There were "sworn sisterhoods" among the singers, described as "wisteria from the same root", bonds that often proved stronger than ties of blood.
Under Mao, all girls could go to school, removing one of nushu's key functions. By the 21st century the script had been turned into a tourist lure in Jiangyong: trinkets with misspelled inscriptions, fans given free with fried chicken. An imposing nushu museum in Pumei village offers writing courses, though the songs have turned bland and pretty. The last natural inheritor, He Yanxin, died in October 2025.
The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.