Month: July 2024

At the museum, I met the granddaughter of the natural inheritor of Nüshu: Hu Meiyue. She introduced us to some basic Nüshu pronunciation and sang Nüge for us.

Hu Meiyue is the granddaughter of Gao Yinxian, the natural inheritor of Nüshu. She learned to write Nüshu and sing Nüge with her grandmother since she was a child. She can read and sing Nüshu at the age of 3, write Nüshu at the age of 8, and learn to weave tapes and cut paper at the age of 12. Since then, she had been using her spare time to learn and inherit Nüshu.

Nüshu has the characteristic of multiple meanings, which means that a Nüshu character can represent many different characters in the Chinese language, so when reading Nüshu, we need to read it in context to understand it.

There are some Nüshu characters that look very similar to Chinese characters, and there are folklore that some characters look like slanted Chinese characters because women were not allowed to receive education in the past and could only look through the windows in the school.

Applied imagination in Nüshu.

Screenshot from documentary Hidden Letters

Pictures of The Nüshu Garden

Nüshu birthplace: Jiangyong Shangjiangxu County, the environment around Nüshu Garden

When I was planing the field research, I found that this place is not like other developed areas in China, with complete transportation conditions, there is no airport, only train and bus stations, from Guangzhou I need to change trains from the high-speed rail to get there, and most of the accommodation places are far away from the Nüshu Museum, because it is still a few dozen minutes drive from the center of Jiangyong.
When I came to the birthplace of Nüshu, I had a stronger feeling about this project, because most of the materials I saw before were on the Internet, and many of them were mixed with truth and falsehood, so when I got off the train, I felt that this project really started.
My first impression of the county is that it is very underdeveloped, and unlike other tourism-oriented cities in China, where most of the traffic relies on motorbikes and carpools, and it is difficult to find a convenience store or a restaurant on the side of the road.