There Was a Language in China That Only Women Could Read — And They Burned It When They Died

Three things you need to know before this story begins. First: there existed in Hunan Province, China, a written language called Nüshu — women's writing — that was created by women, used exclusively by women, kept secret from men for centuries, and that encoded in its delicate flowing characters the entire inner life of a population of women whose outer lives were so constrained that a secret language was the only space they had that was entirely their own. Women wrote their deepest feelings in Nüshu — their grief at leaving home for marriage, their longing for their sworn sisters, their accounts of difficult husbands and harsh mothers-in-law. When they died, they had it burned or buried with them. The last woman who had learned it in the traditional way died in 2004. She was ninety-eight years old. Second: the Forbidden City housed approximately nine thousand women at the height of the Ming dynasty. The palace women who lived and died inside it — from the empress in the Palace of Earthly Tranquility to the junior concubines in the Eastern and Western Palaces to the palace maids who managed the daily operations of the inner court — developed a parallel power structure that ran alongside the formal imperial government and that, at certain critical moments, effectively was the imperial government. Third: the ordinary Chinese woman of the Ming period — the farm wife with her partially bound feet planting rice in the Yangzi Delta, the silk weaver whose labor drove one of the most economically significant industries in the medieval world, the widow managing her household through the specific combination of Confucian virtue and practical necessity — carried within her daily life a complexity and a richness that the formal record almost entirely fails to capture. Tonight we spend two and a half hours recovering what the official record missed. We follow the farm woman from before dawn through the silk production and the child-rearing and the specific texture of a life conducted largely within walls that were meant to contain it. We go inside the Forbidden City to understand what nine thousand women actually did in those nine hundred buildings. We meet the sworn sisters who exchanged Nüshu letters across the years of their marriages. We meet the educated courtesans who were the most literate women in the city. We meet the Empress Dowagers who governed the empire from behind the curtain. And we end with Yang Huanyi, who died in 2004 having carried the last living knowledge of Nüshu through a century that had no idea what it contained. Dim your lights. The silk loom is quiet. We're here every night — new story, same pace, lights always low. ________________________________________ Tags: Ming Dynasty China, Chinese women history, Nüshu, women's writing, Forbidden City, Chinese daily life, Chinese history, Ming Dynasty, bound feet, Chinese concubine, Empress Dowager, Chinese silk, sworn sisters, laotong, women's history, sleep history podcast, history for sleep, Sleepless Historian style, Chinese culture, Yang Huanyi