Nüshu, a 19th-century Chinese script written only by women (2017)
Nushu has a rather interesting (and recent!) history of discovery by the wider world. No one is really quite sure when Nushu was created. We have records that during the first half of the 20th century, several people from the outside world stumbled across the existence of Nushu.<p>However, the study of it really began in earnest with a scholar named Zhou Shuoyi, who toiled away with one of the few remaining readers, Hu Chishu, of it from the 50s through the Cultural Revolution. Hu gave him a set of Nushu documents. Then during the Cultural Revolution he was targeted by the Anti-Right movement and his original Nushu documents were burned. Hu had by this time also passed away.<p>A then-recently-minted philosophy PhD student, Gong Zhebing, who happened to be canvassing the area heard of the script from some locals, who had only known of it as a script that occasionally replaced a few Chinese characters, or was used for decorative purposes.<p>Gong managed to find Zhou and together the two of them tracked down a surviving woman who knew the characters, an 81-year-old by the name of Gao Yinxian. She had a cache of Nushu documents that Gong and Zhou were able to translate into Chinese characters. Gong and Zhou also recorded samples of her singing some of these documents.<p>Gong then published in 1983 his groundbreaking &quot;A Report On  the Study of a Type of Special Script,&quot; (关于一种特殊文字的调查报告) which led to the widespread recognition of Nushu and is the main source of the events I&#x27;ve related above. At the time of publication, Gong knew of only two (!) surviving women who could read Nushu, Gao being one of them. This was a script that was potentially on the knife&#x27;s edge of survival, having already been threatened once by the Cultural Revolution.<p>If you can read Chinese I&#x27;d recommend a look at Gong&#x27;s original article here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ixueshu.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;ff408e73ad9fa2af318947a18e7f9386.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ixueshu.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;ff408e73ad9fa2af318947a18e7...</a> as well as well as a summary article detailing the discovery process of Nushu (女书:谁是第一个发现者和第一个研究者 as published in 学术研究 by 蒋书红 and 孙雍长) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wenku.baidu.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;943f24631ed9ad51f01df20a.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wenku.baidu.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;943f24631ed9ad51f01df20a.html</a><p>Otherwise, if there&#x27;s sufficient interest in this thread, I can try taking a crack at translating them. No promises though. They&#x27;re pretty lengthy articles.