西夏文
The earliest modern identification of the Tangut script occurred in 1804, when a Chinese scholar called Zhang Shu (, 1781–1847) observed that the Chinese text of a Chinese-Tangut bilingual inscription on a stele known as the Liangzhou Stele at the Huguo Temple () in Wuwei, Gansu, had a Western Xia era name, and so concluded that the corresponding inscription in an unknown script must be the native Western Xia script; and hence the unknown writing in the same style on the Cloud Platform at Juyongguan at the Great Wall of China north of Beijing must also be the Tangut script.