Drogön Chögyal Phagpa
The first alphabetic writing system for Chinese was created by the Tibetan Buddhist monk and leader Drogön Chögyal Phagpa () on the orders of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. His 'Phags-pa script, promulgated in 1269, was a vertical adaptation of the Tibetan alphabet initially aimed at Mongolian but later adapted to other languages of the empire, including Chinese. It saw limited use until the fall of the Yuan dynasty in 1368. The alphabet shows some influence of traditional phonology, in particular including voiced stops and fricatives that most scholars believe had disappeared from Mandarin dialects by that time. However, checked tone syllables (ending in the stops /p/, /t/ or /k/ in Middle Chinese) were all written with a glottal stop ending. (Other tones are not marked by the script.)