page_title: Jurchen script
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Jurchen script / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Copy of a drawing of a "medallion" with a Jurchen translation of the Chinese couplet 明王慎德、四夷咸賓 from 方氏墨譜 (Fāngshì Mòpǔ, 1588) vol. 1 folio 32b.中文: 《方氏墨譜》卷一第32頁載女真文“明王慎德、四夷咸賓”印
context_page_description: Jurchen script was the writing system used to write the Jurchen language, the language of the Jurchen people who created the Jin Empire in northeastern China in the 12th–13th centuries. It was derived from the Khitan script, which in turn was derived from Chinese. The script has only been decoded to a small extent.
  The Jurchen script is part of the Chinese family of scripts.
context_section_description: After the Jurchen rebelled against the Khitan Liao Dynasty and established the new Jin dynasty in 1115, they were using the Khitan script.
  In 1119 or 1120,Wanyan Xiyin, the "chancellor" of the early Jin Empire, acting on the orders of the first emperor, Wanyan Aguda, invented the first Jurchen script, known as "the large script".
  The second version, the so-called "small script", was promulgated in 1138 by the Xizong Emperor, and said to have been created by the emperor himself. According to the Jin Shi, in 1145 the small script characters were used officially the first time.
  There is no historical information about any original books that were written in Jurchen, but during the reign of Emperor Shizong of Jin (1161–1189) a large number of Chinese books were translated into Jurchen. The translation program started in 1164; among the translations were Confucian and Taoist classics, histories, and exam study guides. However, not even a single fragment of any of the books survived.
  Most of the samples of the Jurchen writing available to modern researchers are epigraphic ones (those on monuments etc.), as well as a few short inscriptions on seals, mirrors, ceramics, graffiti, etc. A total of nine epigraphic inscriptions are known so far. The best known (and traditionally thought to be earliest of them) is the Jurchen inscription on the back of "the Jin Victory Memorial Stele" (大金得勝陀頌碑, Dà Jīn déshèngtuó sòngbēi), which was erected in 1185, during the reign of Emperor Shizong, in memory of Wanyan Aguda's victory over the Liao. It is apparently an abbreviated translation of the Chinese text on the front of the stele. However, the undated inscription from Qingyuan (Kyŏngwŏn) in northern Korea is now thought to be older, surmised to have been created between 1138 and 1153. The only inscription dating from after the end of the Jin dynasty is the one on the stele erected in 1413 by the Ming eunuch admiral Yishiha on the Tyr Cliff, on the lower Amur River.
  No paper or silk manuscripts in Jurchen were known until 1968, when a Jurchen manuscript was discovered by E.I. Kychanov among the Tangut papers in the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies (now the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences). It is written on two sheets of paper and dates to 1217. Writing in 1990, Herbert Franke (perhaps, not aware of Nüzhen zishu, below) describes the Leningrad document as "unique" and not yet deciphered.
  Even more importantly, in 1979 Chinese scholars Liu Zuichang and Zhu Jieyuan reported the ground-breaking discovery of an eleven-page document in the Jurchen script in the base of a stele in Xi'an's Stele Forest museum. This manuscript, containing 237 lines of Jurchen script (around 2300 characters), is thought to be a copy of Nüzhen zishu (女真字書, "Jurchen Character Book"), written by Wanyan Xiyin himself soon after his invention of the large-character script. According to its discoverers, this manuscript was a type of textbook, a list of large-script characters, each one usually representing a complete word. This is different from the epigraphic inscriptions, which also contain phonetic symbols.
  The Jurchen script was apparently fairly widely known among Jurchens, which is attested by numerous graffiti (unfortunately, mostly illegible) left by Jurchen visitors in Bai Ta Pagoda in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia.
  Jurchen script must have become much less known after the destruction of the Jin dynasty by the Mongols, but it was not completely forgotten, because it is attested at least twice during the Ming Dynasty: on Yishiha's Tyr stele of 1413 and in a Chinese–Jurchen dictionary included in the multilingual "Chinese–Barbarian Dictionary" (華夷譯語) compiled by the Ming Bureau of Translators (四夷館).
  During the Yuan and Ming dynasty the Jurchen language continued to be spoken in Manchuria, where it later developed into the Manchu language. The latter, however, was written first in Mongolian script (1601), and later in a new Manchu script derived from the Mongolian script (1632), neither of which has any relation to the
caption: A medallion with the Jurchen translation of the Chinese couplet, Míngwáng shèn dé, sì yí xián bīn ("明王慎德.四夷咸賓": "When a wise king is heedful of virtue, foreigners from all quarters come as guests"). The image was preserved in a Ming Dynasty catalog of molds for making ink cakes.
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