It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that we, the family of Andrew West, confirm his peaceful passing on 10th July 2025. The BabelStone legacy will be continued by colleagues and friends. corp.unicode.org/pipermail/un...

My reconstruction and identification of a partially-preserved Tangut character in a unique fragment of the Homophones text held at the British Library www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n53...

First step towards the encoding of Jurchen *small script* characters, by @cosmicore.bsky.social and myself www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n53...

Monumental three-volume Handbook of Epigraphic Cultures to be published by De Gruyter, early next year hopefully. Open Access eBook! Includes chapters on Khitan and Tangut epigraphy.

When I was in Lhasa in Spring 1985 I witnessed a sky burial. Below are a selection of photographs I took (with permission, and only after the vultures had been summoned) using poor quality Chinese film after finishing my supply of Fujifilm.

One day in Lhasa I bumped into this guy who was a passenger on one of the other trucks from Chengdu to Lhasa, and I spent half a day taking photos of him posing all around town. The photos are not great as they are taken on cheap Chinese film, but there is a certain charm to them.

Trashi delek! Happy Losar! Happy Tibetan lunar new year! Welcome to the Wood Snake 🪵🐍 year! The illustration shows the auspicious greeting བཀྲ་ཤིས་འབར་འགྱུར་གཅིག༎ in hor yig ཧོར་ཡིག 'Mongolian' script.

Trashi delek! Happy Losar! Happy Tibetan lunar new year! Welcome to the Wood Snake 🪵🐍 year! The illustration shows the auspicious greeting བཀྲ་ཤིས་འབར་འགྱུར་གཅིག༎ in hor yig ཧོར་ཡིག 'Mongolian' script.

For the Spring Holiday of 1985, during our year studying at the Beijing Language Institute (2nd year of SOAS Chinese degree course), my roommate (APB) and me decided to go on a big adventure overland from Chengdu to Lhasa 1/🧵

For #EpigraphyTuesday some fragments of Chinese-inscribed marble slips unearthed from the ruins of Karabalgasun, situated on the west side of the Orkhon River in central Mongolia, which was capital of the Uighur Khaganate between 744 and 840. The first fragment is engraved 没蜜施 ... 1/7

Precious Seals of the Qing Dynasty 清代寶璽 — a set of one hundred postcards published by the Palace Museum in 1932 which show the Chinese and Manchu inscriptions on the faces of one hundred Qing dynasty imperial seals #SealSunday

For #WoodblockWednesday, the only extant woodblock printed edition of the Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary (part of the Huáyí Yìyǔ 華夷譯語 series produced by the Bureau of Translators 四夷館 during the Ming dynasty), held at Tiānyīgé 天一閣 library in Ningbo. 71 out of 108 folios preserved (missing fasc. 1 of 3).

I'm still waiting for him to learn about Unicode, then mandate US ASCII on all government websites

For #EpigraphyTuesday the story of the famous bilingual Khitan-Chinese "Record of the Journey of the Younger Brother of the Emperor of the Great Jin" 大金皇弟都統經略郎君行記 which is engraved on the originally blank face of the Wordless Stele 無字碑 for Empress Wu Zetian at the Qianling Mausoleum in Shaanxi. 1/7

Tangut Proverb #48 (《𗆧𗰖𗬻𘜼𘋥𘝿》 folio 5A): Riding a horse along a long road shows off its strength and power; Accompanying a person in old age, it is clear how strong [the friendship is]. 𗵘𘙲𘆝𘓢𘟏𗪺𗏴 𘓐𗤒𗳳𗀚𘝶𗊵𗩯

A lot of Cantonese-usage characters are coming to Unicode 17.0 later this year, but perhaps my favourite is ⿴囗芒 [UK-20506] pronounced mon1 which means a 'computer monitor'

Christmas 1984 in Beijing passed by quietly and almost unnoticed, but the new year's holiday a week later allowed us a brief respite from classes at the Beijing Language Institute 北京语言学院, and so on New Year's Eve a few of us boarded a night train from Beijing Station to ...

The most recent discovery of a monumental Tangut inscription occurred in September 2013 when this small funerary stele (60 cm high) was unearthed during excavations of a tomb situated outside the original east city wall of Daming 大名 in Hebei.

For #ManuscriptMonday here is a fragment of a Tangut inventory dating from the Western Xia (1038–1227) which was unearthed in 2005 at the Shanzuigou 山嘴沟 site in the Helan mountains of Ningxia 1/4

BabelStone Flags font updated for Syria www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/Flags....

The other Chinese pronoun coming to Unicode v. 17.0 next year, in addition to ⿰㐅也 (3p gender-neutral, ⿰男也 (3p explicitly male), ⿱妳心 ( f. equivalent of 您), ⿱我心 (Taiwanese 1p plural), is ⿱她心 (f. equivalent to 怹)

At the Dalston Rio for Tibet Film Festival screening of Snow Leopard 雪豹 གསའ།

Unicode 17.0, planned for release in early September 2025, will include a new block for CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J with 4,298 characters (U+323B0 through U+33479), including 906 characters submitted by the UK (shown below)

Northern Song 太平通寶 cash coin with six tentatively-identified Khitan large script characters scratched onto the reverse side, unfortunately their meaning is not obvious www.zeno.ru/showphoto.ph...

Combined Chinese character for 福禄寿 "good fortune, prosperity, long life" inscribed on a ceramic pot lid excavated from a Qing dynasty mosque at Jingdezhen 景德镇 in Jiangxi

Me in August 2016 with the enormous Tangut inscription standing at the entrance to the Western Xia tombs near Yinchuan ...

Today I started to scan the negatives of my photos from my time as a student in China from 1984 to 1985 ... and yes I am aware that some of them have been nibbled by a wayward mouse ...

The latest version of my BabelStone Han font released today now includes more than 60,000 CJK unified ideographs

Article in Chinese on the mini ogham stone found in a Coventry garden in 2020 (I'm still dubious about its authenticity)

Exciting discovery of an Anglo-Saxon name-stone from this season's dig at Lindisfarne. The name ᚳᚢᚦᚹᚢᛚᚠ = Cuthwulf in runes at the top, and the what seems to be part of the same name (CVD...) in Latin script below.

40 years ago today I walked across the Lo Wu Bridge 羅湖橋 into China for the very first time — into a world that a year's intensive study of Mandarin and Classical Chinese at SOAS University of London had woefully ill-prepared me for.

Prof. Rachel Harris giving the citation for an honorary doctorate awarded by SOAS University of London to unjustly imprisoned Uyghur ethnographer Rahile Dawut two days ago

The Phags-pa script was particularly well-suited for writing Sanskrit. This is the Phags-pa transcription of the Dharani of the Tathagata Heart (Tathāgata-hṛdaya-dhāraṇī)

The Tibetan alphabet written in dzi calligraphy (gzi yig གཟི་ཡིག), from Lokesh Chandra's "Indian Scripts in Tibet" (New Delhi, 1982) p. 60

This is one of four early 14th-century Christian gravestones from Quanzhou (the great port city of the Mongolian empire, known to Marco Polo as Zayton) which have a main inscription engraved in Chinese language using the Phags-pa script.

BabelStone Han v. 16.0.1 released, with 1,500 additional CJK characters, and finally completing coverage of Ext. A. The font covers 64,064 Unicode characters, including 59,240 CJK unified ideographs, and is the last major update before the font will implode under the pressure of Ext. J next year.

The four characters shown in the first image (⿱雨⿰口合, ⿱雨⿰口明, ⿱雨⿰口日, ⿱雨⿰口天) are not available in Unicode, but the first three were proposed for encoding by the UK, and have been accepted into CJK Ext. J expected in Unicode 17.0 next year.

Phags-pa script was mainly used for Mongolian and Chinese, but this 14th-century Phags-pa inscription on the north corridor wall to Cave 217 at the Mogao Caves reads ꡏꡦꡋ ꡎꡟ ꡗꡦꡋ ꡢ ꡗꡦ mėn bu yėn qa yė meaning "I, Buyan-Qaya" in the Uyghur language (Buyan-Qaya is a Buddhist name meaning Rock of Merit).

It's exactly a year since I quit twitter (and later deleted my account), and I don't miss it in the slightest. I'm content occasionally whispering into the void here, and only wish that all my mutuals who still double post here and there would kick the habit as well!

A small fragment of a Mongolian text printed using the Phags-pa script, recovered from the Northern Area of the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang between 1988 and 1995. The middle column reads ꡖꡞꡘ ꡂꡦ ꡋꡞ ꞏir gė ni = Mongolian ᠢᠷᠭᠡᠨ ᠢ irgen-i 'people' (acc.)

A fragment of the Heart Sutra hand-written in Mongolian on the back of a page from a woodblock printed edition of a Tangut Buddhist text, recovered from the Northern Area of the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang between 1988 and 1995

If, like me, you can't see Tangut text in Bluesky posts, copy the post and paste into my Tangut Text Viewer to visualizer the Tangut text www.babelstone.co.uk/Tangut/Viewe...

This week I identified an apparently overlooked new Tangut character in this fragment of an otherwise lost page (folio 56a) of a printed edition of the Tangut Homophones 𗙏𘙰 held at the British Library (英藏黑水城文獻 v. 5 p. 379, not yet digitized on IDP unfortunately)

A first look at provisional and potential additions to the Unicode Standard version 17.0 in September 2025 (repertoire and code points are not yet stable), including 4,300 characters for CJK Ext. J, 914 Jurchen characters, 28 additional Tangut characters, and 115 additional Tangut components.

Back in September 2019, when the world was a very different place, my friend Sergey Dmitriev started to organize a festschrift in honour of the 90th birthday of M. V. Sofronov (b. 11th October 1929), and last week it was finally published as Тангутская и китайская филология. К юбилею М. В. Софронова