As one of the initiatives to save Shuishu, the peculiar
pictographic characters of the Shui ethnic group of China, an exhibition hall
where visitors can get an all-round understanding of the Shui
culture is being constructed in southern Guizhou Province and is expected to open to
the public in July, Xinhuanet.com reported on April 4.
The intriguing Shui characters used by the ancient Shui ethnic
group, are in danger of being lost as most modern Shui people don’t
know how to read the characters any more.
In one sense, Shui pictographic characters, with their very long
history, are regarded as something of a “living fossil”. Books
written in Shui characters are like “encyclopedias” of the ethnic
group as they have recorded many things including astronomy,
geography, religion, folk-customs, ethics, philosophy, aesthetics
and law.
To preserve this “living fossil”, government departments in
local areas of Guizhou inhabited by the Shui people have set up
various research institutes in recent years and allocated funds and
manpower to the project. The unofficial purchase and sale of the
books written in Shui characters have been curbed thanks to
protective regulations issued by the local governments.
The staff of local research institutes have collected over
10,000 Shuishu book manuscripts from among local inhabitants over
the past several years. The total number of written Shui characters
can’t be calculated at present. However, more than 400 characters
have been decoded by experts. If their variant forms are taken into
account, more than 2,000 Shui characters have been identified.
Pan Zhongxi, head of the Shui Culture Institute of the Shui
Ethnic Autonomous County of Sandu in Guizhou, said the manuscripts
of six Shuishu books in four volumes with 500,000 words have
already been completed and discussions about their publication are
under way. Researchers are now busy translating a new batch of
books which are expected to be published next year, Pan added.
Previously China officially published two books of Shuishu with
translation and annotations.
(China.org.cn translated by Zhang Tingting, April 9, 2006)