Villagers in Jiangyong county buried the last known natural inheritor of Nüshu, He Yanxin, on 23 October 2025, closing a chapter in a script invented centuries earlier by women barred from standard Chinese literacy, who built an alphabet of their own instead.
二零二五年十月二十三日,江永县村民安葬了女书最后一位自然传人何艳新;这也为一段延续数百年的历史画上了句点——当年,女性被排除在正统汉字教育之外,便自创了一套属于她们自己的文字体系。
Nüshu had already lost its last fully native speaker once before, when Yang Huanyi died in 2004 at around 98, prompting UNESCO to describe her passing as the start of a “post-Nüshu era”; the script was added to China’s National Register of Documentary Heritage in 2002 and recognised as national intangible cultural heritage in 2006, with a dedicated museum opening on Jiangyong’s Puwei Island the following year.
早在此前,女书便已失去过一位最后的原生使用者;二零零四年,阳焕宜以约九十八岁高龄去世,联合国教科文组织将其辞世称为”后女书时代”的开端。女书于二零零二年被列入《中国档案文献遗产名录》,二零零六年被列为国家级非物质文化遗产,次年,一座专门的女书博物馆在江永县浦尾岛落成。
Yongzhou’s history runs considerably further back than either woman’s lifetime. At Yuchanyan cave in Dao county, archaeologists recovered pottery fragments dated to between 17,500 and 18,300 years old, among the oldest known ceramics anywhere in the world, alongside rice remains that place the site among the earliest evidence of rice cultivation yet found.
永州的历史,远比这两位女性的一生更为久远。在道县玉蟾岩洞穴遗址,考古学家发现的陶器碎片,经测定距今约一万七千五百年至一万八千三百年,是目前所知世界上最古老的陶器之一,此外还出土了稻作遗存,使这里成为已知最早的水稻栽培证据发现地之一。
An Exiled Official Who Invented a Whole Genre of Travel Writing
一位被贬官员,开创了一整套游记文体
The Tang dynasty official Liu Zongyuan was banished to Yongzhou in 805 AD, and it was here, rather than in the capital, that he wrote the essays now considered foundational to Chinese travel literature, including Eight Records of Excursions in Yongzhou and The Snake Catcher, a piece describing a local snake so venomous that its bite had no known cure.
唐代官员柳宗元于公元八零五年被贬至永州,正是在此地,而非京城,他写下了如今被视为中国游记文学奠基之作的一系列散文,包括《永州八记》与《捕蛇者说》,后者描写的是一种当地剧毒之蛇,相传中毒后无药可医。
Liuzi Temple, built in his memory, still stands in the city today, and the Wuxi Stele Forest nearby holds hundreds of inscriptions carved by visiting scholars and officials between the Tang dynasty and 1920, drawn to the same landscape that shaped Liu’s exile.
为纪念他而建的柳子庙,至今仍矗立于城中;附近的浯溪碑林,则保存着自唐代至一九二零年间历代文人官员留下的数百方摩崖石刻,他们所吟咏的,正是当年令柳宗元流放至此的同一片山水。
A Mountain Where an Emperor Died and His Wives Never Found Him
一座皇帝殒命、两位王妃遍寻不获的山
Jiuyi Mountain, in the south of the prefecture, is where legend places the death of Emperor Shun during a tour of the region; his two wives are said to have gone searching for him among the mountain’s nine near-identical peaks and never found their way to the right one, weeping onto the local bamboo until its stems turned permanently mottled, a variety still known today as Xiangfei bamboo.
永州南部的九嶷山,相传是舜帝南巡途中驾崩之处;他的两位妃子曾在九座极为相似的山峰间寻夫,却始终未能找对方向,泪水滴落在当地竹子上,竟令竹竿从此留下斑驳泪痕,这一竹种至今仍被称为”湘妃竹”。
According to Hunan’s provincial statistics bureau, Yongzhou’s permanent population stood at 5.0185 million at the end of 2024, with GDP reaching ¥269.3 billion, up 5.3 percent on the previous year; per capita disposable income across the prefecture averaged ¥30,424, up 5.7 percent.
据湖南省统计局公布的数据显示,截至二零二四年底,永州市常住人口为五百零一点八五万人,GDP达二千六百九十二点五七亿元,同比增长百分之五点三;全市居民人均可支配收入为三万零四百二十四元,同比增长百分之五点七。
Getting to Yongzhou means choosing between two rail stations serving the prefecture’s two central districts, Lingling and Lengshuitan, on lines running south towards Guangdong and Guangxi; Yongzhou Lingling Airport, rebuilt from 2019 onward, now offers domestic routes that put the prefecture within a few hours of most major Chinese cities.
前往永州,通常要在服务于零陵与冷水滩两大主城区的两座火车站之间做出选择,铁路线路向南分别通往广东与广西;自二零一九年起改扩建的永州零陵机场,如今已开通多条国内航线,数小时内即可抵达国内大多数主要城市。
Jiangyong’s old villages still stand largely as they did when Yang Huanyi and He Yanxin were girls, their walls carved with characters no man in the household was ever taught to read.
江永的古老村落,大多仍保持着阳焕宜与何艳新还是女童时的模样,墙壁上刻着的文字,家中的男性从未被教导识读。
