Phagpa

Phagpa, also spelled Phags-pa, was a 13th-century Tibetan Buddhist monk of the Sakya school who served as a spiritual advisor and teacher at the court of Kublai Khan, the founder of the Yuan dynasty. A prominent scholar and translator, he accompanied the Mongol court to China and helped integrate Tibetan Buddhist influence into the empire’s administration.

In the 1260s, Kublai Khan commissioned Phagpa to design a universal script to unify the empire’s multilingual administration. Phagpa produced the Phags-pa script—a square, Tibetan-derived writing system intended to render Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, and other languages in a single orthography. It was adopted for a time as an official script of the Yuan realm; inscriptions and government seals used it, and it appeared on some coin legends and edicts.

The Phags-pa script ultimately declined in use with the waning of the Yuan and the return to more traditional administrative practices. Today it is mainly of historical interest, viewed as a notable but impractical attempt at a multilingual writing system. Phagpa’s influence extended beyond script design: at the Yuan court he helped spread Tibetan Buddhism among Mongol rulers and facilitated cultural exchanges between Tibet and the Mongol empire. The script’s legacy lies in its place as an early effort to unify a vast imperial domain through a single writing system and as a symbol of Tibetan–Yuan cultural interaction.