Tangut

Tangut refers to the Tangut people and their language, who established the Western Xia state in what is now northwestern China. From approximately 1038 to 1227, the Western Xia dynasty controlled parts of the present-day Ningxia, Gansu, and northern Shaanxi, with its capital at Xingqing, near modern Yinchuan. The Tangut polity combined Chinese bureaucratic traditions with local institutions, and Buddhism played a significant role in its culture and scholarship. The Western Xia was a regional power that interacted with neighboring Song, Jin, and Mongol polities before its defeat by the Mongol Empire.

The Tangut language is a Sino-Tibetan language, though its precise classification remains debated among linguists. It was written in a distinctive Tangut script, also known as the Xia script, created in the 11th century to transcribe Tangut. The script is large and complex, with thousands of unique characters, and was used for official documents, literature, and Buddhist texts. Tangut texts have provided key insights into the language and the Western Xia state, and significant portions of Tangut literature and inscriptions have been recovered from sites such as the Dunhuang caves and other archive-rich locales.

In 1227, the Mongol conquest brought an end to the Western Xia. The Tangut state dissolved, and its people and cultural artifacts were absorbed into larger empires that followed. Today, Tangut studies focus on decipherment, manuscript preservation, and the reconstruction of Western Xia governance, society, and religion. The Tangut script remains a major field of philological research, contributing to broader understandings of East Asian writing systems and medieval Sino-Tibetan languages.