Cultural Rhythms of Writing

Cultural Rhythms Of Writing: Experimental Ethnography On Zhuang Manuscripts And Variant Chinese Characters

Good morning, everyone. My name is Boge Xiao.

Today, I will talk about Zhuang manuscripts, variant Chinese characters, and the different ways writing survives in the border region of Guangxi.

I came to this project through forms that looked non-standard or difficult to classify. But the real question soon became larger: why do some forms remain in use, why do some take on new functions, and why do some become readable only when we bring different textual worlds together?

I approach these manuscripts both as a researcher and as a descendant of the Zhuang and Gelao peoples. So for me, they are not only archival texts, but also living materials.

In this talk, I will focus on three kinds of cases: preservation, refunctioning, and cross-border textual traces.

I want to begin with one encounter.

About a year ago, someone sent me images of a manuscript and asked a simple question: could I identify the date?

At first, the writing looked familiar—close to Chinese, perhaps related to old Zhuang writing. So I placed it in the frameworks I already knew and shared it with scholars working on Zhuang language and manuscript traditions.

But none of us could read it with confidence.

The manuscript was visible, but unreadable.

What followed was not just decipherment. It was a shift in method. We had to re-situate the text through border history, manuscript circulation, and eventually Vietnamese Nôm. Only then did the date become legible: Khải Định, from the Nguyễn dynasty in Vietnam.

That moment led me to a simple question: was the manuscript really unreadable, or were we using the wrong way to read it?

To answer that question, we need to begin with Guangxi.

Guangxi is a border area in Southwest China, directly adjacent to northern Vietnam. It is home to Zhuang communities and related Tai-speaking groups whose manuscript and ritual traditions developed in a multilingual environment.

This second map makes that border logic clearer.

So this is not simply a story about a “minority culture” isolated inside China. It is a contact zone where Chinese writing, local Zhuang practice, and long-term exchange with Vietnam meet.

That matters because manuscripts from this region may not belong to only one script world. They may have been written, used, preserved, or made readable within more than one historical frame.

So why did the opening manuscript seem unreadable?

Not because the text had no meaning, but because we read it too narrowly.

We assumed it should fit a single Chinese-script framework. We treated variation as irregularity, inconsistency, or error. And we underestimated Guangxi as a border region with deep links to northern Vietnam.

But this case suggests a different view.

Some manuscripts belong to layered writing environments. Chinese writing, local language practice, and border history are present at the same time.

So the problem was a method.

Let me briefly place my project in relation to existing scholarship.

Most existing studies help us in three ways.

First, research on Chinese writing shows how standardization was pushed by the state and by central regulation.

Second, research on minority regions shows that older forms often remained active outside the center.

Third, border studies remind us that texts can move across linguistic and political boundaries. This image is useful because it shows space as layered, not fixed, which helps explain why border texts do not fit neatly into one framework.

All of this is useful. But these studies often leave one problem unresolved: they do not always separate different kinds of variation.

This gives me three categories.

First, preservation: forms that remain active after receding from more standardized writing elsewhere.

Second, refunctioning: forms that remain, but no longer do the same work.

Third, cross-border clue: forms or features that suggest a wider border textual environment, without yet proving a one-way chain of influence.

This distinction matters because not every non-standard form means the same thing. Some cases show continuity. Some show transformation. Some show the limits of a single reading framework.

My first case is preservation.

Here, some forms remain active in Zhuang manuscripts long after they become less visible in more standardized writing elsewhere.

I do not treat this as scribal error or cultural delay. I treat it as uneven continuity.

This is the first step toward what I call cultural rhythm.

By cultural rhythm, I do not mean a grand theory. I mean that textual change does not happen at the same pace everywhere.

A form that becomes marginal in one textual world may remain ordinary in another. So this first case shows continuity across unequal tempos of change.

My second case is refunctioning.

What matters here is not that a form survives, but that it does not mean the same thing across contexts.

In earlier Han usage, this graph could overlap with the standard form 等, within a relatively stable semantic range—such as degree or equivalence.

But in Zhuang manuscripts, the same graph appears in contexts where that equivalence no longer holds. It is still recognizable, but its function is reorganized within local ritual and linguistic practice.

If we then place this alongside Vietnamese Chữ Nôm material, we see a further shift. For example, this is associated with the cubic. At this point, the issue is divergence across multiple textual worlds. It is a redistribution of function.

And this is the step where “cultural rhythm” becomes necessary. As a way to describe how the same form is retained, reassigned, and differentiated across overlapping textual environments.

My third category is cross-border textual traces.

Here I want to be especially careful. I am not arguing that these examples prove a complete one-way chain of transmission.

Instead, I am interested in the fact that some manuscripts preserved in Guangxi retain traces tied to northern Vietnam and even colonial-era historical contexts.

One example is the reference to “Great French Hà Giang Province.” What matters here is preservation of a border text shaped by Vietnamese regional history under French colonial rule.

The manuscript I opened with provides a second kind of evidence. It became legible only when Vietnamese Nôm and Vietnamese chronology

were brought into the reading process. The Khải Định date places the manuscript during the period of French colonial Indochina.

This is where cultural rhythm helps me describe delayed legibility: texts survive across borders, but are not always readable again within one framework alone.

These cases point to three different categories I mentioned.

Taken together, they show that border manuscripts do not preserve writing in only one way.

They preserve different temporal layers at once.

Now I can define cultural rhythm more precisely.

It is not a total theory. It is a way of describing uneven textual time.

In the first case, a form remains active after receding elsewhere.

In the second, a retained form changes function.

In the third, a surviving text becomes legible again only through a wider border history.

So cultural rhythm does not mean slowness alone.

It means that forms persist, shift, and reappear under different conditions.

That is the larger claim of this talk.

These cases challenge three assumptions.

First, they challenge a simple center-to-periphery model in which the border only receives or preserves.

Second, they challenge a standardization-centered history in which non-standard forms are treated as residual or deficient.

Third, they challenge the assumption that a manuscript can always be read within one script tradition or one national frame.

My point is not that these frameworks are useless.

My point is that border manuscripts show where they become too narrow.

I want to end with a limit.

I use cultural rhythm as a provisional analytic, not a total theory. These cases are suggestive, not exhaustive.

Stronger claims would require a larger manuscript corpus, more systematic linguistic comparison, and deeper collaboration across Chinese and Vietnamese manuscript traditions.

So my goal today is not really to offer a final map of transmission.

It is to show that when we encounter border manuscripts, we may need to change not only how we read texts, but how we define textual worlds.

And I want to leave you with one question:

How do we read a text that has survived, but not survived in only one world?

Thank you.