Holm David. Some variant characters in a traditional Zhuang manuscript: a new angle on the Chinese script

Stockholm: Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 78 (2006):125–172.Scholars who study the old Zhuang character script most often focus on the exotic elements. However, many of the variant and vernacular characters found in traditional Zhuang manuscripts turn out not to be local Zhuang or Guangxi inventions. Rather, they can be shown to have direct parallels in mainstream written Chinese. They are best considered part of the rich and varied inheritance of handwritten Chinese. Two things follow from this. First, the Zhuang scribes who wrote these manuscripts, or their teachers, participated fully in Chinese writing culture. Secondly, the analysis presented here, in turn, will require us to re-configure our understanding of the universe of Chinese written signs.