Andrew West 魏安
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Andrew West 魏安
@babelstone.co.uk
1.6K followers 440 following 790 posts
Independent researcher of Tangut, Khitan, and Jurchen. Developer of BabelPad and BabelMap. Maintainer of BabelStone Han font. Responsible for adding over 10,000 characters to the Unicode Standard.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2063-7389
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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Sep 6
40 years ago today I walked across the Lo Wu Bridge 羅湖橋 into China for the very first time — into a world that a year's intensive study of Mandarin and Classical Chinese at SOAS University of London had woefully ill-prepared me for.
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It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that we, the family of Andrew West, confirm his peaceful passing on 10th July 2025. The BabelStone legacy will be continued by colleagues and friends.
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Andrew C. West 魏安 1960–2025
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July 30, 2025 at 10:09 AM
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My reconstruction and identification of a partially-preserved Tangut character in a unique fragment of the Homophones text held at the British Library www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n53...
Fragment of folio 56A of the B version of the Tangut Homophones text held at the British Library, showing twelve partial entries with eight complete or partial head characters. The partial head character on the bottom right is identified and proposed for encoding in the linked document.
May 27, 2025 at 9:04 PM
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First step towards the encoding of Jurchen *small script* characters, by @cosmicore.bsky.social and myself www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n53...
Gold paizi found in Chengde, Hebei in 1972, with a vertical inscription in Jurchen small script characters (two clusters of three characters each) beneath a huaya 花押 symbol. Photograph courtesy of Vladimir Belyaev.
May 25, 2025 at 5:05 PM
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Monumental three-volume Handbook of Epigraphic Cultures to be published by De Gruyter, early next year hopefully. Open Access eBook! Includes chapters on Khitan and Tangut epigraphy.
Flyer publicizing two forthcoming Handbooks on Material Text Culture from De Gruyter: Handbook of Medieval Book Ornament [ISBN 978-3-11-141107-1] and Handbook of Epigraphic Cultures (3 volumes) [ISBN 978-3-11-124094-7]
March 12, 2025 at 2:06 PM
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When I was in Lhasa in Spring 1985 I witnessed a sky burial. Below are a selection of photographs I took (with permission, and only after the vultures had been summoned) using poor quality Chinese film after finishing my supply of Fujifilm.
babelstone.co.uk Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Mar 11
The site of the sky burial is near Sera Monastery, and brightly-painted Buddhist paintings adorn the nearby rocks, prominently featuring Yama, god of death, with the head of a buffalo, holding a skull-tipped club in his right hand and a lasso in his left hand, standing on a bull.
Brightly-painted Buddhist paintings on rock faces. The largest painting depicts Yama, god of death, with the head of a buffalo, holding a skull-tipped club in his right hand and a lasso in his left hand, standing on a bull; with his much smaller consort Yami standing on his left side. Photograph by Andrew West, circa 1 March 1985.
March 11, 2025 at 7:00 PM
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One day in Lhasa I bumped into this guy who was a passenger on one of the other trucks from Chengdu to Lhasa, and I spent half a day taking photos of him posing all around town. The photos are not great as they are taken on cheap Chinese film, but there is a certain charm to them.
babelstone.co.uk Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Feb 25
My travel companion posing with a group of pack dzo (yak-cattle crossbreeds).
Man in an ill-fitting suit standing with his hand resting on the saddle of a dzo (yak-cattle crossbreed) among a group of pack dzo in a street in a town in (probably) Garzê County, Sichuan. Behind them is a nondescript white building with Chinese characters on either side of the closed door indicating that it is a store selling cigarettes, alcohol, and sweets (副食门市　出售煙氿糖). Photograph by Andrew West, circa 16 February 1985.
March 7, 2025 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Andrew West 魏安
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Trashi delek! Happy Losar! Happy Tibetan lunar new year! Welcome to the Wood Snake 🪵🐍 year!

The illustration shows the auspicious greeting བཀྲ་ཤིས་འབར་འགྱུར་གཅིག༎ in hor yig ཧོར་ཡིག 'Mongolian' script.
Illustration from A. M. Pozdneyev's Лекціи по исторіи монгольской литературы (St. Petersburg, 1897) page 192. The illustration shows four columns of Tibetan text in hor yig script (a Tibetan decorative style of Phags-pa script), written top-to-bottom and left-to-right.
February 28, 2025 at 12:10 AM
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Trashi delek! Happy Losar! Happy Tibetan lunar new year! Welcome to the Wood Snake 🪵🐍 year!

The illustration shows the auspicious greeting བཀྲ་ཤིས་འབར་འགྱུར་གཅིག༎ in hor yig ཧོར་ཡིག 'Mongolian' script.
Illustration from A. M. Pozdneyev's Лекціи по исторіи монгольской литературы (St. Petersburg, 1897) page 192. The illustration shows four columns of Tibetan text in hor yig script (a Tibetan decorative style of Phags-pa script), written top-to-bottom and left-to-right.
February 28, 2025 at 12:10 AM
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For the Spring Holiday of 1985, during our year studying at the Beijing Language Institute (2nd year of SOAS Chinese degree course), my roommate (APB) and me decided to go on a big adventure overland from Chengdu to Lhasa 1/🧵
Set of three commemorative stamps (Set 特14) issued by the China People's Postal Service (中國人民邮政) in March 1956 to celebrate the completion of two highways from Sichuan and Qinghai to Lhasa (康臧青臧公路)
February 7, 2025 at 4:34 PM
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For #EpigraphyTuesday some fragments of Chinese-inscribed marble slips unearthed from the ruins of Karabalgasun, situated on the west side of the Orkhon River in central Mongolia, which was capital of the Uighur Khaganate between 744 and 840. The first fragment is engraved 没蜜施 ... 1/7
Fragment of a marble slip engraved with the three Chinese characters 没蜜施
January 28, 2025 at 6:25 PM
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Precious Seals of the Qing Dynasty 清代寶璽 — a set of one hundred postcards published by the Palace Museum in 1932 which show the Chinese and Manchu inscriptions on the faces of one hundred Qing dynasty imperial seals #SealSunday
Precious Seals of the Qing Dynasty
Palace Museum Postcards Set Number 5. This is a set of one hundred postcards published by the Palace Museum in 1932 which show the Chinese and Manchu inscriptions on the faces of one hundred Qing dyna...
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January 26, 2025 at 9:57 PM
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For #WoodblockWednesday, the only extant woodblock printed edition of the Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary (part of the Huáyí Yìyǔ 華夷譯語 series produced by the Bureau of Translators 四夷館 during the Ming dynasty), held at Tiānyīgé 天一閣 library in Ningbo. 71 out of 108 folios preserved (missing fasc. 1 of 3).
Folio 37 (first folio of the second of three fascicles) of the only extant copy of a woodblock printed edition of the Ming dynasty Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary, held at the Tianyige Library in Ningbo Yìyǔ (pressmark 善0376). The book is a classified vocabulary list, with Chinese words written in large text, the corresponding Jurchen term written in Jurchen script on the right, and the approximate reading of the Jurchen term using Han characters on the left. There are four vocabulary items per half-folio. This version of the text comprises 821 entries, of which 542 are preserved in this copy.
January 22, 2025 at 9:34 PM
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I'm still waiting for him to learn about Unicode, then mandate US ASCII on all government websites
January 22, 2025 at 11:32 AM
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For #EpigraphyTuesday the story of the famous bilingual Khitan-Chinese "Record of the Journey of the Younger Brother of the Emperor of the Great Jin" 大金皇弟都統經略郎君行記 which is engraved on the originally blank face of the Wordless Stele 無字碑 for Empress Wu Zetian at the Qianling Mausoleum in Shaanxi. 1/7
Photograph looking up at the densely-inscribed surface of the huge "Wordless Stele" 無字碑 for Empress Wu Zetian 武則天 (r. 690–705) at the Tang dynasty Qianling Mausoleum 乾陵 in Shaanxi. Photograph CC BY SA by 猫猫的日记本 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Qianling_Mausoleum_42_2013-08.JPG). For unknown reasons the stele for Empress Wu Zetian was originally blank, but from the Song dynasty onwards various inscriptions were engraved on its surface. The bilingual Khitan-Chinese "Record of the Journey of the Younger Brother of the Emperor of the Great Jin" 大金皇弟都統經略郎君行記 is engraved in a prominent position near the top of the middle of the stele, the text surrounded by an elaborate decorative border.
January 21, 2025 at 6:57 PM
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Tangut Proverb #48 (《𗆧𗰖𗬻𘜼𘋥𘝿》 folio 5A):

Riding a horse along a long road shows off its strength and power;
Accompanying a person in old age, it is clear how strong [the friendship is].

𗵘𘙲𘆝𘓢𘟏𗪺𗏴
𘓐𗤒𗳳𗀚𘝶𗊵𗩯
Folio 5A of the 1187 woodblock printed edition of the Tangut Proverbs, with Proverb #48 highlighted in red
January 10, 2025 at 4:13 PM
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A lot of Cantonese-usage characters are coming to Unicode 17.0 later this year, but perhaps my favourite is ⿴囗芒 [UK-20506] pronounced mon1 which means a 'computer monitor'
Extract from an article in the Hong Kong magazine “Resonate” 《迴響》 no. 1 (July 2020) p. 6
January 10, 2025 at 10:57 AM
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Christmas 1984 in Beijing passed by quietly and almost unnoticed, but the new year's holiday a week later allowed us a brief respite from classes at the Beijing Language Institute 北京语言学院, and so on New Year's Eve a few of us boarded a night train from Beijing Station to ...
Beijing railway station at 10:14 pm on New Year's Eve 1984
December 31, 2024 at 10:14 PM
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The most recent discovery of a monumental Tangut inscription occurred in September 2013 when this small funerary stele (60 cm high) was unearthed during excavations of a tomb situated outside the original east city wall of Daming 大名 in Hebei.
Small stone stele with two columns of Tangut text engraved on one side
December 24, 2024 at 4:04 PM
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For #ManuscriptMonday here is a fragment of a Tangut inventory dating from the Western Xia (1038–1227) which was unearthed in 2005 at the Shanzuigou 山嘴沟 site in the Helan mountains of Ningxia 1/4
Fragment of a manuscript with four columns of text written mostly in Tangut, but with the the dates written in Chinese characters
December 9, 2024 at 9:11 PM
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BabelStone Flags font updated for Syria www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/Flags....
Extract from the BabelStone Flags download page showing the flag of Syria
December 9, 2024 at 11:54 AM
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The other Chinese pronoun coming to Unicode v. 17.0 next year, in addition to ⿰㐅也 (3p gender-neutral, ⿰男也 (3p explicitly male), ⿱妳心 ( f. equivalent of 您), ⿱我心 (Taiwanese 1p plural), is ⿱她心 (f. equivalent to 怹)
November 25, 2024 at 4:42 PM