An ethnic culture expert said he found an antique copper coin inscribed with Shuishu, or the pictographic writings of China's Shui ethnic group.

The coin is about 1,000 years old and bears two pictographs depicting a man pulling a water buffalo and another one pulling a plow, said Pan Chaolin, an associate researcher with the Guizhou Institute for Ethnicities based in Guiyang, capital of the southwestern Guizhou Province.

The buffalo and the plow are both tokens of fortune in Shuishu, said Pan, a noted folklorist specializing in the ancient ethnic writing.

He estimated the coin was cast sometime between 1008 and 1016.

"This is because it also bears 'Da Zhong,' two specific Chinese Han characters that refer to 'Da Zhong Xiang Fu,' the nine-year period under the rein of Emperor Zhen Zong between 1008 and 1016,"he acknowledged.

Emperor Zhen Zong, or Zhao Heng, was the third emperor of the Northern Song Dynasty (998-1022).

Pan said the coin has been bought by a private collector in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province.

The folklorist noted that his institute received approval and a80,000-yuan (some 9,600 US dollars) grant from the Chinese government for a major research program on Shuishu, which he refers to as "the last foothold of pictographic writing."

The southwestern Guizhou Province has nearly 370,000 people of the Shui ethnic group, or 90 percent of the country's total. The remaining 10 percent are inhabiting mainly on plateaus in southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and southwestern Yunnan Province.

Shuishu is on the verge of being lost as only very few Shui people now know how to read the characters. A tiny group of people have preserved most of the surviving books written in the ancient writing, which have been passed down to just one descendant in each family.

Linguists say books written in Shuishu resemble the "Book of Changes" of the Han people since they record the astronomy, geography, religion, folk customs, ethics, philosophy, aesthetics and law of the ethnic group.

China included Shuishu in its archive heritage list in March 2002 and is now preparing to submit it to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO as an oral and intangible heritage of humanity.
 
(Xinhua News Agency December 7, 2004)