Vietnam: Title page from the poem 'My nu cong Ho' printed in Han-Nom.

Title page from a Han-Nom edition of 'My nu cong Ho', woodblock printed in Hanoi, 1921. The work is a poem expressing the feelings of a beautiful girl who is given in marriage to Phien lord. She thinks with deep regret of her youth to be confined in a palace, how she will miss her family, and her longing for freedom and happiness. Chu Nom is an obsolete writing system of the Vietnamese language. It makes use of Chinese characters (known as Han Tu in Vietnamese), and characters coined following the Chinese model. The earliest known example of Chu Nom dates to the 13th century. It was used almost exclusively by the Vietnamese elite, mostly for recording Vietnamese literature (formal writings were, in most cases, not done in Vietnamese, but in classical Chinese). It has almost been completely replaced by Quoc Ngu, a script based on the Latin alphabet.