Vietnam: Two pages from a text handwritten in Han Nom.

Two pages from 'Hai Duong phong vat khuc dung quoc am ca' handwritten in Han Nom. Probably late 19th or early 20th century. 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.