Who invented the Phagspa script?

Drogön Chögyal Phagpa invented the Phagspa script. A Tibetan Buddhist monk of the Sakya tradition, Phagpa designed it in the 13th century at the request of Kublai Khan, the founder of China's Yuan dynasty.

The script was completed around 1269 and was intended as a universal writing system for the multilingual Mongol Empire. It adapted the Tibetan alphabet to represent languages including Mongolian, Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Persian, and Sanskrit. Its vertical forms were especially suited to writing Mongolian.

Kublai Khan made Phagspa the official script of the Yuan dynasty, but it never displaced Chinese characters or the Uyghur-derived Mongolian script in everyday administration. Many documents continued using older systems, and Phagspa largely fell out of use after the Yuan collapsed in 1368.

A common mix-up is crediting Kublai Khan himself: he commissioned and promoted the script, but Phagpa was its designer. The script is also sometimes called 'Phags-pa or ḥPags-pa.