Stele Forest

The Stele Forest or Beilin Museum is a museum for steles and stone sculptures in Beilin District in Xi'an, China. The museum, which is housed in a former Confucian Temple, has housed a growing collection of Steles since 1087. By 1944 it was the principal museum for Shaanxi province. Due to the large number of steles, it was officially renamed the Forest of Stone Steles in 1992. Altogether, there are 3,000 steles in the museum, which is divided into seven exhibitions halls, which mainly display works of calligraphy, painting and historical records.[1]

Stele Forest
An entrance to the Stele Forest
Chinese碑林

An ink rubbing of one of the calligraphy stela at the Beilin Museum in Xi'an, called the "God of Literature Pointing the Dipper." It depicts the figure, made up of the characters describing the four Confucian virtues, "pointing the dipper" (an expression for coming first in the imperial civil service examinations).

History

The Stele Forest began with the Kaicheng Shi Jing Steles (开成石经碑) and Shitai Xiao Jing Steles (石台孝经碑), two groups of steles both carved in the Tang dynasty and displayed in the temple to Confucius in Chang'an. In 904, a rebel army sacked Chang'an, and the steles were evacuated to the inner city. In 962, they were returned to the rebuilt temple. In the Song dynasty, a special hall with attached facilities was built to house and display the two stele groups. It was damaged in the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake during the Ming dynasty. In 1936, famous Chinese calligrapher Yu Youren donated his entire collection of more than three hundred rubbings from steles to the Xian Forest of Stele Museum.[2] It became a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level in 1961 and thus survived the Cultural Revolution.

Steles
Stele Forest Museum

It houses nearly 3,000 steles and it is the biggest collection of steles in China. Most of its exhibits are steles of the Tang dynasty. Ink rubbings of the steles are available for sale.

Among the unusual examples is an 18th-century stele depicting a Yangtze River flood control project. Another appears to be a bamboo forest, but on examination the leaves and branches form a poem.

The famous Nestorian Stele was moved to the Stele Forest in 1907, after the local authorities learned that the Danish adventurer Frits Holm was in town, trying to "obtain" the ancient monument and take it out of the country.[3]

  • Cao Quan Stele (曹全碑, Han Dynasty)
  • Sima Fang Stele (司马芳碑, Jin Dynasty)
  • Kaicheng Shi Jing Stele (开成石经碑, Tang Dynasty)
  • Nestorian Stele (大秦景教流行中国碑, Tang Dynasty)

Stone sculptures

The collections of the Beilin Museum are far more extensive than suggested by this inadequate thumbnail stub. To give but one example, artefacts produced by the ancient buddhasasansangha of part of China are well represented: Buddhist Sculpture from China: Selections from the X'ian Beilin Museum Fifth through Ninthh Centuries (China Institute Gallery,New York, 2007).

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References
  1. "Xi'an beilin Museum(西安碑林博物馆)". foreignercn.com. Retrieved 6 August 2014.
  2. The Modern Sage of Cursive Script: Yu Youren and his world of calligraphy
  3. Keevak, Michael (2008), The Story of a Stele: China's Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625-1916, pp. 117–121, ISBN 962-209-895-9

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