Before the invention of the art of printing, how did ancient Chinese preserve and disseminate their culture and art? As mentioned before, they relied to a great extent on inscriptions on stone tablets.

These inscriptions are known as “Beiwen” (writings on stelae) or, less common, “shishu”, which means stone books. The earliest examples so far discovered are a set of 46 stelae engraved with the Confucian classics after the handwriting of the great Eastern Han calligrapher Cai Yong. They are called “Xiping Shijing” (Xiping Classics on Stone). They were stood in front of the lecture halls of the Imperial College in old Luoyang (the site of the 3rd century town, a little to the east of today’s Luoyang) as standard versions of the classics for the students to read or to copy from.

To engrave a voluminous work or series of works would require thousands of stone tablets and generations of perseverance and painstaking work. By far the greatest work engraved on stone is the Dazangjing (Great Buddhist Scriptures), which comprises more than 14,000 tablets. The carving of the stupendous collection began in the Sui Dynasty (581 --618) and completed around 1644, when the Ming Dynasty was replaced by the Qing, and extending over a thousand years! This rare collection of books on stone is kept in 9 rocky caves on Shijingshan (Stone Scripture Mountain) in Fangshan County, southwest of Beijing.

In order to preserve the “stone books” of various periods, scholars in China started as early as 1090 to collect the stelae scattered around the country and keep them together at Xi’an. Today in the halls of the “Forest of Stelae” are 1,700 tablets of many dynasties from the Han down to the Qing dynasties –the greatest collection in China.

The engravings on these stones cover a wide range of subjects –from the classics to works of calligraphy, from linear drawings to pictures in low relief. They include the Thirteen Classics (Book of Changes, Book of History, Book of Songs, the Analects, etc.), the basic reading s required of Confucian scholars of past ages. These, totaling 640,252 characters, were cut on both sides of 114 stelae in A. D. 837 of the Tang Dynasty. The stelae stand side by side like walls of stone, a veritable library of stone books.

The Forest of Stelae at Xi’an is not only a treasure house of Chinese literature and history but represents, a galaxy of the best calligraphers of different ages and schools, including all the different scripts –Zhuan seal character, Li (official script), Cao (cursive) and Kai (regular) --- each with its representative works. Visitors here may feast their eyes on the whole gamut of Chinese calligraphy.