China Guide
The Yellow River
The Beilin Museum
Opening time: Daily 8.30am–6.30pm
Price: ¥30
Address: Off Duanmulen in Beilin
In the heart of Beilin, a touristy artists' quarter, stands the Beilin Museum, a converted Confucian temple. Aside from an annexe on the west side, which holds an exhibition of chronologically arranged Buddhist images where you can follow the evolution of styles over the centuries, the museum's main focus is six halls containing more than a thousand steles.
The first hall contains the twelve Confucian classics – texts outlining the Confucian philosophy – carved onto 114 stone tablets, a massive project ordered by the Tang emperor Wenzong in 837 as a way of ensuring the texts were never lost or corrupted by copyists' errors. The second hall includes the Daqing Nestorian tablet, on the left as you go in, recognizable by a cross on the top, which records the arrival of a Nestorian priest in Chang'an in 781 and gives a rudimentary description of Christian doctrine. Condemned as heretical in the West for its central doctrine of the dual nature of Christ, both human and divine, and for refusal to see the Virgin Mother as the Mother of God, Nestorianism spread to Turkey and the East as its priests fled persecution, and was the first Christian doctrine to appear in China. In the third hall, one stele is inscribed with a map of Chang'an at the height of its splendour, when the walls were extensive enough to include the Big Goose Pagoda within their perimeter. Rubbings are often being made in the fourth hall, where the most carved drawings are housed; thin paper is pasted over a stele and a powdered ink applied with a flat stone wrapped in cloth. Among the steles is an image called the "God of Literature Pointing the Dipper", with the eight characters that outline the Confucian virtues – regulate the heart, cultivate the self, overcome selfishness and return propriety – cleverly made into the image of a jaunty figure. "To point the dipper" meant to come first in the exams on Confucian texts, which controlled entry to the civil service.