Heading south from the Bell Tower along Nan Dajie, a street of department stores and offices, you come to the huge South Gate, an arch in the wall topped with a triple-eaved wooden building, not open to the public. Turning east on to S.buyuanmen, a cobbled street of souvenir shops dressed up to look like Qing buildings, walk for 500m alongside the wall to reach the Shaanxi Beilin Museum (daily 9am:-5pm; RMB30, students RMB15), a converted Confucian temple. Most of the exhibits are steles, from the Han to the Qing dynasties, which you don’t need to understand Chinese to find fascinating - many are marked with maps and drawings.
An annexe on the west side holds an exhibition of snrall stone Buddhist images, a wealth of which have been discovered in Shaanxi, Exhibited chronologically, the sculptures demonstrate the way the physiognomy of Buddha lineages changed over the centuries. The earliest, from 420 AD, arc of plump, Indian-style Buddhas; later images become much more Han- looking, as Buddhism developed Chinese characteristics and absorbed the influence of Confucianism and Taoism. The Sui and Tang figures are particularly good, bearing the most recognizably Chinese characteristics.
The rest of the museum collection consists of 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. Like most of the steles in the museum, these are set in a stone wall or secured in a steel frame. 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 ora 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 deify the virgin mother, 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 splendor, 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 fiat stone wrapped in cloth. Among the steles is an image called the “God of Literature Pointing the Dipper”, with the eight character which 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. Other tablets hold lively line drawings of local scenic spots. At the back of the hall, a stele records the harsh recriminations taken by the Qing government against a village which massacred foreign missionaries in 1903. The other three halls contain mainly texts, but notable is a stele inscribed with the large character “Hu”, meaning tiger, written in a dynamic single stroke by the Qing calligrapher, Ma Dezhao.
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