The Nestorian Stele


After making my way from Beijing, Mount Tai, Qufu and Harbin in the east of China, I took a plane to Xi’an, one of the former capitals and home to the massive translation project which taught Buddhism the Chinese language in the mid-centuries of the first millenium A.D.  I had come to East Asia (it was 2004) to research Taoism, Confucianism and Chinese Buddhism in situ, and Xi’an offered much to supplement what I’d already visited in the eastern regions. However, after exploring the Wild Goose Pagoda (site of those revolutionary translations), a couple of museums, and the fabled Terra Cotta Army of the first emperor, I noticed a curious recommendation in my guidebook: ‘Forest of Steles’.  I decided to take a look.

Long before the hard disk there was the hard stele, a technique of information storage which may outlive google. Here was an 11th century emperor’s method of preserving important texts, images and calligraphies of his civilization, not on bone, tortoise shell, parchment or even China’s famous invention of paper, but instead as chiselled texts on huge slabs (‘steles’) of granite. As I wandered around the thick forest of some 3,000 black stones and the myriads of Chinese characters, I recalled Luke 19, “…even the stones will cry out.” Here the proud legacy of China has done its best to enter into as near a form of perpetuity as possible. But as I approached the front gate to leave, I noticed a large stele to my right that I had missed on entering. I read the brief English title:  “The Nestorian Tablet of the Tang Dynasty”.

I later learned that Nestorian Christians had arrived in China not long after the Buddhists, and that this stele had been crafted in the 8th century, but then was buried in the following century during persecutions of Buddhism and other foreign religions. It was dug up in the early 17th century and Jesuit missionaries helped to interpret it. At the turn of the 20th century, efforts from abroad to appropriate the stele for a Western museum made the Chinese seize the artefact and put it out of reach of foreign hands. They placed it in the ‘Forest’. This site was soon to become a national treasure of the people that call their country the ‘Middle Kingdom’, destined to survive even the devastation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. It is an oddity of history that this native collection of China’s very own wisdom and beauty, which doesn’t display a single Buddhist inscription, prominently exhibits a Christian stone document right at its front door. Christianity is currently the fastest growing religion in China, and if present trends continue, it could have the largest Christian population in the world by 2030 (more even than Brazil). No less than the fictitious monolith in Space Odyssey, the Nestorian Stele, a documented chapter in Christian history, may have triggered a genuine shift in the human adventure.