Culture Park （South Gate）
Leafy park set on the grounds of a Taoist monastery famed for hand carved scripture printing blocks.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Culture Park's South Gate in Chengdu opens with a craftsman's puzzle: carving a single word backwards, in mirror image, sunk half an inch into pear wood, without a slip. On this ground once stood Erxian An, a Taoist monastery where, in 1906, the abbot Yan Yonghe and two scholars decided to recarve an entire Taoist scripture text from scratch after fire and war destroyed the older printing blocks. You'll hear how craftsmen took on that bet across thousands of blocks of pear wood over fifteen years, finishing only in 1915. Stand where the workshop once stood, on the site of a very long gamble.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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