西安碑林

About this audio guide

This guide to the Stele Forest in Xi'an starts with a problem the Tang court faced in 833: how to stop copyists from quietly altering a text. It follows the anonymous engravers who spent four years carving the entire Confucian canon, more than six hundred fifty thousand characters, into stone tablets meant to serve as a fixed, unforgeable edition. Centuries later, students preparing for the imperial examinations relied on those same tablets rather than a borrowed manuscript. Look at the grooves worn smooth on the tablet in front of you, still pressed for rubbings today.