Situated in the famous Three Schools Street of Xian (the three schools refer to the Chang'an School, Fu School and the Xianning School of Qin Dynasty), the steles forest was established in the second year of the Northern Song Dynasty (1078 AD) to store the Kaicheng Stone Inscriptions. Since then, the collection of the steles forest has been constantly expanding. To date the stone tablets total about 3,000 and they are stored and displayed in six steles corridors, seven steles exhibition halls and eight steles pavilions. Collections here are of high value for exploring both Chinese history and Chinese calligraphy. Here stand a number of stone tablets that bear the works of many outstanding calligraphers in ages and styles.
The First Display Room
In the First Display Room at the Stone Forest is exhibited the "Kaicheng Classics", including the texts of 12 books, namely "the Book of Changes"; "the Book of History"; "the Book of Songs"; "Account of the Rite of the Zhou Dynasty"; "the Book of Ceremony"; "the Book of Rites"; "Zuo Qiuming's Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals"; "Gongyang's Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals"; "Guliang's Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals"; "the Analects of Confucius"; "the Canon of Filial Piety" and "the Erya". The 12 classics containing altogether 650,252 characters were thus engraved on both sides of 114 pieces of stones. In the Qing Dynasty another classic "Mencius" was engraved on 17 pieces of stones with 30,000 eharacters~, It is also displayed here. This and 12 others are together called Thirteen Classics".
The Second Display Room
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Room II mainly keeps tablets of calligraphy inscribed by many famous calligraphers of the Tang Dynasty. These tablets have served as models for calligraphy students. There are "Huang Pudan Tablet inscribed by Ou Yangxun, the early Tang calligrapher; "Master Daoyin Tablet" inscribed by Ou Yangtong, Ou Yangxun's son; "Duobao Pagoda Tablet" and "The Yan's Family Temple Tablet" inscribed by Yah Zhenqing; "Mysterious Pagoda Tablet" inscribed by Liu Gongquan in the late Tang Dynasty; "the Tablet of Forward to the Sacred Teaching of Monk Xuan Zang" inscribed by Monk Huai Ren in Chang'an's Hongfu Temple in the handwriting of Wang Xizhi, the great calligrapher (This tablet is known as the "most valuable copybook".); and the world famous tablet "Nestorian Tablet".
The Third Display Room
Room III contains tablets from the Han to the Song dynasties. They are inscribed with a rich variety of calligraphy, including seal characters, official script, regular script, running hand and cursive hand. The tablets could very well describe the evolution of the Chinese writing system. The tablet here is in seal characters of Meng Ying of the Song Dynasty. According to the book "On Characters" by Xu Shen, Meng Ying wrote the radicals or basic structural parts of 540 Chinese characters in seal script and marked them with phonetics symbols in regular script.
The Fourth & Fifth Display Room
In Room IV are works of poetry in the authentic hand-writing of the well-known calligraphers from the Song through the Qing dynasties, tablets of historical significance in periods of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and some liner engravings from the Song through the Qing dynasties. We would like to show you several of these drawings in particular.
In the Fifth Display Room are tablets which record the history of temple repair, good deeds of man, canal digging and wall mending during the dynasties of Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing. They are good reference data for the study of the then society and local history.
The Sixth Display Room
The room mainly contains the tablets of poetry and verses in the dynasties of Yuan, Ming and Qing. Among them are the very valuable tablets of "Visiting the Tianguan Mountain" by Zhao Mengfu in the Yuan Dynasty; "Seeing off Zhang Sheng of Huiji in Moling Inn" by Dong Qichang in the Ming Dynasty; of "Bestowing Wu He" by the Qing Dynasty Emperor Kang Xi in the handwriting of Mi Fei, and of "Visiting Mount Hua" by Lin Zexu.
The Seventh Display Room
This room was set up in 1982, which specially stores "The Secret Court Copybook of Chunhua in the Song Dynasty". This secret copybook has ten volumes. The first five contain the calligraphy of various emperors, famous officials and well- known calligraphers in seal script, cursive script and regular script. The later five contain the cursive handwriting of Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi. This is a collection of the works of Chinese calligraphers before the Song Dynasty.