The Stele Forest, or Beilin, sits inside the old city near the South Gate on the site of the former Confucius Temple. It is a museum built around stone steles - upright slabs carved with text - and it holds somewhere in the region of 3,000 of them, made over a span of roughly two thousand years. Nowhere else in China has a comparable collection.
How it began
The collection started in 1087, during the Song dynasty, when a set of stone-carved Confucian classics was moved here to protect it from damage. Because the original text of the classics and the great works of history mattered enormously, carving them in stone was a way of making a permanent, unchallengeable edition. Later dynasties added steles of their own, and the site grew into a formal archive of Chinese writing.
What is significant
Several things are worth seeking out. The Kaicheng Stone Classics, carved in the Tang dynasty, preserve the Confucian canon in the standard script of the time. The Nestorian Stele, carved in 781, records the arrival of Christianity in China in Syriac and Chinese, and is one of the most remarkable documents in Chinese history. The Forest of Steles also holds famous examples of calligraphy by masters such as Yan Zhenqing, Liu Gongquan and Wang Xizhi - often in later carvings copied from originals now lost - which is why calligraphy students treat this museum as a place of pilgrimage.
Visiting well
Because the material is text, the visit repays a little preparation. Labels and panels are in Chinese and English, and the museum's explanations of script types - seal, clerical, regular, running and cursive - make the collection far more legible. Notice how the stones are housed in a series of roofed galleries and courtyards that have themselves become historic, and look out for the carved stone animals and the Confucius Temple buildings at the entrance. The ink rubbing workshop, where paper impressions are taken from carvings, is worth a look.
Practical notes
The museum is a ten minute walk from Yongningmen station on Line 2, and is usually combined with the City Wall and the Shuyuanmen calligraphy street just outside its gate. It opens daily with an entrance fee and is closed on some Mondays, so check locally. Allow an hour and a half if you read the labels, and rather less if you are mainly there for the calligraphy.
