Discover Xi'an
Xi'an Beilin Museum (Forest of Stone Steles)
西安碑林博物馆
The world's largest collection of Chinese inscribed stone tablets - over 2,000 objects including the Confucian classics carved in stone and the Nestorian Stele recording Christianity's arrival in Tang China. Reopened in 2025 after a major expansion that roughly quadrupled the display space.
The story
What makes this place special
A museum of writing on stone, begun in 1087 at the city's Confucian temple and prefectural school, and still on that site - most of the surviving buildings are Ming and Qing. It holds close to 3,000 steles. The founding collection is the Kaicheng Stone Classics, twelve Confucian classics engraved between 833 and 837 under the Tang emperor Wenzong: 114 stones carrying more than 650,000 characters, originally set up at the Imperial College in Chang'an as the authorised text of the canon. Its most internationally significant single object is the Xi'an Stele of 781, inscribed in Chinese and Syriac, which records the presence of the Church of the East in Tang China; it was brought into the museum in 1907 after a Danish visitor, Frits Holm, tried to take it abroad. The stone sculpture galleries hold four of the six horse reliefs from the Zhao Mausoleum - the other two are in Philadelphia.
What you’ll discover
Courtyards and long low halls, each packed with rows of upright inscribed stones under cover, so that it genuinely reads as a forest. You walk between them: the Kaicheng Classics fill their own hall as a stone library; other halls group the great calligraphers, so this is where Chinese visitors come to stand in front of the actual surface written by Yan Zhenqing, Ouyang Xun and Huai Su. Behind the stele halls is a separate stone sculpture gallery of Buddhist images, tomb figures and the Zhao Mausoleum horses. Craftsmen make ink rubbings from stones on site, which you can watch and buy.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Go for the Nestorian stele if you want one object: it is the physical proof that Syriac Christianity reached the Tang capital, it is labelled in English, and it is the thing this museum means to the outside world.
- The stone sculpture gallery at the back is skipped by nearly everyone and contains the best sculpture in Xi'an outside the big history museum - including the Zhao Mausoleum horses.
- Watch the rubbing-makers. Seeing the paper beaten into the incisions and inked explains, in two minutes, how calligraphy was transmitted across China for a thousand years before printing.
- If you cannot read Chinese, this museum needs a guide more than any other site in the city. Without one it is rows of grey stone; with one it is the history of the written language.
- It is built into the inside of the city wall near the South Gate, so it combines with a wall walk in one outing, and the antique and calligraphy-supply street outside the gate is worth the detour for brushes, ink and seal stones.
- The halls are unheated and open-sided; in winter it is genuinely cold inside, and in summer rain the courtyards flood at the edges.
When to come
Any weekday morning. It is indoors-ish and rarely crowded, so it works as a rainy-day option and as an escape from the summer heat, though the halls are not air-conditioned. Autumn is most comfortable.
Getting around
Mostly flat but old. The courtyards and the stele halls are at near-ground level on stone paving with low thresholds at the hall doors, so a wheelchair can get through much of it with some help over sills, and a bad knee has little climbing to do. The paving is uneven in places, the halls are dimly lit, and the aisles between stones are narrow, so a wheelchair cannot always turn. The stone sculpture gallery is a modern building and is better equipped.
Worth knowing before you go
The ¥85 price was set in May 2025 for a stated two-year term, so it should hold through 2026 - but it is a big jump from the old price, and older guidebooks still print the pre-renovation figure.
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