Forest of Stone Steles Museum
The Forest of Stone Steles Museum, or the Beilin Museum, is more or less an ancient Chinese library. You see, even though the Chinese did invent the mixing together of fibers of cellulose (aka paper), it's not quite the safest way for keeping information. So for something super important, like a set of rules or poems written by the greatest minds of their time, you want something more fire and water proof. Learning (not really) from the ancient rules of the Japanese じゃんけんぽん, the stone was elected.
The steles found here are divided in seven rooms, each one containing scripture from different dynasties of China. The first room, for example, has a group of tablets with 12 reading books inscribed. Another reason, beside preservation, was to prevent errors in copy. Because some Chinese characters are complicated and one little stroke makes a difference, it would not be unusual to see mistakes in handwritten copies.
In the entrance of the museum, to the right, the original Bell of the Bell Tower is on display.
Some tablets are over one thousand years old, but that does not stop about every tourist from touching them. In room number five, the tablets from the Qing dynasty lay on the backs of Bixi.
For those who can't read Chinese, it starts getting repetitive looking at so many stones, but for those who can, it's a treasure. In room six there are steles with the calligraphy of emperors Kangxi and Lin Zexu themselves. As I don't read Chinese, I'm not sure which text this picture is from, but it is from that same room.
Not only writing was done on the stone tablets, many actually were adorned with very detailed drawings. It's interesting to note that these stones can serve as a model to make reproductions of the art. The Chinese did after all invent the printing press years before Gutenberg. They just roll paint on the stone and put a sheet of paper on it. The ink goes through the paper, so it's not really a stamp (so it's not backwards). You can buy copies here in this room, number five, for fairly cheap.
When you walk in the museum, one of the first things you see is the stone horse of Daxia State, a small minority state from the year 407.
Walking through the several buildings of the museum you get to a garden with about 70 stones used in tombs from the Han and Tang dynasties.
It's a perfect place to play catch. It's actually pretty cool, because it's more or less like a maze without the walls. As long as you don't bump into anything, that is.
Right next to the gravestones, where another group of sculptures that are more religious in nature. Honestly, they seemed all the same to me.
On the way back I walked past the horse again.