Xi'an is home to two unique museums that chronicle China's cultural past. The first of these is the Shaanxi History Museum, a collection of nearly 400,000 artifacts ranging from prehistoric skulls and stone tools up through artworks from the end of the Qing dynasty (1912). The museum is especially famous for material from the pre-Ming period (before 1350) of Xi'an's golden age. The album shows just a few samples from this vast collection:
The second collection, the Forest of Stelae Museum, is housed in a complex of seven separate halls that are all on the grounds of a former Confucian academy. The stelae are massive stone pillars -- more than 1000 in all -- that are inscribed with the definitive versions of classic texts such as the Confucian Analects and the I Ching (Book of Changes) dating from as early as the ninth century. Students and scholars could make rubbings of the stelae, thus eliminating the vexatious problem (for medievalists, at least) of scribal errors made by copyists.
Muslims were not the only religious minority welcomed in this cosmopolitan city. One stone pillar crowned by a cross and dating to 781 CE preserves a text brought to Xi'an in 635 CE by Nestorian Christians fleeing persecution at the hands of their co-religionists.
Craftsmen still make hand rubbings of the stelae for visitors. We purchased an ink rubbing that is about 7 feet by 3 feet. Its Chinese characters form a famous poem hidden among the stalk and leaves of a bamboo plant. http://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/Stelae#
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