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TIAN Mi, Assistant Professor (enrolled till June, 2026)<\/p>\n
How do you rebuild an ancient stone monument when the original is almost entirely gone? Without photography, scanning, or digital modeling, how do you turn those scattered fragments into a visible whole\u2014something that can once again be publicly seen, studied, and remembered?<\/p>\n
This may sound like a question for modern heritage conservation. Yet in nineteenth-century Qing China (1644\u20131911), similar efforts were already underway. Ancient objects, stone inscriptions, and other epigraphic remains were coming to light in unprecedented numbers, and they became crucial for rethinking what people thought they knew about history.<\/p>\n
Among the many discoveries of this time were surviving traces of the Xiping Stone Classics (ca. 175\u2013183), a monumental set of stone inscriptions that had vanished for centuries, and has become the focus of my current research. Established in Luoyang, the imperial capital of the Eastern Han dynasty (25\u2013220), the Xiping Stone Classics were the first officially sponsored stone edition of the Confucian classics in Chinese history. They consisted of forty-six massive steles inscribed with more than 200,000 characters in clerical script, inaugurating a state-sponsored tradition of engraving canonical texts in stone that later dynasties repeatedly sought to emulate. Over time, however, the original steles were almost entirely lost. Although their prestige endured, no physical fragments were excavated until the twentieth century. During the Qing period, only a small body of paper evidence was available: several rubbings, or ink impressions taken from carved stone surfaces, preserving about a hundred characters; and ten now-lost sheets of outline tracings, preserving about five hundred characters by recording the contours of each character. Altogether, these materials preserved little more than six hundred characters\u2014less than one-third of one percent of the original text.<\/p>\n
My research asks how the Xiping Stone Classics were remade, who made this possible, and what their work reveal about the social and technical dimension of reproduction in nineteenth-century China. We might imagine that such a project required official support or enormous resources. Yet the people who made it possible were grassroots-level literati artist-cum-technicians working in \u201cmufu,\u201d the private secretariats of provincial officials in Qing China. Many of them lacked secure official positions, but they played important technical roles in local society as clerks, hydrologists, engineers, and project managers. What makes them central to my research is that they treated calligraphy not simply as an aesthetic pursuit, but as a practical technique for copying, carving, and remaking ancient inscriptions. In this sense, their practices came close to what we would now call \u201ccultural heritage conservation.\u201d<\/p>\n
How, then, did the remaking of the Xiping Stone Classics begin in practice?<\/p>\n
My research reveals that it started not with anything monumental, but with something much smaller: inkstones. An inkstone was a basic writing tool found on every scholar\u2019s desk in premodern China and across East Asia. Small enough to fit in the hand, it had a shallow surface for grinding and holding ink, while its flat underside could serve as a space for carved inscriptions.<\/p>\n
The first step taken by these mufu calligraphers was to transform the inkstone into a portable medium for miniature reproduction. They did so by carving the inscriptions preserved in the paper fragments onto its flat underside. This was not a simple act of tracing, in which semi-translucent paper was placed over a model so that the characters could be outlined directly. Carving reduced-scale inscriptions onto inkstones, however, required a different method. The surviving characters had to be copied freehand, reduced in scale, and fitted into an extremely small space. Freehand copying depended on long practice rather than direct transfer: the calligrapher learned from models but gradually internalized their forms and movements through repeated acts of looking, writing, and correction. To do this well, they had to restrain, or even suppress, their own writing habits, training their hand to follow the logic of another hand. Although freehand copying was a basic exercise for every calligraphy learner, few attained the mastery needed to reproduce characters faithfully, especially at miniature scale. This is what I call the \u201creproductive hand\u201d: a rigorously trained hand, almost machine-like in its discipline, yet rooted in bodily memory and capable of reproducing ancient inscriptions with flexibility and precision, even when the model was fragmentary, damaged, or even no longer immediately present.<\/p>\n
Although the inkstones bearing miniature inscriptions of the Xiping Stone Classics are no longer extant, rubbings taken from them have survived and are now preserved in museums across East Asia. Often bound as pocket-sized albums, they circulated widely and were prized as collectible artwork in their own right.<\/p>\n
These rubbings did more than circulate as collectible albums. They also served as templates for remaking the Xiping Stone Classics at local Confucian temples across the empire. One famous example was a now-lost set of steles once installed in the Confucian Temple near the prefectural school in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province in southeastern China. The project was sponsored by the Director of Education in Jiangxi, who had received a set of inkstone rubbings of the Xiping Stone Classics from his secretary. Using them as models, he commissioned a local stone carver to engrave the fragments at a much larger scale onto stone tablets.<\/p>\n
The monument consisted of four stone slabs. Yet despite its enlarged scale, it did not present the Xiping Stone Classics as a continuous text. Instead, it displayed only twelve surviving inscription fragments, arranged from right to left in sequential order. The makers also made use of the stones\u2019 rough, unpolished surfaces: their irregular marks and blemishes suggested abrasion, breakage, and loss both within and between the fragments.<\/p>\n
By modern standards, this set of steles can hardly be called a full reconstruction of the Xiping Stone Classics. It was, rather, a monument to fragments. The makers were clearly aware that the Confucian classics engraved in the Xiping era, in the second century CE, differed from the versions transmitted in their own time. Their decision to engrave only the surviving fragments, rather than fill the gaps with later textual versions, therefore reflects a cautious scholarly attitude. The monument did not pretend to restore the lost classics as a complete and seamless whole. Instead, it made loss visible, presenting the Stone Classics as something that could only be approached through fragments, traces, and later acts of mediation.<\/p>\n
Why did the remaking of the Xiping Stone Classics attract such wide attention in nineteenth-century China? One common answer lies in Qing antiquarianism: the intense interest in the material traces of the past. But my current research suggests that something more was also at stake.<\/p>\n
My research suggests that the local remaking of the Xiping Stone Classics took place in the shadow of a major imperial project. In the late eighteenth century, the Manchu-led Qing government had established a new official set of Confucian Stone Classics in Beijing. Since the Manchus were a ruling people from Northeast Asia governing a largely Han Chinese population, this project helped present the dynasty as both China\u2019s legitimate ruler and the authoritative guardian of Confucian tradition. Against this background, the renewed interest in the much older Xiping Stone Classics may have carried a different significance. Unlike the court project, these local efforts were largely driven by Han Chinese provincial officials and their secretarial teams. As the earliest state-sponsored stone edition of the Confucian classics, the Xiping monument pointed to a more ancient origin of Confucian orthodoxy, one associated with Han classical culture. My ongoing research shows that the two projects also produced very different visual images of the canon: the Qing Official Stone Classics presented it as complete, standardized, and centrally authorized, while the remade Xiping Stone Classics presented it through fragments, breaks, and visible loss. This contrast suggests that the local monuments may have quietly challenged the idea that the origin of Confucian orthodoxy could be fully standardized and controlled from the imperial center.<\/p>\n
In the next stage of this research, I hope to trace this story further across different sites and objects. I am continuing to collect evidence for where recreated versions of the Xiping Stone Classics were installed, what traces of them still survive, and how the inkstone rubbings that served as their models circulated. I am also asking whether the Xiping Stone Classics was an exceptional case, or part of a wider practice of remaking ancient stone inscriptions in nineteenth-century China. Which monuments were chosen for such remaking, and why? By following these questions, I hope to better understand how fragments of the ancient past were reproduced, circulated, and made meaningful again before the age of mechanical reproduction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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