In the Stele Forest (碑林) Museum in Xi’an (西安), China, stands a single black limestone stele. Excluding its tortoise-shaped base, the body of this stone rises to about 2.79 m, and its formal name is the ‘Daqin Stele’ — in full, the ‘Memorial of the Propagation in China of the Luminous Religion of Daqin’ (大秦景敎流行中國碑). According to the sexagenary-cycle date carved in the inscription, the stele was erected in the second year of the Jianzhong era — that is, in 781. It is a stone that testifies that a Christian community already existed on this land roughly 800 years before Jesuit missionaries reached East Asia.
Two Scripts Carved Side by Side on Stone
What makes this stele remarkable is, first of all, physical. Chinese and Syriac are carved side by side on its face. Finding Syriac script in the heart of East Asia is solid evidence that a community which used those letters lived there. This faith was a branch of Christianity that spread eastward along the Silk Road from its base in Sasanian Persia, calling itself ‘Jingjiao’ (景敎) — the ‘Luminous Religion.’ Though it has often been called ‘Nestorianism’ today, its original name is the ‘Church of the East.’
According to the inscription, the story begins in 635, the ninth year of the Zhenguan reign of Emperor Taizong of Tang. A Syriac-speaking monk named Alopen (阿羅本) arrived in Chang’an with his companions, received Taizong’s hospitality, and is said to have had the scriptures he brought translated in the imperial library. In 638 an edict authorizing the religion was issued, and around the time a monastery was built in the Yining ward, 21 monks (generally presumed to have been Persians) were recognized. From the arrival (635) to the stele’s erection (781), the history the stele covers spans about 150 years. But because the inscription is itself a panegyric honoring imperial patronage, its passages describing hospitality and prosperity should be read not as neutral reporting but as facts the inscription chose to ‘record.’
The Strategy Behind the Name ‘Daqin’
At first this temple was called the ‘Persian Temple’ (波斯寺), but in 745, under Emperor Xuanzong, its name was changed to the ‘Daqin Temple’ (大秦寺). ‘Daqin’ (大秦) was originally a Han-era Chinese term for the Roman Empire. Scholars read the deliberate choice of ‘Daqin’ — evoking Rome — over ‘Bosi’ (波斯), meaning Persia, as a strategic move to secure legitimacy. It amounted to presenting the faith not as a strange creed from the frontier but as a teaching arising from a venerable civilization.
The same strategy shows in the wording of the inscription, which expounds Christian doctrine by borrowing the vocabulary of Buddhism and Daoism. Modern scholars do not see this as syncretism that blends faiths. Rather, they regard it as a sophisticated ‘cultural translation’ that rendered an unfamiliar doctrine in familiar language for the literate readers of Tang society. And so this stele is read less as a relic of Western Christian history than as a ‘Chinese religious document’ in which a minority religion negotiated its place by borrowing the language and concepts of the Tang empire.
The People Who Raised the Stone
The inscription was composed by a Church of the East cleric named Jingjing (景淨, Syriac name Adam), and the calligraphy was written by Lü Xiuyan. According to the inscription, Yisi, who led the stele’s erection, served as a military commander aiding the renowned Tang general Guo Ziyi during the An Lushan Rebellion, and received a court title for his merit. The career of this one man — soldier and church patron alike — hints at how deeply this community had taken root in Tang society. The stele is said to have been erected at the Daqin Temple in Chang’an, or in nearby Zhouzhi County.
About 780 Years Buried in the Earth
But prosperity did not last forever. In the ninth century, Emperor Wuzong of Tang carried out a sweeping religious suppression during the Huichang era (841–845) — the Huichang persecution (會昌廢佛). Driven by a financial motive to refill the empty treasury together with an intent to reject foreign faiths, the target did not stop at Buddhism but spread to foreign religions in general, such as Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Jingjiao. The stele is presumed to have been buried in the earth to escape persecution around this very time. The circumstances of its burial are not written on the stone; this is a strong inference based on the context of the Huichang persecution.
So this stone spent about 780 years underground, from its ninth-century burial to its rediscovery at the end of the Ming dynasty. The earlier figure — ‘about 800 years ahead of the Jesuits’ — counts from 781, when the stele was erected; this ‘about 780 years’ is a separate reckoning of how long the stele lay buried. It came to light again in the 1620s (generally recorded as 1623–1625), near Chongren Temple on the outskirts of Xi’an. Through those who recognized the inscription, a Chinese-text copy reached Li Zhizao, a Catholic in Hangzhou, and by way of Jesuit missionaries became known as far as Europe. A forgotten chapter of East Asian Christian history was revived in an instant by the unearthing of a single stone.
Rereading the Label of ‘Heresy’
One common misconception about Jingjiao must be addressed. What was condemned as heresy at the Council of Ephesus in 431 was a single individual, Nestorius. The equation that the entire Jingjiao community was therefore a ‘heretical sect’ is far from the facts.
The Church of the East had already declared its independence in 424, before this council, and was a separate tradition that did not accept that condemnation. Modern scholarship holds that this church’s Christology came not from Nestorius himself but from Theodore of Mopsuestia, and the Syriacist Sebastian Brock has called the very label ‘Nestorian’ a deplorable misnomer. Dividing theological orthodoxy from heresy is not the task of this article. But distinguishing recorded fact from a common equation is the task of anyone who reads historical sources. For reference, the forgery theory raised in seventeenth-century Europe was settled scholarly in the nineteenth century, and today there is no dispute over the stele’s authenticity.
Here is what to remember. The transmission of Christianity to East Asia did not begin with sixteenth-century Western missionaries, but reaches back at least to the Church of the East that crossed the Silk Road in 635. And that evidence had not vanished — it had merely lain buried for about 780 years. When a single stone rose again, the religious history of a continent was restored that far back.