A Stone Buried and Unearthed Again: The Xi’an Nestorian Stele, Christianity in China 800 Years Before the Jesuits

Around 1625, workers digging near Chongren Temple, west of Xi’an (the old Chang’an), uncovered a large stele. A cross was carved on its head, and strange Syriac letters were mixed in among the Chinese characters on its body. This stone is the Stele of the Propagation of the Luminous Religion of Daqin in China (大秦景教流行中國碑), better known as the Nestorian Stele. Erected in 781, it records in its own words the story of a Christian community that had carried on in Tang China for about 150 years since a monk named Alopen arrived in Chang’an in 635. But the event of 635, the record of 781 and the rediscovery around 1625 belong to different times. Reading the three separately shows both what the stele testifies to and where it stops telling us anything.

Watch the 10-minute explainer

Watch on YouTube

Start by reading the stone’s name

According to the Xi’an Beilin Museum, the stele was erected in 781, the second year of the Jianzhong era under Emperor Dezong of Tang, at the Daqin Temple (大秦寺) in Chang’an. Its body is 193 cm tall and 96 cm wide and carries 1,780 Chinese characters in 32 lines of regular script. The text was composed by Jingjing (景淨), a monk from Persia, and the calligraphy was written by Lü Xiuyan (呂秀巖).

Each word of the stele’s name has a meaning. The museum explains “Daqin” as the old Chinese name for the Eastern Roman Empire and “Jingjiao” as the Chinese name of the Church of the East, a branch of Christianity. The English translation of the inscription renders Jingjiao as “the Luminous Religion.” The full name therefore means “a stele commemorating the spread in China of the Luminous Religion that came from Daqin.” Still, the word “Daqin” does not tell us Alopen’s birthplace or the exact route he took to Chang’an.

The stone’s life in six dates

Date	What happened?	What to keep in mind
635	Alopen arrives in Chang’an	This is not an on-the-spot record from that year but a retrospective account in the 781 inscription.
638	An edict orders the first Daqin Temple built in the Yining ward of Chang’an	This, too, is what the inscription reports.
781	The stele is erected in Jianzhong year 2	The date the inscription itself was made, 146 years after 635.
845	Religious persecution of the Huichang era; clergy of foreign religions ordered back to lay life	Many accounts say the stele was buried at this time, but no record gives a date of burial.
1623 or 1625	Rediscovery in the late Ming period	Both years appear across scholarly sources.
1907	Moved to the Stele Forest (today’s Beilin Museum)	It was moved in the course of stopping an attempt to take it abroad.

The first encounter, as the inscription tells it

The inscription contains the phrase 「貞觀九祀至於長安」, “in the ninth year of Zhenguan he reached Chang’an.” The ninth year of Zhenguan is 635. The inscription goes on to say that Emperor Taizong of Tang sent his minister Fang Xuanling to the western outskirts to welcome Alopen’s party and had the scriptures translated in the palace library. Three years later, in the twelfth year of Zhenguan (638), an edict ordered a Daqin Temple built in the Yining ward (義寧坊) of Chang’an, with twenty-one monks.

The narrative continues from there. Emperor Gaozong had Luminous temples founded in the prefectures, and the inscription describes that age as 「法流十道 … 寺滿百城」: “the teaching flowed through the ten circuits … temples filled a hundred cities.” It also records that early in the Tianbao era, under Emperor Xuanzong, the general Gao Lishi sent portraits of five emperors to the temple. This sequence can be checked in the parallel Chinese text and English translation compiled by L. Eccles and S. N. C. Lieu.

Here the words we put in front of a sentence matter. Writing only “this happened in 635” erases the 146 years between the record and the event. Reading it as “the inscription of 781 reports the arrival of 635 this way” makes the nature of the source visible. “Temples filled a hundred cities,” too, is better read as an expression honouring the community’s growth than as a statistic from an actual count. That does not mean a later record is worthless. It is valuable evidence of how a community remembered its own beginnings and explained them in public.

Putting an unfamiliar faith into classical Chinese

The opening part of the inscription explains Christian teaching in sentences a Tang reader could follow. The Trinity of God is written as “Three-One” (三一), and the Messiah, by sound, as “Mishihe” (彌施訶). The birth of Jesus is told as 「室女誕聖於大秦 景宿告祥 波斯睹耀以來貢」: “a virgin gave birth to the Holy One in Daqin; a luminous star announced the good omen, and Persians saw its brightness and came bearing tribute.” The passage recalls the Gospel story of the Magi. There is also the line “he left behind twenty-seven books” (經留廿七部), but the inscription alone does not tell us which books those twenty-seven were.

What stands out is the choice of words. This community called its clergy “seng” (僧) and its churches “si” (寺), borrowing terms long familiar from Buddhism to introduce itself. In the side rubbing below, too, “seng” is placed before names, as in “Seng Jingfu” (僧景福).

People carved in two scripts

On the front of the stele and along its two narrow sides, the names of clergy are carved in both Syriac and Chinese: one bishop, two chorbishops, two archdeacons and some seventy monks and priests. In some cases the Syriac and Chinese names sound alike, but in many they bear no resemblance at all.

Jingjing, who composed the text, had the Syriac name Adam. A Syriac note introduces him as “priest, chorbishop and papash of Sinistan (China).” Papash, literally “pope,” is an unusual title, and scholars generally take Adam to have been the metropolitan who led the church’s province in China. There is a curious detail as well. The Syriac dating formula names Hnanishoʿ II as patriarch of the Church of the East, yet he had died some months before the stele was erected, and Timothy I had already become the new patriarch in Baghdad in May 780. The news, it seems, had not yet reached Chang’an. The distance between Baghdad and Chang’an survives in a single name on the stone.

What the stele can confirm	What one stele can hardly settle
A community that recorded its own history in Chinese and Syriac in 781	The exact number of Christians across Tang China
An account of the arrival in 635 and the edict of 638	Independent proof of every detail in that account
Language stressing imperial patronage and the value of the faith	A conclusion that all of society judged it the same way
A church organization linked to the patriarch in Baghdad	When and why it was buried, and the full continuity of the faith afterwards

Cross and lotus: the line between observation and interpretation

Above the title on the stele’s head, a cross is carved, supported below by cloud patterns and a lotus. This much anyone can observe on the stone.

The question is what it means. The University of Washington’s Silk Road exhibition, presenting a rubbing of the head held by the Seattle Art Museum, adds one scholar’s interpretation: the clouds stand for Daoism, the lotus for Buddhism, and the cross above them for the supremacy of the Luminous Religion. Yet the old description on Wikimedia Commons that accompanies this line drawing reads the same clouds, without citing a source, as a symbol of Islam. The two explanations carry very different weight of evidence, but together they show how differently the same pattern can be read depending on who is looking. The fact that a motif is there and an interpretation explaining its intent are not evidence of the same order. We can imagine how it looked to people in Tang China familiar with Buddhism and Daoism, but this composition alone cannot prove that doctrines were blended or that one religion was shown overpowering the others.

When and why was the stone buried?

Some sixty years after the stele was erected, Emperor Wuzong of Tang launched a sweeping persecution of Buddhism. The annals of Wuzong in the Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang) preserve, in an edict of the eighth month of Huichang 5 (845), the phrase 「勒大秦、穆護、祆三千餘人還俗」: “more than three thousand clergy of Daqin (the Luminous Religion), Muhu and Xian (Zoroastrianism) are ordered to return to lay life.” Not only Buddhism but the clergy of foreign religions such as the Church of the East and Zoroastrianism were hit as well. The Beilin Museum explains that the Luminous temples were torn down in this persecution and that the stele, too, disappeared from view.

The explanation that the stele was buried at this time is also widespread. But an inscription from 781 cannot record its own later burial. The idea that it was buried around 845 is a plausible inference, yet no record says who buried it, when or why. So the phrase “about 780 years underground” should be read as a rough span measured from an assumed year of burial to the year of rediscovery.

The stone reappears, and its letters travel to Europe

The Beilin Museum says the stele came to light in early spring of Tianqi 5 (1625) of the Ming dynasty near Chongren Temple (also called Jinsheng Temple) west of the city of Xi’an, a spot it identifies as the old site of the Tang Daqin Temple. However, the study of the inscription compiled by Antonino Forte from Paul Pelliot’s posthumous papers gives the year of discovery as 1623 or 1625, and there is also a view that the stele first stood not in Chang’an but in nearby Zhouzhi County. The exact circumstances of the discovery are still being studied.

The stele soon caught the eye of Jesuit missionaries. According to an exhibition catalogue of rare books at the University of Hong Kong Libraries, the Portuguese Jesuit Álvaro Semedo was the first European to see it in person after it was unearthed. Translations of the inscription spread quickly into several European languages, and in 1667 Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata printed the original Chinese and Syriac text on a large fold-out sheet, with a Latin translation and a romanized reading. Kircher never went to China; he compiled the book from materials sent by other missionaries.

1907: how the stele ended up in a museum

For more than 200 years after its discovery, the stele remained at Chongren Temple. In 1859 the official Han Taihua (韓泰華) visited, rejoiced that the characters were intact, rebuilt the pavilion over the stele and carved a record of his visit on its left side. A side rubbing held by the Royal Asiatic Society shows this 1859 text along with the monks’ names. A single rubbing thus holds writing from both 781 and 1859.

In May 1907 the Dane Frits Holm came to Xi’an and tried to bribe the temple’s monks with 3,000 taels of silver so that he could take the stele abroad and set up a replica carved from the same kind of stone in its place. According to the Beilin Museum, the replica was finished in September, and the plan leaked while its transport was being discussed; the local authorities stopped it, and Holm could take only the replica. The original stele, together with its tortoise base, was moved to the Stele Forest between 2 and 6 October that year.

Holm’s replica went to New York and was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for about ten years as a loan. In 1917 a New York woman bought it and presented it to the Pope in Rome. Other copies exist in several places, including Mount Kōya in Japan and the Musée Guimet in Paris. The original stone is still in the Beilin Museum in Xi’an.

What does the “800 years” in the title compare?

The comparison in the title is between the erection of the stele in 781 and the settlement of the Jesuits Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci at Zhaoqing in Guangdong in 1583. According to Joseph Sebes’s study published by Macao’s Cultural Affairs Bureau, the two succeeded in settling at Zhaoqing on 10 September 1583. The gap between the two years is 802, so “about 800 years” is fair. Measured from Alopen’s arrival, it is 1583−635=948 years. Neither number has anything to do with how long the stele was underground.

Nor does 1583 mark the first arrival of Western missionaries in China. The Franciscan John of Montecorvino had already reached Khanbaliq (today’s Beijing), the Yuan capital, in 1294. So the title’s comparison is accurate only when read narrowly, as the time gap with the Jesuit mission of the late Ming, not with “Western missionaries” as a whole.

The strength of the Nestorian Stele is not that it fills every gap. It lies in how its names in Chinese and Syriac, its date of 781, its sentences looking back on 635 and a patriarch’s name suggesting that news from Baghdad arrived late all fit together. Read with event and record, original and copy, observation and interpretation kept apart, this stone becomes more than “an amazing old story”: it teaches how historical evidence should be handled.

References

The inscription was checked against published transcriptions and translations. The list below contains only the materials actually used in this article; where only a publisher’s description of a scholarly book was read, the whole book is not counted as consulted.

• Stele of the Propagation of the Luminous Religion of Daqin in China – Xi’an Beilin Museum (in Chinese)
• L. Eccles and S. N. C. Lieu, The Xi’an (Nestorian) Monument: Chinese text and English translation in parallel (PDF)
• Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), chapter 18A, Annals of Emperor Wuzong – Wikisource (in Chinese)
• Paul Pelliot and Antonino Forte, L’inscription nestorienne de Si-ngan-fou – ISEAS Kyoto
• Rubbing of the top panel of the Nestorian Tablet – University of Washington Silk Road exhibition
• SC79 Rubbings from the side of the Nestorian Stele – Royal Asiatic Society archives
• University of Hong Kong Libraries, Western rare books exhibition catalogue (PDF), entries on Semedo and Kircher
• Joseph Sebes, The Precursors of Ricci – Review of Culture, Cultural Affairs Bureau of Macao
• Nestorian Stele – English Wikipedia
• John of Montecorvino – English Wikipedia

Watch the 1-minute Short

Watch the Short on YouTube