Forest of Stone Steles Museum (Beilin Museum)

The Forest of Stone Steles Museum functions as Beilin District's dedicated epigraphy and calligraphy museum, occupying the former Confucian Temple of Xi'an and built up over nine centuries around its founding collection, the 114-tablet Kaicheng Stone Classics carved in 837 CE. As a museum rather than a single monument, its holdings are organized into seven numbered exhibition halls plus a stone-sculpture corridor, together holding more than 3,000 catalogued steles, epitaphs, and carved panels -- the largest such collection under one roof in China. Curatorially, the museum groups its steles thematically: the Confucian Classics occupy dedicated halls near the entrance, calligraphic masterworks by canonical figures such as Wang Xizhi and Yan Zhenqing fill a separate wing organized loosely by script style, and later halls hold funerary epitaphs and religious inscriptions spanning the Han through Qing dynasties. The sculpture corridor, added as the collection grew, displays freestanding stone figures and architectural elements, including guardian lions and a Tang-dynasty relief panel of court musicians, separating three-dimensional sculpture from the flat-carved steles. Because many steles were carved specifically to be reproduced by ink rubbing, the museum maintains a working rubbing workshop, both as a conservation record of the texts and as a saleable craft product for visitors. The museum occupies converted temple halls and courtyards rather than a purpose-built gallery building, so exhibition spaces vary in scale and light from room to room, and later Ming and Qing additions to the original Song-era temple now house the newer sculpture and rubbing exhibits.