Stele Record of the Zongsheng Guan, Louguantai大唐宗圣观记碑
- Type
- Steles and Inscriptions
- Location
- China · Shaanxi · Zhouzhi, Xi'an · Louguantai (the area of the Shuojingtai)
- Coordinates
- 34.0463, 108.2647 Map ↗
- School
- Louguan School
- First built
- 9th year of the Wude era, Tang (626) · Composed and written by Ouyang Xun, in clerical script; the surviving stone is a Yuan-dynasty recarving after the original was ground down, not the original Tang stone.
- Heritage status
- Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Heritage Site (1956, Louguantai)National Key Daoist Temple (1983)
Overview
The Stele Record of the Zongsheng Guan, Louguantai was erected in the ninth year of the Wude era of Tang (626), with the text composed and written in clerical script by Ouyang Xun — a rare instance of clerical-script calligraphy among Ouyang Xun's surviving works, its brushwork rounded yet touched with angularity, modeled on the Han-dynasty Xiping Stone Classics and close in style to the Stele of the Divine Lord of Baishi. The stele stands 365 centimeters tall and 112 centimeters wide, with twenty-three columns of sixty characters each; the text recounts the origins of Daoism and traces the establishment and development of the Louguan site from the reign of King Mu of Zhou through the Qin down to the Tang, making it a key text for studying the construction of the Louguan Daoist lineage's genealogy. It should be noted that the surviving stone is a Yuan-dynasty recarving made after the original was ground down, not the original Tang stone, and this should be stated whenever the stele is used as a source. The stele also has a curious modern footnote: the three characters "Asahi Shimbun" in the masthead of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun were assembled from characters taken from this stele. Louguantai was listed as a Shaanxi provincial cultural relic protection unit on August 6, 1956, and was designated by the State Council in 1983 as a National Key Daoist Temple; whether the stele itself has been separately listed as a national-level protected site is not clearly documented. See the entry "Louguantai" for the parent temple.
Highlights
- Text composed and written in clerical script by Ouyang Xun
- Traces the establishment and development of the Louguan site from the Zhou and Qin through the Tang
- The surviving stone is a Yuan-dynasty recarving
- Source of the characters assembled for the Asahi Shimbun masthead