The Xi’an Stele

The stone’s own heading calls it a memorial of the spread in China of the Jingjiao of Da Qin. The Chinese text was composed by a monk who signs as Jingjing. Lines in Syriac at the foot and along the edges name the clergy who set it up, date it to the year 1092 of the Greeks (780/781) and to the time of the patriarch of the Church of the East, and give the donor’s father as a priest from Balkh. The stone is now in the Beilin Museum in Xi’an. Older Western books, and the translation linked here, call it the “Nestorian” monument or tablet; the stone itself does not use that name.

It is a monument made by the community to honour its benefactors and the emperors who favoured it, 146 years after the arrival it describes. For that arrival and for the reigns that followed it gives a connected narrative, and it tells the story as a run of imperial favours. Its quotation of the edict of 638 can be checked against the Chinese official record in the Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), which preserves the same edict in slightly different words.