[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Waggs! Here's an old thing from the hard drive, related:

Nestorian Tablet
by Paul Halsall
July1998

This remarkable record of the fact that Christianity flourished in medieval China is a huge stone about ten feet high. Carven dragons and a cross adorn its summit, and its main shaft is completely covered with some two thousand Chinese characters. It stands now in the Peilin or "Forest of Tablets" in Sian-fu, this Peilin being a great hall specially devoted to the preservation of old historic tablets. Up to a few years ago the ancient stone stood with other unvalued monuments in the grounds of a Buddhist monastery, exposed to all the assault of the elements. Only European urgence has led to its being preserved in the Peilin... [I]n the year A.D. 781 erected this stone in commemoration of its triumphs. Now, alas, only the stone remains. The record of the sect's decay has needed no stone to make it manifest. Nestorian Christianity, shut off from its mother land by the rise of the Mohammedan powers in between, proved unable to resist the inroads of ignorance and superstition and changing political affairs. It degenerated and disappeared.

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[SunkenCiv]

The City of Light: The Hidden Journal of the Man Who Entered China Four Years Before Marco Polo by Jacob D'Ancona tr by David Selbourne	Legends of the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng by Xin Xu tr by Beverly Friend illus by Ting Cheng reviewed