Jiaoshan: a crane inscription, a river and the art of survival
The broken Yihe Ming reveals how calligraphy survives through stone, paper, repeated visits and difficult acts of conservation.
Jiaoshan Stele Forest
Broken stone, powerful writing and river erosion give this calligraphy landscape an unusually physical sense of history.
The focal work is the Yihe Ming, an inscription associated with the burial of a crane, originally carved on Jiaoshan's western cliffs. Its surviving fragments sit within a much larger tradition of inscriptions, visits and copying. The protected stones and the cliff landscape together tell a story of cultural memory exposed to weather and water.
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Photo credits and rights
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The entrance to the Stele Forest at Jiaoshan, with a hilltop pagoda beyond.Cangminzho · CC BY-SA 4.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗ Resized and converted to WebP.