Ch'ing-Tsing: Nestorian Tablet: Eulogizing the Propagation of the Illustrious Religion in China,with a Preface, composed by a priest of the Syriac Church, 781 A.D.This remarkable record of the fact that Christianity flourished in medieval China is a huge stone about 10 feethigh. Carven dragons and a cross adorn its summit and its main shaft is completely covered with some 2000Chinese characters. It stands now in the Peilin or "Forest of Tablets" in Sian-fu, this Peilin being a great hallspecially devoted to the preservation of old historic tablets. Up to a few years ago the ancient stone stood withother 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.The Nestorian sect of Christians still exists in Western Asia and was in a thriving condition in Syria in the sixthcentury. It sent missionaries widely over Asia. Marco Polo recorded having found Christian churches in China;and Roman Catholic missionaries of later centuries found there a few Nestorians still practising a debasedformof their half-forgotten faith. This much concerning the Nestorian Christianity in China we have longknown. Then, with the modern opening of the empire, the old Nestorian stone was found. It tells its ownhistory, and tells it plainly, how the Nestorian monks came, how Chinese officials were appointed to listen totheir explanations, and gravely approved of the new religion as having "excellent principles." Various emperorsaccepted, or at least included, Christianity among their religions; and the faith prospered, and had manythousands of followers, and in 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, provedunable to resist the inroads of ignorance...