Xi'an Stele Forest is in Sanxue Street in the southern part of Xi'an City, Shanxi Province. It used to be where the Wen Temple was, but now it has become Shanxi Provincial Museum. Its name comes from its huge collection of steles, reminiscent of a forest. The stele forest is housed in Xi'an's 11th century Confucius Temple, which is one of the most renowned Confucian Temples in China.
The present stele forest has a collection of more than 2,300 steles from the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD) to the Qing Dynasty. There are seven big exhibition rooms, seven verandas and one stele pavilion, displaying more than 1,000 stele works. There is the large-scale stone book repository containing important ancient literature of China, the Stone Classics of Kaicheng.
The stele stones stored in the Stele Forest constitute an important part of the treasure house of cultural relics of China, and serve as important material data for the research on Chinese history, chirography and pictorial art.
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