SESSION: Re-contextualising Steles: Media, Memory, and Materiality
This session focuses on the stele—inscribed stone—as a transhistorical and transcultural medium, examining how it has been interpreted, mobilised, and embodied within diverse cultural and political contexts. We foreground its dual identity as both textual artefact and material object, attending to its mobility and recontextualisation in global circulation. Such as the relocation and replication of ecclesiastical stelae during colonial expansion; the circulation, re-inscription, and re-carving of stelae in East Asia; the epistemological and curatorial challenges posed by stelae displayed in contemporary museums as ‘objects’ rather than ‘texts’; and the diminished material resistance of digitalised rubbings, which become part of immaterial data flows, etc.
We invite contributions that explore the stele’s entanglement with political, religious, and technological practices and interrogate how textual legibility interacts with material opacity. We are interested in how inscription enables the stele’s mobility, and how this mobility produces temporal and cultural disjunctions between the site of origin and the site of reception. How do different cultural regimes reshape and reimagine the stele?
We also welcome critical approaches that ask: what changes when we move from reading the stone to sensing it? What forms of agency, resistance, or refusal reside in its weight, texture, geological origin, or emplacement? Can posthumanist and new materialist frameworks allow us to rethink the stele not as a passive vessel of meaning, but as an active participant in human and more-than-human networks? We expect to provoke thinking about the material intelligence of stone.
Session Convenor:
Jing Wang, University of Edinburgh
Tianyu Shi, University of Hamburg
Ziyi Li, China Academy of Art
Speakers:
Ziyi Li, China Academy of Art
Eternal Footprints: A Compendium of Qing-Dynasty Travel Inscriptions at West Lake
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, West Lake’s landscapes evolved into a socially inclusive leisure realm. Countless travel inscriptions—emulating literati cultural paradigms—penetrated historical spaces shaped by monastic, Daoist and scholarly traditions, implicitly articulating popular aspirations for material “presence” and “endurance”. While travel inscription practices dated back to antiquity, the authority to interpret and name landscapes remained the preserve of literate elites. Yet the proliferation of anonymous inscriptions around the Qing-dynasty West Lake blurred elite-commoner distinctions in landscape engagement, spawning new cultural formations through such mundane interactions.
Moving beyond the rigid elite-popular binary, this study examines individuals navigating fluid social boundaries and their material traces, unearthing latent values embedded in non-elite society. It draws on recent scholarship framing stelae as dynamic media: not static textual artefacts, but active material agents. The interplay between textual legibility and material resilience unfolds across the processes of carving, preservation and reinterpretation. The mobility and recontextualization of these inscriptions—via relocation, rubbing, transcription or scholarly citation—reveal the dislocation and reconfiguration of cultural memory across time and space.
By probing how these inscriptions circulated, were appropriated, and reimagined across social groups, this paper explores how stelae’s materiality—their form, placement, and geological substance—enabled alternative meaning-making practices within popular travel networks, beyond elite, authoritative frameworks. Ultimately, through the microhistorical lens of West Lake inscriptions, this study illuminates shifts in Qing non-elite epigraphic practices, offering a localized case study that advances material culture studies by foregrounding stelae’s participatory agency in human-more-than-human assemblages.
Tianyu Shi, University of Hamburg
Rendering Stone Legible: Rubbing, Reproduction, and the Visual Authority of the Cuan Stelaes
This paper reconsiders the Cuan Longyan Stele 爨龍顏碑 and the Cuan Baozi Stele 爨寶子碑 as objects of visual and material mediation, asking how stone inscriptions were transformed into art-historical artefacts through practices of rubbing, circulation, and canon formation from the mid-Qing period onward. Rather than approaching these stelae primarily as textual documents, I foreground their shifting status as visual surfaces whose aesthetic legibility was actively produced—and unevenly stabilised—through modern regimes of display and reproduction.
The Cuan Longyan Stele entered the art-historical canon through the intervention of metropolitan epigraphers such as Ruan Yuan, who reframed its weathered stone surface as exemplary evidence for a northern stele aesthetic. Through the wide circulation of carefully curated rubbings, the stele was detached from its original site and reconstituted as a portable visual model, increasingly apprehended through images rather than through direct encounter with stone. By contrast, the Cuan Baozi Stele, promoted by local literati in nineteenth-century Yunnan, resisted such stabilisation. Variations in rubbing techniques, uneven surface preservation, and unresolved questions of authenticity prevented the emergence of a single authoritative visual form, keeping the stele anchored to its local material presence.
By juxtaposing these two trajectories, this paper examines how stone mediates between visibility and opacity in art-historical knowledge. This paper argues that the aesthetic authority of a stele depends not only on inscription and style, but also on how its material surface is rendered reproducible—or left recalcitrant. Attending to stone as a medium that both enables and limits visual abstraction, this study contributes to broader discussions of materiality, mediation, and the agency of objects within art history.
Binbin LI, Sorbonne Université
Imperial Inscriptions as Political Tools: Qin Dynasty Steles and the Materiality of Power
This paper examines the stone steles erected by Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China (221–210 BCE), as complex media that fused textual propaganda with material presence to consolidate imperial authority. Following the unification of China, the emperor undertook inspection tours and commissioned inscribed steles on sacred mountains such as Mount Tai and Langya. These monuments, carved in standardised small seal script (xiaozhuan), served not merely as written records of his rule but as enduring physical assertions of imperial order. The analysis focuses on the steles’ dual identity. Textually, their inscriptions promoted Legalist ideology and celebrated the emperor’s unmatched virtue. Materially, their monumental scale and sacred emplacement transformed them into lasting embodiments of power, linking the new political structure to cosmic and ancestral forces.
The paper also traces the later circulation of these steles: their transcription by Han historians such as Sima Qian and their reappearance as aesthetic artefacts in Song-dynasty rubbings. This historical trajectory reveals how the legibility of text interacted with the permanence of stone to project authority across time and space. By re-examining the Qin steles as both text and matter, the study highlights how inscription itself produced the imperial imagination and its enduring afterlife.
Rakesh Kumar Das, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. (Doctoral student)
From Text to Stone: Eternal Curses and the Politics of Custodianship of Land Grant through Gaḍhagal Stele
This research focuses on—Gaḍhagal (ass-curse steles), which is a stone stele often depicted with the inscription along with bestiality images where a donkey is seen in sexual intercourse with a woman. The major focus of this paper is to understand the intertwined aspect of land grant, and its politics of custodianship through the imprecated text and visual narrative. The epic Hindu texts, such as the Śāntiparva of the Mahābhārat, Dharmaśāstra, and Manusmṛti, elaborate on the imprecatory verses and the consequences awaiting violators. Early medieval epigraphic sources from Odisha, India, especially those of the 9th CE, feature extensively engraved imprecation verses in copper plate inscriptions. Those verses are as follows: “He who acts otherwise [than prescribed], his lineage is cut off, and his kingdom is destroyed. He who takes away Land, whether given by himself or by another, here, becomes a worm in his own faeces and is cooked together with his ancestors— as it has been said by the blessed one Vedavyāsa Vyāsa (sage)”. Meanwhile, the Gaḍhagal ass-curse steles are not an unusually erotic pillar but also marked the sun and moon on the upper portion of the pillar as an integral part. This paper argues that stone steles may be a complex instrument that stands to ensure the everlasting (depicting the sun and moon) and inviolability of land grants. By considering the above stone steles and copper plate inscriptions, addresses the question of ass-curse steles, which embed religious, moral, and social sanctions within the framework of political authority.
Jing Wang, University of Edinburgh
Epigraphic Scholarship and the Formation of Frontier Historical Geography in the Qing Dynasty
This paper uses the Qing-dynasty rediscovery and reinterpretation of the Eastern Han Meritorious Stele of Pei Cen (25–220 CE) as a case study to examine the relationship between epigraphic studies and the Qing imperial project of cultural unification during the Qianlong–Jiaqing period.
Originally a frontier inscription commemorating military achievements in the northwest borderlands, the Pei Cen Stele was first “rediscovered” by Qing military commanders during eighteenth-century campaigns in the Western Regions. It subsequently circulated among epigraphers, who endowed it with the aesthetic of vigorous antiquity (jinggu) and a supplementary historiographical function. At the same time, the stele was incorporated into imperial knowledge systems, including the Si Ku Quan Shu (compiled 1773–1782) and the imperially commissioned Illustrated Gazetteer of the Western Regions (completed in the late eighteenth century), where it functioned as a cultural coordinate in the construction of imperial frontier imagination.
By analysing the dynamics of absence and presence between imperial aesthetic authority centred on the court and the epigraphic practices of scholar-officials, this article reveals a symbolic disjunction between literati and imperial power as mediated through the Pei Cen Stele. The stele thus serves as a lens through which to observe how eighteenth-century China negotiated ruler–subject relations through knowledge production and cultural practice.