The Luoyang Museum of Stone Carving Art, located at the Guanlin Temple of Luoyang and opened to the public in 1981, is a museum of special subjects. The museum is specialized in the collection of carved stone relics unearthed from Luoyang through the ages. It has collected around 1,000 articles of artifacts, of which 25 belong to Class One and 332 belong to Class Two collection. The museum has two basic exhibitions to show 513 items of carved stone.
The artifacts shown in the Exhibition Room of Artistic Stone Sculptures are the unearthed mausoleum carved stones from the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220) to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), 96 items of exquisite palace stone stones and religious carved stones and 43 items of auxiliary exhibits. The rare carved stones include a pair of tianlu and bixie (both are mythical animals for exorcising evil spirits) unearthed in 1955 with the height of 109 cm and length of 166 cm, a stone lion unearthed in 1970 from the former site of the imperial palace of the Sui Dynasty (581-618) with the height of 96 cm and the pattern of spiral-shaped hairs carved at the neck and chest, theWengzhong(stone statue placed in front of a tomb) in front of the imperial mausoleum of the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534), theChanchu(the fabled three-legged toad in the moon) at the eavesdrop for discharging rainwater unearthed from the former site of the imperial palace of the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and the giant stone sage from the Song Dynasty (860-1279).
On display in the Exhibition Room of Epitaphs are 441 epitaphs from the Eastern Han Dynasty to the Ming and Qing dynasties. The epitaphs can be used to check the history against the inscriptions on the epitaphs for supplementing the missing part of the history, making corrections and proving the truth. The largest tomb tablet, 100 cm long and 100 cm wide, is from the Northern Wei Dynasty.
The museum has held a small-sized exhibition of carved stones and an exhibition of the selected rubbings of the calligraphy from the Luoyang epigraphs.
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