Chinese tourists have been known to deface cultural artifacts at home and abroad but, if this news story is to be believed, this is a problem that existed long ago. And back then, the problem wasn’t with Chinese, but with foreigners.

A stone tablet has been discovered in the Ming tombs in Nanjing that stands about 1.5 meters high and 60 cm thick. This find at the World Heritage site was discovered by a tourist, Mr Xu, and is significant because it contains very little Chinese. Instead it contains foreign languages that come from six other non-Chinese countries. It appears that this tablet served as a warning to foreigners not to write graffiti in the tombs.

Wang Wei, Management Office for Religious Studies for Zhongshanling Park in Nanjing, says that since the last year of the Qing Dynasty there was an influx of foreigners who would visit famous Chinese cultural and scenic sites. Some of these foreigners liked to deface, and graffiti upon, buildings and stone inscriptions on the site. This problem vexed the local government at the time. As iFeng reports, it is not hard to see that the foreigners and their proclivity for graffiti at that time were too much for the ruling officials to bear.

So the governor at the time, who ruled over Jiangsu, Anhui and Jiangxi, commissioned this tablet in 1909 to clearly warn foreign tourists with their “unenlightened essences” to refrain from vandalizing, and also called for the pathway to these stone tablets to be lined with wooden railings in order to separate the culture of the stone tablets from the “uncultured” foreigners that would harm them.

It didn’t appear to work, however: what appears to be Russian and written back in the Qing Dynasty era, can be seen on a sacred ethics tablet at the Ming Tombs.

Source: iFeng

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Keywords: ming tomb tablet