Emperor Ling Approves the Xiping Stone Classics

In 175 CE, the scholar and court official Cai Yong petitioned Emperor Ling of the Han dynasty to have the Confucian classics carved permanently into stone, warning that rival factions were altering the texts to support their own interpretations, two hundred and sixty one years after Emperor Wu made Confucianism the Han state's official orthodoxy in 136 BCE, already recorded here. Emperor Ling approved the petition, and Cai Yong, joined by a group of fellow scholars, spent the next eight years collating and inscribing seven classics, among them the Book of Changes, the Book of Documents and the Analects of Confucius, onto forty six stone stelae set up before the Lecture Hall of the Imperial Academy outside Luoyang's Kaiyang Gate. Known afterward as the Xiping Stone Classics for the reign era in which the work began, the inscriptions fixed a single authoritative text for students to copy and check their own manuscripts against, correcting centuries of accumulated scribal error, and fragments of the original stelae, along with later rubbings taken from them, survive today in museum and library collections. The project set the pattern later dynasties followed when they cut their own stone canons, more than four centuries before Tang Emperor Taizong ordered a Confucian temple built in every prefecture in 630, already recorded here.