Stele of the Modesty Hexagram

Stele of the Modesty Hexagram

The Stele of the Modesty Hexagram is a cultural relic protected at the provincial level in Anhui Province.

The Stele of the Modesty Hexagram is located within the campus of No. 12 Middle School in Jinghu District. Dating back to the Ming Dynasty, it was designated as a Provincial-Level Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit in 1981. The inscriptions on the stele are in the form of iron-wire seal script by Li Yangbing, a calligrapher from the Tang Dynasty. There are four steles in total, each standing 1.95 meters high, 0.91 meters wide, and 0.17 meters thick. They are made of bluestone. The steles are named after their inscriptions, which are transcriptions of the "Modesty Hexagram" section from the Book of Changes (Yijing). In the fourth year of the Jiajing era during the Ming Dynasty (1525), Zhang Dayong, the customs superintendent of Wuhu, commissioned the carving of the steles based on a rubbing of Li Yangbing’s transcription of the Modesty Hexagram that was in private hands. The steles were erected within the Confucian school, and the end of the steles bears a four-line postscript by Zhang Dayong in divided script. The steles are generally well-preserved.