County School Stele

County School Stele

The County School Stele is a cultural relic protection unit of Anhui Province.

The County School Stele is located within the campus of the No. 12 Middle School in Jinghu District, Wuhu City.

The stele stands 2.62 meters tall, 1.24 meters wide, and 0.24 meters thick, and is made of bluestone. In the first year of the Chongning era (1102) during the Northern Song Dynasty, Mi Fu (1051–1107), then serving as the military governor of Wuwei, witnessed the expansion of the Wuhu Confucian school under imperial decree. This initiative pioneered state- and county-level educational institutions (local school establishment). To commemorate this significant event, the county magistrate Lin Xiu specially invited Huang Shang, Minister of Rites, to compose the text, and Mi Fu to inscribe “The Record of the New School in Wuhu County,” which was then carved onto the stele and erected within the school grounds. The stele features a seal script title and running script text, demonstrating vigorous brushwork and exquisite carving—truly a masterpiece of Mi Fu’s calligraphic art in his later years. Due to the passage of time, some characters have become faint, but the stele remains largely well-preserved.

The Qian (Humility) Hexagram Stele, located within the campus of the No. 12 Middle School in Jinghu District, dates back to the Ming Dynasty and was designated a provincial-level key cultural relic protection unit in 1981. The stele text is written in iron-wire seal script by Li Yangbing, a calligrapher of the Tang Dynasty. There are four steles in total, each standing 1.95 meters tall, 0.91 meters wide, and 0.17 meters thick, all made of bluestone. The steles are named after the content, which is a copy of the “Qian Hexagram” section from the “Book of Changes” (Yijing). In the fourth year of the Jiajing era (1525) during the Ming Dynasty, Zhang Dayong, the customs supervisor of Wuhu, commissioned the carving of these steles based on a privately held rubbing of Li Yangbing’s calligraphy. They were erected within the Confucian school, with four lines of postscript written and signed by Zhang Dayong at the end of the steles. The steles are largely well-preserved.