The Stele Recording the Zhongshan Academy's Endowed Fields and Buildings

A new find of the fourth survey

According to a report by the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism on the fourth national survey of cultural relics, in December 2024 surveyors in Lishui District, under the guidance of the municipal survey office in Nanjing, surveyed and recorded the stele "Record of the endowed fields and buildings granted to the Zhongshan Academy". The report describes it as a Ming stele connected with the Jingnan Campaign, now standing in a pavilion in Zhuangyuan Fang Park in Lishui District.

The report is an interim report on the survey; survey conclusions rest with the formal publication of the cultural relics authorities, and this entry marks its statements as coming from the survey report.

According to the report, the stele is 320 centimetres long, 116 centimetres wide and 23 centimetres thick. Its text was composed by Li Mo, a Minister of Personnel in the Jiajing period, and the stele was put up by the Lishui magistrate Wang Congshan in 1554, the thirty-third year of Jiajing. After about 470 years the head of the stele is lost and only the shaft and base remain, but the text is clear and well preserved. It records the course of the Jingnan Campaign and the court's provision for the Qi family, buying twenty mu of land and building one house to settle Qi Guangyu, a descendant of Qi Tai. Qi Tai was a Lishui man and, with Huang Zicheng, one of the ministers charged by the Jianwen Emperor with his dying trust.

How it was found in 1984

According to an article by the local historian Wu Dalin, reprinted on the Lishui114 forum, in August 1984, during a county-wide survey of cultural relics, a report came in that there seemed to be a stele in the wall of the county fuel company; on the spot the stele was found mostly buried, its head lost and only the shaft and base remaining, the shaft measuring 2.36 metres long, 1.16 metres wide and 0.24 metres thick, and bearing the full title "Record of the endowed fields and buildings granted to the Zhongshan Academy". That item is an article reprinted on a forum and is of low authority; it is used here as a lead only.

The two accounts of the dimensions do not agree: the length is given as 320 centimetres in one and 236 in the other, and the thickness as 23 centimetres and 24; the width, 116 centimetres, agrees. The two sets are set side by side, and this entry chooses neither nor alters either statement accordingly.

Protection status

The report does not state a grade of protection for the stele. It is a newly recorded find of the fourth survey and has not yet been graded, so no protection_level is given, and the stele is not written up as a published protected site.

To be added

Still to be added: a full transcription of the stele's text, what the "endowed fields and buildings" recorded on it amounted to, the relation between the academy it records and the academies of Ming Lishui, the grading of the stele, and which of the two sets of dimensions is correct. The report does not transcribe the text, and this entry does not supply it.