Stone Drums

The stone drums, made of granite, are so named due to their shape. Ten of such stone drums have been unearthed so far. The writing on them is called stone-drum script.

Known as the earliest stone inscriptions surviving in China, they describe a large-scale hunting expedition by the king of the Qin state in the Spring and Autumn-Warring States Period (770-221 B.C.).

The stone drums endured a turbulent history. They were discovered in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and already valued for the inscriptions they carry. They were lost in wars at the end of the Tang Dynasty, and nine were recovered until the Song Dynasty (960-1279). By the time the last one was retrieved more than 200 years later, it was cut in half and had been used as a stone mortar to husk rice.

Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty, who was obsessed with calligraphy, collected all the stone drums and filled the inscriptions with molten gold.

After the Jin army captured the Song capital, the stone drums were transported to Yanjing (present-day Beijing), where they were lost again after the gold was removed. And they reappeared in the Yuan Dynasty.

From then on, the stone drums had been stored in Beijing.

In 1933, they were evacuated southward to Sichuan Province alongside other relics in the collection of the Palace Museum to escape warfare. On the way, the truck transporting the stone drums rolled over twice, but fortunately, they survived. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the stone drums ultimately returned to the Palace Museum.

The inscriptions on the stone drums are the large seal script . This script inherited the bronze inscriptions of the Shang and Zhou dynasties and laid the foundation for the small seal script used by Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.), to unify the country's writing system. The stone drums are of irreplaceable importance in the fields of history, philology, literature, and calligraphy.

石鼓（吾車刻石）

A stone drum (carved with the poem Wuche, meaning "My Chariot").

石鼓

石鼓為花崗巖材質，因外形似鼓得名，共有十塊，表面刻有文字，被稱為石鼓文。石鼓文鑿刻于春秋戰國時期，記錄了秦國國君的一場大規模游獵，是中國現存最早的一組石刻文字。

石鼓經歷坎坷。它們被發現于唐代，因石鼓文的價值被稱頌。唐末戰亂，石鼓散失，直到宋代才找回九個。最后一個石鼓被發現時，已流落民間200多年，被削去一半，挖成石臼，用于舂米。熱愛書法的宋徽宗將全部石鼓運回皇宮，并為銘文填注黃金。金軍破宋，石鼓被運往燕京，剔除黃金后再度遺失，重新現世已是元代。此后，石鼓一直被珍藏在北京。1933年，為避戰火，石鼓隨故宮文物南遷至四川省，途中遭遇兩次翻車仍得以幸存。新中國成立后，石鼓回歸故宮博物院。

石鼓文為秦大篆，上承商周時期鑄于青銅器上的金文字體，下為秦始皇用來統一中國文字的秦小篆奠定基礎。石鼓在歷史學、文字學、文學和書法領域都具有不可替代的重要價值。