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part of Stele of Cuan Longyan

The Stele of Cuan Longyan is inside the Zhenyuanpu Primary School, 14 km south of the county seat of Luliang County, Yunnan Province.

The Stele of Cuan Longyan is briefly called Da Cuan (Big Cuan), too. The stele was set up in the second year (458) of the Daming Period of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279). The stele is 3.38 m high, 1.35 m wide in the upper part, 1.46 m wide in the lower part, and 0.25 m thick. The top is semicircular, with 24 characters in 6 lines meaning it is the Stele of Late Mr. Cuan, Longxiang General, Official of Defense, Governor of Ningzhou Prefecture and Head of Nadu County of the Song Dynasty (960-1279). In the upper part is a relief of a blue dragon, a white tiger and a rose finch; in the middle of the lower part there is a hole, on the left is the pattern of the sun and on the right the pattern of the moon; in the sun is a crow and in the moon is a toad. The epigraph contains 24 lines, each line having 45 characters, and the whole text contains 904 characters. The epigraph talks about the lineage of Cuan’s family and the political history of the three generations of Cuan Longyan, especially the crackdown on the Zhao Guang Uprising in Yizhou in the ninth year (432) of the Yuanjia Period, in which Cuan Longyan played a leading role. The stele has 3 lines of superscriptions, containing 313 characters altogether, recording the political and military institutions and the persons working in the government in the frontier region at that time. The epigraph is in regular script, but still keeps a very strong feature of the official script. The handwriting shows a vigorous and firm verve, a highly changeable structure, and it has always been praised highly by many chirographers.

(Source: chinaculture.org)