A literal legacy set in stone

Most people read poems in books or online, but residents in Chengdu, Sichuan province, get to read 1,455 ancient poems on stone tablets.

First-time visitors to the Flower-bathing Brook Park in Chengdu will be impressed with the numerous tablets, each inscribed with a poem by Du Fu (712-770), one of China's most luminary poets. They are dotted all over the 32-hectare urban forest park — Chengdu's largest.

The characters are engraved by famous calligraphers dating from ancient times to the present day.

Together with poems inscribed on stone in the adjacent Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum, those in the park are part of the Thousand-Poem Tablet Project, through which Chengdu has, quite literally, set the legacy of the Tang Dynasty (618-907) poet in stone.

With an investment of 150 million yuan ($21 million), the Chengdu municipal government's ambitious plan to erect tablets with Du's existing 1,455 poems in the park and museum started in 2015 and was completed in 2018.

The tablets collect Du's works from the many, varied stages of his life. Starting in his youth, they track his journey from the Tang capital of Chang'an (today's Xi'an in Shaanxi province), the musings he recorded in his prime and those from his short stint as a middle-aged vagrant in Gansu province. Also included are the poems he penned over nearly four years in his cottage in Chengdu, the two years he spent in today's Fengjie, Chongqing, from 766-768, all the way through to his final years in Hunan province before his death in 770.