My freshman composition teacher taught me never to begin an essay by saying what it is not. “Begin,” he would say firmly and repeatedly, “by saying what your argument is, not what it isn’t.” While obviously I have never forgotten this directive (and like all teachers I find myself repeating it to my own students), I still feel compelled to begin this book with a few nots, owing to the peculiar nature of the subject at hand. The Story of a Stele is a book about Western perceptions of a Chinese object, but it is not a book of sinology....

One day in 1625, in the ancient Chinese capital of Xi’an in the province of Shaanxi in northwestern China, a group of workers accidentally unearthed a large limestone stele. An enormous black tablet about three meters high, one meter wide, and half a meter deep, the front and sides were exquisitely carved with a long inscription that included both Chinese and a Syriac script known as Estrangelo. The text, dated 781, eulogized the history and spread of a religion it referred to as jingjiao (the “luminous” or “illustrious” or “brilliant” teaching), which had come to China from a faraway land...

The previous chapter examined the way in which Western missionaries were preoccupied with the idea of finding traces of Christianity in China even before they had arrived there at the end of the sixteenth century. And with the discovery of the Xi’an stone in 1625, there now seemed to be incontrovertible proof not only that the religion had flourished there in its distant past, but also that it had been openly supported by a line of highly respected emperors. This was doubly fortuitous from the Jesuit point of view, for it allowed them to prove to the tradition-minded scholarly class...

It was certainly not the case that every seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century book about China made some kind of reference to the Nestorian monument. One important example was the narrative of the first Dutch embassy to Beijing published in Dutch, French, German, and Latin editions between 1665 and 1668.¹ It is perfectly understandable that diplomatic and mercantile aspirations would have found other kinds of detail to be much more pertinent (and the ambassadorial party never went anywhere near Xi’an). But by the same token, one might have expected at least some kind of reference to the monument in the précis...

Thus far we have examined more than two hundred years of controversy surrounding the stone since it was first discovered in 1625. We have seen that Western response was both immediate and agitated, with many readers refusing to believe that the monument was what the missionaries said it was. The problem or the attraction, depending on one’s point of view, was that the object was said to be Christian, and it is no accident that readers’ obsessions were based on a preconceived idea that whatever else the inscription might have contained, it was not even “Chinese” at all. Despite a...

Once the stone had been placed into the Beilin in Xi’an it must have been clear to Westerners that it was not going to be “rescued” to a museum of their own. In the popular imagination, the stone had had its brief moment of fame and then returned to earth just as quickly, and Holm’s replica, once front-page news and a major attraction at the Metropolitan Museum, was soon to disappear into the Vatican’s little-visited Missionary Ethnological collections. Holm himself managed to maintain a certain celebrity, lecturing on his expedition until he died in 1930 (always credited as “Dr. Holm,”...