The Heritage of the Temples, a Heritage in Stone:An Overview of Beijing's Religious Epigraphy

Out of the thousands of temples that still existed in Beijing before the 1950s, less than a dozen are nowadays active, the remaining ones having been either abandoned or destroyed. However, the commemorative inscriptions that were carved on stelae for centuries and that still remain on rubbings enable us to understand whole sections of the history of temples and of the religious life of the capital.