Yongning Temple Stele

52°56′N 139°46′E / 52.94°N 139.76°E / 52.94; 139.76

The Yongning Temple Stele (Chinese: 永寧寺碑) is a stele erected by the Chinese Ming dynasty in 1413 with a trilingual inscription to commemorate the founding of the Yongning Temple (永寧寺) in the Nurgan outpost, near the mouth of the Amur River, by the eunuch Yishiha. The location of the temple is the village of Tyr near Nikolayevsk-on-Amur in Russia. This stele is renowned both as the latest known example of a monumental inscription in the Jurchen script, and also for the inscription of the Buddhist mantra Om mani padme hum in four different scripts on its sides. A stele with a monolingual Chinese inscription, commemorating the repair of the temple by Yishiha, was erected in 1433. Both monuments are now held at the Arsenyev Museum in Vladivostok.

Background

The Ming government under the Yongle Emperor (reigned 1402–1424) attempted to expand its influence in the far north and defend itself against the Mongols by setting up a system of guards and posts in the territory of the Haixi Jurchens and Jianzhou Jurchens in the Liaodong Peninsula and the area of modern Jilin province, giving official positions to the local Jurchen leaders in exchange for their allegiance.^[1] In 1409 the Nurgan Regional Military Commission, covering the region of the lower Amur River and the island of Sakhalin, was established, but this region was under the control of the 'Wild Jurchens' who made raids on Chinese outposts. In 1412, in response to these raids the Yongle Emperor commanded the eunuch Yishiha, a Haixi Jurchen by origin, to lead an expedition to pacify the region. The following year Yishiha set off with a fleet of twenty-five ships and a thousand soldiers, as well as architects and craftsmen. He sailed down the Sungari River and into the Amur River, reaching a place the Chinese called Telin 特林 (modern Tyr) where he stayed for almost a year. Near a cliff overlooking the Amur River he built a Buddhist temple named the Temple of Eternal Tranquility (Yongning Temple).^[2]^[3]

In response to the destruction of Buddhist sculptures by local shamans, Yishiha made further expeditions to the Nurgan region in the 1420s, and in 1432–1433 he made one last expedition with 50 ships and 2,000 soldiers to invest a Jurchen chief as the new Nurgan Military Commissioner. As the temple he had founded twenty years earlier had been destroyed, Yishiha built a new Yongning Temple, situated a short distance away from its predecessor, overlooking the Amur River.^[2]^[3] In 1435 the Ming government abandoned its military presence in the region, and disbanded the Nurgan Regional Military Commission.^[1]

The 1413 Stele

Om mani padme hum
Chinese
Hanzi	唵嘛呢叭𡄣吽
Pinyin	ǎn má ní bā mí hōng
Jurchen
Jurchen script
Transliteration	am ma ni ba mi xu^{[note 1]}
Mongolian
Mongolian	ᠣᠣᠮ ᠮᠠ᠋ ᠨᠢ ᠪᠠᠳ ᠮᠢ ᠬᠤᠩ
Transliteration	oom ma ni bad mi qung
Tibetan
Tibetan	ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པད་མེ་ཧཱུཾ
Transliteration	oṁ maṇi pad me hūṁ

The 1413 stele was erected at Yongning Temple to commemorate its construction by Yishiha. The stele is 179 × 83 × 42 cm in dimensions,^[4] and is inscribed on the front with an inscription in Chinese which extols the Yongle Emperor and recounts Yishiha's expedition. On the back of the stele are abbreviated versions of the Chinese inscription written in Mongolian and Jurchen. On one side of the stele, the Buddhist mantra Om mani padme hum is engraved vertically in four different scripts:^[4]^[5]

This stele is the latest known example of an inscription in the Jurchen script.^[6] The earliest record of this stele was probably in book published in 1639 by a Chinese scholar called Yang Bin, but a rubbing of the actual inscription was not published until 1887 after a Qing official called Cao Tingjie made a journey along the Amur River in 1885. The stele was removed to Vladivostok Museum in 1904.^[4]

The 1433 Stele

The 1433 stele was erected in commemoration of the rebuilding of the Yongning Temple by Yishiha in 1433. It has a single, monolingual Chinese inscription.^[5]

Gallery

Notes

^ The Jurchen readings are taken from Jin Qizong's Dictionary of Jurchen (Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe, 1984). The characters are nos. 474, 370, 560, 419, 641 and 385 in Wilhelm Grube's Die Sprache und Schrift der Jučen (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1896).

References

^ ^a ^b Li, Gertraude Roth (2002). "State Building before 1644". In Peterson, Willard J. (ed.). The Ch'ing Empire to 1800. Cambridge History of China. Vol. 9. Cambridge University Press. pp. 11–14. ISBN 978-0-521-24334-6.
^ ^a ^b Stephan, John J. (1996). The Russian Far East: A History. Stanford University Press. pp. 16–17. ISBN 978-0-8047-2701-3.
^ ^a ^b Tsai, Shih-shan Henry (1996). The Eunuchs in the Ming dynasty. SUNY Press. pp. 129–130. ISBN 978-0-7914-2687-6.
^ ^a ^b ^c Kane, Daniel (1989). The Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters. Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies. pp. 63–68. ISBN 978-0-933070-23-3.
^ ^a ^b Jin, Guangping; Jin, Qizong (1980). 女真語言文字研究 [Study of Jurchen Language and Script]. Wenwu Chubaneshe. pp. 355–376.
^ Kiyose, Gisaburō Norikura (1977). A Study of the Jurchen Language and Script: Reconstruction and Decipherment. Hōritsubunka-sha. p. 25.