Two crafts anchor everything we make at Ink & Jade: the carving of Buddhist sculpture in stone, and the printing of ink rubbings on paper. Both are old — older than printing, older than photography — and for most of their history they were intertwined: words carved beside a Buddha, then lifted onto paper by scholars and travelers. This is a short, honest history of both arts, written for visitors meeting them for the first time.
From Gandhara to Yungang: how the Buddha came to China
Buddhism reached China from India along the Silk Road in the first century AD, and with it came images. The earliest Buddhist statues looked west — Greek-influenced styles from Gandhara (in today's Pakistan and Afghanistan), with wavy hair, draped robes and naturalistic folds. Chinese carvers absorbed these forms and slowly remade them: robes grew looser and more flowing, faces calmer and more Chinese, until the foreign god wore the clothes of a scholar.
The turning point came in 460, when the Northern Wei court commissioned the Yungang Grottoes near Datong. A sandstone cliff was opened like a quarry of faith: five giant caves for five emperors, then tens of thousands of statues large and small. By the time work slowed, around 51,000 figures filled the cliff — the first monumental Buddha complex in Chinese history.
Longmen and the golden age of Tang sculpture
When the Wei capital moved to Luoyang in 493, the carvers followed, and work began at Longmen, south of the city. Over the following centuries Longmen grew into more than 2,300 niches and some 100,000 statues. Its masterpiece is the Great Vairocana Buddha, completed in 675 under the Tang dynasty — a serene, seventeen-metre face said to be modeled on Empress Wu Zetian.
The Tang (618–907) was the golden age of Chinese Buddhist sculpture: fuller bodies, jeweled bodhisattvas, a confidence that turned doctrine into beauty. When Buddhism later faced persecution in 845 and dynastic upheaval, cliff carving slowed — but the sculptures survived in stone, exactly as the carvers had hoped.
The invention of ink rubbing
No one knows exactly when scholars first pressed paper against stone and beat it with ink-soaked pads, but by the Tang dynasty the craft — called ta, "to press and print" — was mature. The oldest rubbing known to survive is a copy of Emperor Taizong's "Warm Spring Inscription," found sealed in the hidden library cave at Dunhuang: black paper, white characters, the stone preserved in reverse.
A rubbing is not a drawing. The paper is worked into every carved hollow; ink touches only the raised surface. The result is a perfect, negative portrait of the stone — every chisel mark, every broken edge, every grain. Before photography, it was the only way to copy a carving exactly, and it weighed nothing next to the stone itself. Words could now travel: a stele in Xi'an could be studied in Hangzhou and printed in a book.
When rubbing became scholarship: the Song dynasty
In 1061 the statesman and poet Ouyang Xiu completed the Jigu Lu ("Record of Collecting Antiquities"), an annotated catalogue of rubbings from ancient bronzes and steles. With the Jinshi Lu of Zhao Mingcheng — husband of the great poet Li Qingzhao — rubbing became scholarship. A discipline was born, jinshixue, "the study of metal and stone": the ancestor of modern epigraphy.
For a thousand years since, rubbing has kept China's written surfaces alive. Originals were lost — steles smashed in war, bronzes melted down — yet their rubbings survived, passed down like manuscripts. Collectors prize old rubbings precisely because they record stones that no longer exist.
The Qing revival and the full-form rubbing
After centuries of quiet, the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) brought a research boom. Scholars traveled to "visit steles," copying and rubbing everything they found. From this era came the most inventive technique in the craft's history: quanxing ta, the "full-form rubbing," which wrapped paper around an entire bronze vessel and printed it as one three-dimensional-looking image — sometimes called China's answer to the photograph, two centuries early.
Where the two arts meet: the Longmen inscriptions
The clearest meeting point of the two arts is Longmen itself. Beside the Buddhas, donors carved inscriptions recording who paid, who prayed, and when. The most famous of the "Longmen Twenty," the Shipinggong Memorial of 498, is carved in raised relief — so its rubbing prints black characters on white paper, the reverse of an ordinary stele. These inscriptions became classics of Chinese calligraphy, studied by every calligrapher since the Qing. A Buddhist statue and a page of writing, sharing one cliff: that is the world our prints come from.
World Heritage and the living craft
Yungang (2001), Longmen (2000) and the Dazu Rock Carvings (1999) are now UNESCO World Heritage sites, and museums from the Metropolitan to the British Museum hold Chinese rubbings in their collections. The crafts themselves are alive: in carving workshops and rubbing studios, artisans still beat ink into paper exactly as their Tang predecessors did. Ink & Jade works in that lineage — our prints come from sculptures carved by masters we can name, so that these two ancient arts can travel one more century, into modern homes.
A short glossary
- Grotto (shiku) — a cave temple carved into a cliff, sometimes hundreds of metres long.
- Stele (bei) — an upright stone slab bearing text: the "printed page" of pre-print China.
- Rubbing (taben) — a print made by pressing paper into carved stone and dabbing ink over it.
- Sutra (jing) — a Buddhist scripture; some are carved in full into a statue's robes.
- Bodhisattva (pusa) — an enlightened being who stays to help others; often jeweled and crowned.
- Gandhara — ancient region of today's Pakistan and Afghanistan whose Greco-Buddhist style first shaped Buddhist images.
- Epigraphy (jinshixue) — the scholarly study of inscriptions on metal and stone.
Frequently asked questions
What is the oldest ink rubbing in the world?
The oldest rubbing known to survive is a Tang-dynasty copy of Emperor Taizong's "Warm Spring Inscription," discovered in 1900 in the hidden library cave at Dunhuang. It is held today in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
How is an ink rubbing made?
A sheet of dampened paper is pressed into the carved surface, then lightly tamped so it sinks into every hollow. When nearly dry, an ink pad is dabbed across it: ink colors only the raised parts, and the carved design appears white on black.
Why were Buddha statues carved into cliffs?
Rock protects what wood cannot: fire, floods and wars. Cliff temples were also acts of devotion on a grand scale — emperors and guilds sponsored caves to earn religious merit, and a carving in living stone was meant to last as long as the mountain.