Valley Spring Cultural Park

The Valley Flowing Spring Cultural Park is located in Fengjing Village, Tianzhushan Town, Qianshan County, Anhui Province. There are more than 400 stone carvings from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) and the Song Dynasty (1912-1949 AD), with the most stone carvings from the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD). The stone carvings are densely covered on the cliffs, slabs of stone and riverbeds in the valleys. There are more than hundreds of inscription authors, and no less than a hundred of them can be checked. Li Dexiu of the Tang Dynasty, Wang Anshi, Huang Tingjian, Su Dongpo of the Song Dynasty, Hu Zongzong of the Ming Dynasty, Zhang Kai of the Qing Dynasty and other famous officials have inscribed on the cliffs. The inscriptions cover a wide range of astronomy, geography, politics, economy, military affairs and culture; the styles are diverse, including poems, songs, chronicles, titles; the scripts are regular, cursive, official, running and seal. The three earliest stone carvings in the Valley Flowing Spring are all from the Tang Dynasty, and they are all distributed on the cliffs on the east wall of the Stone Ox Ancient Cave. Two of them are inscriptions by Li Ao, a Tang Dynasty essayist and philosopher, when he visited the valley as the governor of Shuzhou. There are more than 100 inscriptions in the valley from the two Song dynasties, and the content is also extremely rich. There is not only the earliest inscription in Anhui in the Northern Song Dynasty, which was inscribed by Zhao Fu, Shu Ya, and Huang Mengxi in the second year of Duangong (989); there are also poems inscribed by politician Wang Anshi, inscriptions by calligrapher Huang Tingjian, inscriptions by Li Shizhong, poems inscribed by Zhang Tongzhi of the Southern Song Dynasty, etc. During the Song Dynasty, there was an endless stream of tourists who came to the valley to see the scenery, forming an unprecedented trend of stone carving to record their travels. After the Yuan Dynasty, many tourists flocked to the valley, and also left a large number of stone carvings with text. From the perspective of calligraphy, the stone carvings here include official script, regular script, cursive script, seal script, running script, etc. Each style of calligraphy is rich in changes and has its own characteristics. It basically represents the development and evolution of Chinese calligraphy art since the Tang Dynasty, and is a precious treasure house of calligraphy art.