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On January 7, 781 AD, in the reign of Mar Khnanishu the Catholicos Partriarch of the East and the year of Kienchung of the Tang dynasty of , the Nestorian Monument was erected.
The Monument is ten feet high by 3,1/3 feet wide and just under one foot thick and it weighs two tons. It is made of a black, sub-granular oolitic limestone.
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Aramaic & Chinese inscriptions from the Hsian-Fu Monument:
Besides celebrating the arrival of Christianity in China in 635 A.D., the inscriptions consist of one thousand nine hundred Chinese characters and about fifty Aramaic words (in the Estrangela script), containing some seventy names of Assyrian missionaries in rows on the narrow sides of the stone with the corresponding Chinese characters denoting the Chinese synonyms or phonetics for the Assyrian names.
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