By Holly Chik

Copyright scmp

A stone inscription found on the Tibetan Plateau recording a hitherto unknown expedition sent by China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang in 210BC is genuine, China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration has concluded.
The carving had triggered a heated debate about its authenticity after its discovery was announced in June. Sceptics suggested it may be a modern forgery and questioned if it was possible to travel to the plateau given the generally harsh conditions.
But Deng Chao, an official from the state heritage body, said the inscription had been authenticated after a field investigation in the Kunlun Mountains that used advanced equipment to study the carving, which was found at a site 4,300 metres (14,000 feet) above sea level near Gyaring Lake near the source of the Yellow River.
The carving, written in the ancient small seal script, read: “The emperor commanded level five grand master Yi to lead a group of alchemists here to collect yao.”
Yao is a term that could refer to herbs, animals or minerals with healing power – but it could also mean the elixir of life.
The inscription also said the group had travelled by carriage to the mountain and had reached Zhaling Lake in Qinghai in the third month of the ancient Chinese calendar in the 37th year of Qin Shi Huang’s reign.
Ancient records say that the emperor – who founded the Qin dynasty (221-207BC) and unified China’s warring states – was obsessed with immortality and had sent an expedition eastward towards Japan in search of the elixir, but there is no record of a similar westwards journey.
Deng told state news agency Xinhua the largely intact stone, which features a date not found in existing records, helped fill gaps in the historical narrative.

Heated debate about the authenticity of the stone arose after Tong Tao, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Archaeology, reported his initial findings about the discovery in early June.
A research team visited the site two times in June and July to gather data on the stone and its surrounding environment, according to Xinhua.
They also organised two seminars with specialists from different disciplines to discuss the evidence.
The stone characters showed clear chisel marks, indicating they were carved with flat-edged tools, a method consistent with Qin-era technology, Deng told Xinhua.
Through an analysis of minerals and elements, “researchers excluded the possibility that the inscriptions were carved using modern alloy tools”.
He said secondary minerals were present in both the grooves of the inscriptions and on the stone’s surface. This suggested long-term natural weathering, which ruled out the possibility that the carving was done recently.
Laboratory analysis showed that the carved stone was composed of quartz sandstone, a material known for its high resistance to abrasion and weathering, the report added, while the area’s surrounding mountains and lake created a relatively mild microclimate.
Li Yuelin, a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory in the United States, told the Post earlier this year that the inscription appeared to have been carved with a flat-edged chisel using Qin-era techniques that were later phased out.
He said this week that this was the most critical piece of evidence, but he found other elements to be credible too.
“The other aspects of the analysis addressed doubts raised by netizens, including issues such as weathering, whether modern tools were used to carve it, whether modern metal traces were present and whether sedimentary materials are consistent with the era,” he said.
Li, president of the Seven Seas Institute of Chinese Calligraphy in Illinois, said he was glad to be part of the discussion and to have a formal conclusion instead of letting the debate taper off.
“The evidence is clear, but that does not mean those who are sceptical will be convinced,” Li said. “There will always be people who will argue and claim that it is fake.”

Xin Deyong, a history professor at Peking University, who has argued that the inscription was a forgery, reacted to the findings on social media by “strongly urging the National Cultural Heritage Administration to release the verification report and the names of the experts involved”.
He added: “This is a major academic issue that the academic community has the right to know. It cannot be determined solely by the government’s ‘authority’!”
Zhao Chao, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who was involved in the investigation, told Xinhua that the stone was the only known Qin carving to survive at its original location.
“Systematic scientific methods were applied to date and authenticate this single ancient stone inscription, pioneering a new model for stone-inscription authentication in China,” he said.
Hou Guangliang, a professor at Qinghai Normal University, who discovered the inscription in 2020, said the carving was found more than 1,400km from the Qin capital Xianyang, near modern-day Xian.
“In ancient times, reaching this harsh and sparsely populated environment would have been even more challenging,” he told Xinhua. “The inscription shows that as early as the Qin dynasty, people bravely explored the Tibetan Plateau.”