CHAPTER 6 Huizong's Stone Inscrptions Patricia Ebrey After the Jurchen conquest of 1127 and the retreat of the Song gove r ment to the south, many literat i wondered what had happened to the famous landmarks of the former capita l at Kaifeng. After the Mongols reunifed north and south in 1276, travel became easier, and by the 1290S a growing number of southern scholars had visited the north. Luo Zhiren l It 1=, after a trip to Kaifeng in 1296, reported that the site of the former National Academy k * stll had the stone ttles done by Cai Jing ! 1. (1046-1126) on imperial command. Most of the steles that had once stood there, however, including the ones with the Nine Classics inscribed on them, were piled in heaps. At the old Bureau of Astronomy, one hall still had the tit le plaque inscribed by Huizong (r. 1100-1125) in cursive scrpt 1 t, reading "Hal l of the Nine Celestial Bodies" l l . . . And a stele by Huizong had been discovered: With regard to Huizong's stele on set tling the trpods, i Slender Gold scrpt, when a commoner's family ins ide the old palace precincts was excava tng in order to build a wa l l, they suddenly came across an exceptonally tal l stele. At the top were a pair of dragons. The head of the tur tle at its base was looking Besides the abbrevia tions listed on p. xiv, the fol lowing abbreviations are used in the notesforthischapter: H Harvard-Yanjingnumberforitemsin theDaozang i; basedonDaozang mu yinde i, 1 r il l' (Shanghai:Shanghaiguj i,1986repr int). SKLB Shike shiliao xnbian . il �;i R, 30vols. (aibe:nwenfeng,1977). SYFZCS Song Yuan diang Zh i congshu ;7Jt 7 It . .. ' 12vols.(aibe i:Guota iwenhua shiye, 1980).