石鼓
石鼓为花岗岩材质，因外形似鼓得名，共有十块，表面刻有文字，被称为石鼓文。石鼓文凿刻于春秋战国时期，记录了秦国国君的一场大规模游猎，是中国现存最早的一组石刻文字。
石鼓经历坎坷。它们被发现于唐代，因石鼓文的价值被称颂。唐末战乱，石鼓散失，直到宋代才找回九个。最后一个石鼓被发现时，已流落民间200多年，被削去一半，挖成石臼，用于舂米。热爱书法的宋徽宗将全部石鼓运回皇宫，并为铭文填注黄金。金军破宋，石鼓被运往燕京，剔除黄金后再度遗失，重新现世已是元代。此后，石鼓一直被珍藏在北京。1933年，为避战火，石鼓随故宫文物南迁至四川省，途中遭遇两次翻车仍得以幸存。新中国成立后，石鼓回归故宫博物院。
石鼓文为秦大篆，上承商周时期铸于青铜器上的金文字体，下为秦始皇用来统一中国文字的秦小篆奠定基础。石鼓在历史学、文字学、文学和书法领域都具有不可替代的重要价值。
石鼓（吾车刻石）
A stone drum (carved with the poem Wuche, meaning "My Chariot").
Stone Drums
The stone drums, made of granite, are so named due to their shape. Ten of such stone drums have been unearthed so far. The writing on them is called stone-drum script.
Known as the earliest stone inscriptions surviving in China, they describe a large-scale hunting expedition by the king of the Qin state in the Spring and Autumn-Warring States Period (770-221 B.C.).
The stone drums endured a turbulent history. They were discovered in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and already valued for the inscriptions they carry. They were lost in wars at the end of the Tang Dynasty, and nine were recovered until the Song Dynasty (960-1279). By the time the last one was retrieved more than 200 years later, it was cut in half and had been used as a stone mortar to husk rice.
Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty, who was obsessed with calligraphy, collected all the stone drums and filled the inscriptions with molten gold.
After the Jin army captured the Song capital, the stone drums were transported to Yanjing (present-day Beijing), where they were lost again after the gold was removed. And they reappeared in the Yuan Dynasty.
From then on, the stone drums had been stored in Beijing.
In 1933, they were evacuated southward to Sichuan Province alongside other relics in the collection of the Palace Museum to escape warfare. On the way, the truck transporting the stone drums rolled over twice, but fortunately, they survived. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the stone drums ultimately returned to the Palace Museum.
The inscriptions on the stone drums are the large seal script . This script inherited the bronze inscriptions of the Shang and Zhou dynasties and laid the foundation for the small seal script used by Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.), to unify the country's writing system. The stone drums are of irreplaceable importance in the fields of history, philology, literature, and calligraphy.
