Inscription of Yanran

The Inscription on the Ceremonial Mounding of Mount Yanran is a cliff carving made in 89 AD on the order of the Eastern Han general Dou Xian to commemorate his victory over the Northern Xiongnu near the Altai Mountains. Its text was composed by the historian Ban Gu and carved in Han clerical script, running to 260 characters, of which about 220 remain legible; the surviving text matches the account of the campaign preserved in the Book of the Later Han, opening with details of the battle and closing with verse in the Chu Ci style. The inscription lay unrecognized for centuries at a cliff site in the Delgerkhangai Mountains of Mongolia's Dundgovi Province until a Mongolian journalist located it in 2001, and academic teams did not confirm and fully decode the carving until 2016 and 2017. It is regarded as one of the most celebrated surviving monuments of ancient Chinese military history. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/