Stone Drums of Qin

The Stone Drums of Qin or Qin Shi Gu (Chinese: 秦石鼓; pinyin: Qín Shígǔ; Wade–Giles: Ch'in Shih Ku) are ten granite boulders bearing the oldest known "stone" inscriptions in ancient Chinese (much older inscriptions on pottery, bronzes and the oracle bones exist).

Originally thought to bear about 700 characters in all, the Stone Drums were already damaged by the time they are mentioned in the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) poetry of Du Fu.

Even among recognizable graphs, scores of them are used in ways unattested elsewhere, leading to great difficulty and disagreement in their interpretation, a situation common to Zhou dynasty inscriptions (Mattos p. 122).

There exists no record of their actual discovery, so the date and location thereof are unsettled, and are a matter of extensive scholarly controversy.

Wagner (1990) speculates that the original location of the drums' discovery may have been the Qin royal tombs or an associated ritual complex in Fengxiang County, Shaanxi Province, but also mentions another potentially relevant location: a mountain named Mount Shigu (石鼓山), or Stone Drum Mountain, in Chenzang (陳倉), about 25 km.