The Hidden Character Stone is a main attraction along with a jade water basin that is part of the Qiannan Pingtang National Geological Park. The park has an area of about 201.6 square kilometers. The stone is in a narrow gap between two cliffs, just wide enough for two people.
History
In June 2002, the Duyun international photography exposition recommended an area in Zhangbu as a photo spot. The stone was discovered during cleanup after the expo. The area has been isolated, untouched by humans for a long time. The person cleaning the area was staff member Wang Guo-fu, who discovered the characters written on the stone. From December 5–8, 2003 a Chinese scientific inspection group of about 15 scientists was formed to investigate the stone. Some of the notables include Li Ting-dong from Chinese Academy of Sciences, Liu Bao-jun from Chinese academy of Sciences and Li Feng-lin from China University of Geosciences. The stone was analyzed to be about 270 million years old from the Permian period. There are no traces of the characters being made by humans. Other researchers included Li Feng-lin and Gu Jing-yi. Li Ting-dong further commented about the stone's contribution to science, and that there is nothing like it. Liu Bao-jun expressed support for additional research and was interested in the natural formation of the characters on the stone. Each character on the stone is about one square shaku, which is about 1 square foot.
Description
Five-character version
The five-character version suggests the characters on the stone said "Communist Party of China". This is the version publicly accepted in the PRC. Also when referring to this version, the stone has been called, literally "savior stone". This name comes from people who are passionate in supporting and admire the Communist Party. The story of how the stone was discovered usually follows this version. Zhang Dahua of Zhangbu village once publicly gave an explanation of how the name "savior stone" was created.
Six-character version
The six-character version suggests the characters on the stone said "Communist Party of China perish". There has been criticism that the sixth and last character "perish" has been purposely neglected to turn a "Perish communist stone" into a "savior stone". This is not a version accepted in the PRC, hence when mainland media reports it, it has to hide the perish character. Often when pictures are shown with the stone having six characters, the description still refers to it by the five-character version. In Chinese text the character "perish" is often used in association with the perish of a state like "Chu perish", "Wei perish".
Traditional and Simplified Chinese
The characters on the stone are a mix of Traditional Chinese characters and Simplified Chinese characters. The first and third character are identical in both versions. The second character "country" and fourth character "produce" is in the traditional form. The fifth character, "party" is in the simplified form. The sixth character "perish" has no difference. Some have analyzed all the odd characters as Simplified, while the even characters are Traditional.
On the stone: 中國共產党亡
Traditional Chinese: 中國共產黨亡
Simplified Chinese: 中国共产党亡
Analysis
The origin of the characters remain a subject of dispute. There were some early speculations that the characters were put there by the People's Liberation Army, but according to the path of the Long March, they never went to Pingtang. The characters also read left to right, which was not practiced at the time. The inclusion of a Simplified character before the CPC did any simplifications also ruled them out. There were also some skeptics who suspected the village was creating a fraud to build their tourism industry at the time. Others think the Hidden Character Stone was made in the Cultural Revolution.
Cultural reference
The Hidden Character Stone has appeared as a topic on a number of shows such as CCTV's "Approaching Science" and the Hong KongATV show "China's Mystery Files". Both refer to the five-character version.
