The Stele Forest (碑林; pinyin: Bēilín) or the Forest of Stone Steles Museum, situated in the Shaanxi Museum, at the foot of the city wall against the Kuixing Tower, is the largest and oldest of its kind in China with a collection of 2,300 stone tablets and epitaphs of different periods of the Chinese history, forming comprehensive library of books-on-stones that of immeasurable historical and artistic value.

This courtyard-style building in the museum was once the Confucian Temple. In 1950, the structure extended into the museum as we see today. A dense crowd of tablets in the museum looks like a thick forest, therefore, named The Stele Forest.

As a cultural relic treasure house, the museum contains the largest, richest and earliest collection of ancient stone tablets of China. These pieces of art are works from the Han Dynasty through to the Ch'ing Dynasty (206BC~1911AD), including over 1000 pieces of memorial tablets forming The Stele Forest, which according to textual research, it was originally set up in 1087AD.

Xi'an forest of steles is not only a treasure house of ancient Chinese calligraphy, but also a rich collection of China's historical documents and records and stone carving patterns. These tablets record partly the great achievements of Chinese culture and can reveal to us today, the cultural exchange between China and other countries in the old days.