Ancient wisdom finds new fans at Qufu's Confucius Museum

Inside the exhibition, lines from the Analects written on bamboo slips, stones, and in books printed using woodblocks and wooden movable types are on display to help visitors understand the sage's influence on China, and how it has been passed down.

Among the bamboo slips are some from the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) which bear words including Confucius' name. They were unearthed in Jinta county, Gansu province, in 1973.

In addition, a number of rubbings and books formerly preserved at the Confucius family mansion and passed down by generations of the sage's descendants are being exhibited for the first time.

The Confucius Museum houses nearly 700,000 relics once kept in the family home. "In addition to the rubbings, we've noticed variations on the same sentence from the Analects across different dynasties," Tang said.

"The differences mainly resulted from using different Chinese characters and didn't change the sentence's meaning substantially, but do show that people in different dynasties had different interpretations of Confucian thought," she added.