thumb|A Mount Tai shigandang () in [[Beijing, China.]] thumb|Shigandang erected at the entrance of a lane, etc., to drive away misfortune or evil spirits. thumb|An ishigantō in Okinawa (city)|Okinawa, Japan Shigandang (; ) is an ornamental stone tablet with writing, which is used to exorcise evil spirits in East Asia. Shigandang are often associated with Mount Tai and are often placed on street intersections or three-way junctions, especially in the crossing, which is often considered a spiritually dangerous place ().
thumb|A Mount Tai shigandang () in [[Beijing, China.]] thumb|Shigandang erected at the entrance of a lane, etc., to drive away misfortune or evil spirits. thumb|An ishigantō in Okinawa (city)|Okinawa, Japan Shigandang (; ) is an ornamental stone tablet with writing, which is used to exorcise evil spirits in East Asia. Shigandang are often associated with Mount Tai and are often placed on street intersections or three-way junctions, especially in the crossing, which is often considered a spiritually dangerous place ().
Erecting shigandang near houses, villages, bridges and roads has a long history in China. The phrase shigandang first appeared in the Western Han dynasty. During the Tang dynasty, these three characters were carved on stones and were used to protect houses from evil until the Song dynasty Taishan shigandang () appeared. It became widely popular throughout the country to set up shigandang or Taishan shigandang near villages and houses. Furthermore, the custom also spread to the Han cultural sphere overseas.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).