became a fixed pattern, to be followed by all the Chinese rulers following the Zhou.

    Under the hereditary system, the imperial power was passed down within the imperial family, from generation to generation. That explains why Chinese emperors and kings were so keen to ancestral worshipping. Imperial ancestral temples were built in all dynasties, but only one has

been preserved to this day. That structure lies to the left of the Forbidden City in the center of Beijing, which served as the Imperial Ancestral Temple for both the Ming and Qing dynasties and now as the Beijing Workers' Cultural Palace. The temple, so to speak, is a neat cluster of one-story buildings in a walled compound. In some ways, it resembles the Forbidden City in ground plan. Like the Forbidden 

Towering cypress trees make the Temple of Imperial Ancestors even more solemn and respectful.

    The hall in the front, with an 11-bay front, is where sacrificial ceremonies were held in feudal times and, as such, it stands on a three-layer marble platform while its roof, itself an elaborate structure, is of the highest status. The hall in the center is where the memorial tablets of the dynasty's dead emperors were displayed. The tablets would be moved to the hall in its front when commemorative ceremonies were held. The hall in the rear was used for display of the commemorative tablets of the imperial family's remote ancestors. The three palace halls each have a side hall to either side, round which there are two walls forming two circles, one within the other, with the main gate of the compound in the middle of the south section of the outer wall. Towering cypress trees grow in the courtyard in between the gate and the south section of the inner wall, including many that were planted 500 years ago, making the compound even more solemn and respectful.

   The Altar of Land and Grain lies to the right front of the Forbidden City, thus forming a symmetrical pair with the Imperial Ancestral Temple. Agriculture was ancient China's lifeline and, for this reason, land and grain were seen as the symbol of the state. In classical Chinese, the characters land and grain are synonyms of the rivers and mountains and the country. Worshipping of land and grain dates to the times of remote antiquity and, as time went by, people developed the ritual of worshipping them in front of earthen mounds or "altars" as they chose to call them. Before the Ming Dynasty, two earthen mounds symbolizing land and grain separately were built within the same temple. In the Ming Dynasty and the succeeding Qing,

however, land and grain came to be worshipped together, hence the Altar of Land and Grain in a compound to the west of the Gate of Heavenly Peace.2 The altar is, in fact, a raised platform one meter high, in the shape of a square with each side measured at 15 meters in length.

    The surface of the platform is covered with earth of the "five colors", which stand for the Chinese territory in the "five directions" - blue for the east, white for the west, red for the south, and black for the north while yellow, the "imperial color", is in the center. The earth of the "five colors" was from different parts of China, sent to Beijing as a tribute to the emperor. A low wall surrounds the platform, also in the shape of a square, and each side of the wall is decorated with glazed

tiles in the color that stands for a specific direction - blue, white, red or black. At a sacrificial ceremony, those present would stand to the north of platform. To shelter the emperor from wind or rain during the ceremony, a hall was built there.