With a brilliant history and culture, ancient Chines
The Hall of Great Literary Attainment, the Confucius Temple of Qufu. | e produced numerous outstanding people -- scholars noted for their contribution to the development of the Chinese civilization, soldiers who died in wars in defense of the country, and officials who defied death to uphold justice in defiance of imperial orders. Many of them were accorded posthumous honors, hence those commemorative structures we can still see everywhere.
The Confucius temples: Confucius (551 BC -- 479 BC), a thinker, educator and philosopher, was the founder of Confucianism, a philosophical school to become China's dominating ideology for well over 2,000 years from around the beginning of the Christian era to the early 20th century. He had the honorific title "sage" in all feud
Temple dedicated to Zhang Fei, Yunyang County, Sichuan Province. | al dynasties, and temples dedicated to him were built in all cities and towns.
The largest and most magnificent Confucius temple, however, is in Qufu, Shandong Provi
An ancestral temple in a Zhejiang Village. | nce, the sage's birthplace. The Confucius Temple of Q ufu was originally the sage's residence, which underwent expansion under all dynasties until it became such as to match the Forbidden City in splendor.
The temple, so to speak, occupies an area of 32,700 square meters measured at 650 meters from north to south -- in which there are structures with a total of 460 rooms. It consists of two parts. The part in the front features three stone archways and five gates. Of the four great
halls in the rear part, the largest and most important is the Hall of Great Literary Attainment, where a portrait of Confucius is displayed for worshipping. The Hall of Great Literary Attainment has a roof as large and elaborate as the roof of the Hall of Preservation of Harmony, the second largest of the Three Great Halls in the Forbidden City. Ten huge columns with coiling dragons in relief support the eave of the hall. The Hall of Great Literary Attainment stands on a two-layer stone platform with a large front, where ceremonies were held in commemoration of Confucius. Xingtan, or the Apricot Platform in front of the hall, is the site where Confucius taught his disciples. Emperors of all dynasties sent official delegations to pay homage to the sage at the temple, and many came in person. Emperor Yong Zheng of the Qing Dynasty, who reigned from 1723 to 1735, went so far as to decree use of bright yellow glazed tiles -- reserved for imperial structures -- on structures in the Confucius
Temple dedicated to Li Bing and his son, Who have been worshipped for Well over 2,000 years for construction of the Dujiangyan Weirs. | Temple. Though smaller in size,Confucius temples elsewhere are similar to that in Qufu in ground plan,with, for example, halls and gates named as "great literary attainment". Some Confucius temples, alias "literary temples", were used as government-run schools as well.
Du Fu (712-770), a poet of the Tang Dynasty, has always been remembered as the "sage of Chinese poetry'. The Du Fu Cottage in Chengdu was built in his honor. |
Temples of the military: In the third century AD, China came to be divided into three kingdoms, the kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu, amid incessant wars and internal conflicts as the Han Dynasty was collapsing. Liu Bei, emperor of the Shu in southwest China, had two great soldiers, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, as his sworn brothers, and Zhu'ge Liang, a great statesman and strategist, as his prime minister and military advisor. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei has been respected for bravery and gallantry ever since the Three Kingdoms Period, and Zhu'ge Liang, as the very personification of wisdom, resourcefulness and loyalty. Stories about the four heroes of the Shu spread all over China, culminating in the classical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong of the late Ming Dynasty.
The novel, still popular today, has made them known to virtually every Chinese. The four heroes personified the moral principles of Confucianism on benevolence, justice, propriety, wisdom and honesty, prompting construction of memorial temples in their
The ancestral temple of the Jin clan in a village in Wuyuan County, Jiangxi Province. | honor everywhere, in Sichuan, their power base, in particular. They were so intimate to one another that more often than not, they are worshipped together, as a collective. In the Zhu'ge Liang Memorial Temple in Chengdu, capital of what is now Sichuan Province, statues of Liu Bei and Zhang Fei are displayed as well. Likewise, a temple in Zizhong, Sichuan, features the three sworn brothers, Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, even though it is called the Guan Yu Memorial Temple. For his
loyalty and virtue, Guan Yu, in particular, became a divine figure --the "God of War". Temples dedicated to Guan Yuan are, therefore, also referred to as "military temples". In many Chinese cities, "military temples" are found alongside Confucius temples, alias "literary temples".
Memorial temples dedicated to Bao Zheng: Bao Zheng, or "Lord Bao the Clear Sky" as he has been referred to, has been no less popular than the four heroes of the Shu Kingdom, hence the numerous temples in his
Brick relieves flank the gate of the Chens' ancestral Temple in Guangzhou. | memory. The most famous of the Bao Zheng temples is in his birthplace, Hefei City of Anhui Province. This Song Dynasty (960- 1127) official has been held as the highest model of official honesty, fairness, virtue and impartiality, and stories of how he defied the powerful, including even the emperor, to protect the oppressed and humiliated are told in numerous traditional operas and literary works.
The Dujiangyan Weirs, a water control project on a tributary of the Yangtze River, was built in the fourth century BC under the guidance of Li Bing, a local official, and his son. The project is still being used, to the benefit of tens of millions in the Chengdu Plain, the breadbasket
of southwest China. Ever since they died, the father and son have been worshipped at a temple in Guanxian County, the site of a bifurcation structure to prevent flooding by the Minjiang River of the Chengdu Plain. There are also structures in commemoration of ancient Chinese writers, poets, scholars and other men and women with outstanding literary achievements. For literary achievements and sympathy towards the laboring people, Du Fu (712-770), a poet of the Tang Dynasty, has always been remembered as the "sage of Chinese poetry". The Du Fu Cottage in Chengdu was built in
The theater in an ancestral temple, Zhejiang Province. |
The structure serves as a temple dedicated to Zhuge Liang and, at the same time, the ancestral temple of the Zhuge clan in Lanxi County, Zhejiang Province. | his honor.
What are the characteristics of these commemorative structures left over from ancient times? In the first place, they are invariably in the places where the persons were born, lived or worked for a period or all their lives. As a matter of fact, some had been the persons' residences that were expanded after they died. That explains why such structures are free in architectural style and ground plan, in many ways resembling local dwellings. The Zhang Fei Temple in Yunyang County, Sichuan Province, stands on the south bank of the Yangtze River, facing the town on the opposite bank where the county government is seated. The temple's main halls and subsidiary structures are distributed evenly on the slope of a hill, and most of them have flying eaves and roofs of glazed tiles. The Li Bing and Son Temple overlooks the Minjiang River from atop a hill. The entrance is at the foot of the hill, while the main hall, the Li Bing Hall, stands atop the hill. The walled compound has four gates facing different directions. Enclosed in the compound is a cluster of structures -- halls, arch'ways, pavilions, towers and a theater on one section of the wall with a gate in its lower part. From the entrance to the main hall we walk up the hill, enjoying the magnificent scenery down the hill at different heights and from different angles.
Temples of this kind are dedicated to people noted for the historic contributions they made to the development of the Chinese nation or the exemplary role they played in the process. Over the centuries these people have always commanded the respect of the people, prompting people to build temples in their honor so that the kind of spirit or moral standards they represented could be passed down from generation to generation. In a nutshell, temples built by people spontaneously played the same role of mass education as the Confucius temples built by the government. The Lord Bao Temple in Hebei constitutes a sharp contrast to the extravagantly decorated Confucius temples. It is a simple courtyard, with a hall in which a statue of the Song Dynasty official is
displayed for worshipping and his instructions to his family are written on one of the walls. The courtyard, in itself, embodies the kind of honesty and cleanness "Lord Bao, the Clean Sky" upheld all his life. |
