Kong Lin: A Road of Cypresses Into Ten Thousand Graves

Inside Qufu's north wall the city's main axis changes its name from Drum Tower Avenue to North Gate Avenue and runs due north for 1,266 metres, a wide boulevard planted with cypress and pine and decorated with the Wan gu chang chun memorial arch, until it arrives at the main southern gates of the cemetery. What lies beyond is not laid out as a garden but as a wood: more than 10,000 mature trees give the place its name and its shade. Confucius is buried near the bank of the Sishui river, and the mound over him is a cone-shaped hill. The tomb first raised there had the shape of an axe and carried a brick platform for sacrifice. Stelae and later burials accumulated around it, Ming burials filling the western part of the ground and Qing burials the eastern, until a family plot had become a landscape.

Order runs through the ground here as it does through the buildings at Qufu. About a kilometre north-west of Confucius' tomb lies a comparatively small area where some dozen Dukes of Yansheng, from the fifty-fifth to the sixty-fourth generation, have been buried, their sites standing in more or less chronological rows from south to north and, within each row, from east to west. Every duke has his own spirit way oriented from south to north, and every spirit way holds the same furniture in the same order: three pairs of animals, felines that are sometimes winged, then rams, then horses; a memorial arch; a bixi carrying a stele; two guardian figures, a warrior on the west side of the path and a civil official on the east; and a last stele before the small tumulus.

Stone, not ritual, is the medium of this place. The 2011 census counted 5,572 inscribed pieces here: 25 from the Song, 60 from the Yuan, 581 from the Ming, 2,627 from the Qing, 500 from the Republic and 90 from the 1950s and 60s, with 231 of undetermined date; alongside them stand 1,192 subsidiary carvings, among them 795 stone offering tables and 122 incense burners. The cemetery also keeps the twelfth century in its record: when Jin troops overran the region, soldiers there wanted to dig up the sage's grave, and the commander who asked who Confucius was, was told he was a great saint of antiquity, and had the soldiers executed. In 1966 the mound was levelled and the sage's great stele destroyed; of the three sacred sites together, more than a thousand stelae were smashed and more than two thousand graves dug open.