Within two years of Confucius' death his disciples turned his former hall into a temple, and in 195 BC the founder of the Han, Liu Bang, passing Qufu on his way home from Huainan, sacrificed a full ox there, the first emperor to do so. The precedent held: twelve emperors later paid twenty personal visits to Qufu, and about a hundred more sent deputies on 196 official visits. The temple was removed altogether in a rebuilding of 611 AD; by the Song it had three sections and four courtyards. In 1331 it was framed in a wall modelled on the imperial palace. Fire in 1499 destroyed the Dacheng Hall and 120-odd buildings with it, and rebuilding took five years and 150,000 taels of silver. Lightning struck again in 1724, and that work took six years. Altogether the temple has known 15 major renovations and 31 large repairs.
From the journal
Qufu's Temple: Nine Courtyards, Five Hundred Steles and a First Sacrifice
The temple at Qufu was raised over Confucius' own house two years after his death, and for two thousand years every Chinese emperor who came north went into it.
In the same city · Jining ↗A House Turned Into an Ancestral Hall
A Narrow Rectangle of Yellow Tile Through the Old Town
The plan imitates the palace and runs through the walled town itself, dividing the old city into an eastern and a western half. It is a narrow rectangle about 1,100 metres from the south gate to the north, symmetrical to either side of a central axis, with red walls, yellow tiles and painted rafters. The first three courtyards are open and planted with tall pines. The Hongdao Gate, built in 1377 as the temple's main entrance, took its present name in 1730 from the emperor's reading of a line in the Classics: a person broadens the Way, not the Way the person. North of the Dazhong Gate the complex splits three ways, the middle group sacrificing to Confucius, the east to his ancestors and the west to his parents. The oldest building on the site is a stele pavilion of the Jin dynasty.
The Arguments Written on Stone
The temple is also a library written in stone. A recent book on Confucian stelae in Qufu counts around 500 monuments on the temple grounds and does not claim that its list is complete; a 2011 census in the cemetery two kilometres north found 5,572 inscribed pieces. The Thirteen Stele Pavilions hold the choicest. Five pavilions in the northern row each shelter a single large stele carried on a stone tortoise; they were installed under the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors between 1683 and 1748, stand 3.8 to 4 metres tall, and their turtles reach 4.8 metres long, so each weighs up to 65 tons. Eight smaller pavilions in the southern row hold stelae of the Jurchen Jin and the Mongol Yuan alongside Qing ones. Not every inscription is in Chinese: some Yuan and Qing tablets carry Middle Mongolian in the 'Pags-Pa script, and some Manchu.
