Kong Fu, the Mansion of the Duke

The mansion stands immediately east of the temple, and was once joined to it. It housed the Duke of Yansheng, a title that passed down in the senior line of Confucius' descendants, and from it the family tended the Confucian sites of Qufu and governed what the sources call the largest private rural estate in China. Its layout states the Confucian order of things in brick and timber: official rooms arranged like a yamen in front, private quarters behind, and inside both a ranking by seniority, sex and status. Present-day counts give 152 buildings and 480 rooms on 12,470 square metres, and a four-storey refuge tower designed to shelter the household in an attack and never used. Its archive holds about 60,000 documents on four hundred years of the mansion's life under the Ming and the Qing.