Confucius Temple

Confucius temple, located in Qufu of Shandong province, is the special memorial for worshipping or remembering Confucius. Originally established in 478 BC, Confucius temple used to be the former residence of Confucius, and it was built according to the standard of royal or imperial palace. Confucius temple is one of three Chinese greatest ancient architecture complexes, which play a more important role in the world architectural history. Confucius Temple is the central memorial for worshipping Confucius, which is the model of more than 2000 branched Confucius temples in other places of China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore and American and so on.

Confucius Temple is said to be built in 478 BC , the next year after Confucius died, and the king of Lu Kingdom changed his former residence to be the memorial temple for him. Since then Confucius was highly respected and awarded from generation to generation, and later it was enlarged to be the temple, particularly the temple was largely restored in Qing dynasty and then finalized its current appearance. In the temple there are in total nine gardens and its mid axe from south to north with the total length of 630 meters and width of 140 meters. There are more than 460 halls, pavilions and rooms, 54 gate-style archways and 13 royal inscription steles. It covers roughly 95,000 square meters in total. There are a large number of stone inscription steles in Confucius Temple, especially a lot of steles of Han dynasty preserved here, and it is the largest one that preserves the most Han-dynasty stone inscription steles. The amount of stone inscription steles is the second only to Beilin of Xian (Xian Stele Wood). The size of Confucius Temple is next to Forbidden City in Beijing. It is the model of Chinese ancient memorial architecture complexes.