Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CONFUCIUS
Confucius
was born in 552 BC into a declining aristocratic family in an age of petty king-
doms where life was blighted by constant war and feuding. An itinerant scholar, he ob-
served that life would be much improved if people behaved decently, and he wandered
from court to court teaching adherence to a set of moral and social values designed to bring
the citizens and the government together in harmony. Ritual and propriety were the sys-
tem's central values, and great emphasis was placed on the five “
Confucian virtues
”: be-
nevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness. An arch-traditionalist, he
believed that society required strict hierarchies and total obedience: a son should obey his
father, a wife her husband, and a subject his ruler.
Nobody paid Confucius much attention during his lifetime, and he died in obscurity. But
during the Han dynasty, six hundred years later,
Confucianism
became institutionalized,
underscoring a hierarchical system of administration that prevailed for the next two thou-
sand years. Seeing that its precepts sat well with a feudal society, rulers turned Confucian-
ism into the state religion, and Confucius became worshipped as a deity. Subsequently, of-
ficials were appointed on the basis of their knowledge of the Confucian texts, which they
studied for half their lives.
The great sage only fell from official favour in the twentieth century with the rise of the
egalitarian communists, and today there are no functioning Confucian temples left in Ch-
ina. Ironically, however, those temples that have become museums or libraries have re-
turned to a vision of the importance of learning, which is perhaps closer to the heart of the
Confucian system than ritual and worship.
Yonghe Gong
雍和宫
, yōngghé gōng • Yonghegong Beidajie • Daily 9am-4pm •
￥
25 • 010 64044499,
• Yonghegong Lama Temple subway (lines 2 & 5)
You won't see many bolder or brasher temples than the
Yonghe Gong
Lama Temple, built
towards the end of the seventeenth century as the residence of Prince Yin Zhen. In 1723, after
the prince became Emperor Yong Zheng and moved into the Forbidden City, the temple was
retiled in imperial yellow and restricted thereafter to religious use. It became a
lamasery
in
1744, housing monks from Tibet and Inner Mongolia. After the civil war in 1949, it was de-
clared a national monument and closed for the following thirty years. Remarkably, it escaped
the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, when most of the city's religious structures were des-
troyed or turned into factories and warehouses.
Today the lamasery also functions as an active
TibetanBuddhist
centre. It's used basically
for propaganda purposes, to show that China is guaranteeing and respecting the religious
freedom of minorities, though it's questionable how genuine the state-approved monks you
