Traces of the Sage studies the Temple of Confucius (Kongzi 孔子 throughout this volume) in Qufu 曲阜, Shandong province, from its earliest beginnings to the present day. Combining information from secondary literature and from Ming and Qing local gazetteers, Flath narrates the political, social, and cultural history of the site and analyzes its structures as an example of “the ways in which societies manage space and material” (xiv).
Kongzi (551–479 BCE) was a fairly obscure figure for centuries. It was only after Confucianism was adopted as a state doctrine that China's scholars and officials began to venerate the Sage and honor his descendants. A local cult, sustained with local elite support, gradually attracted imperial patronage, even though until the eighth century the object of worship could as easily be the Duke of Zhou as the Master himself. As Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism gained preeminence in Chinese society, emperors seeking legitimation bestowed titles and honors on Kongzi and donated funds to construct the gates, steles, stele pavilions, and sacrificial halls that constituted the Kong Temple complex on which the book focuses.
The history of the Kong Temple is one of periodic destruction and renewal. The building cycles are projected onto a long-term historical trend of cultic expansion and ritual elaboration, most prominently expressed in the successive promotions in status bestowed on Kongzi and the head of the lineage composed of his direct descendants. The temple was one of three major sites for veneration, the other two being the family mansion and the “Kong Forest” (Kong lin 孔林), where successive generations of Kongs were buried, which was the primary site for Kongzi cult rituals in ancient times. In later periods, grave rites gave way to sacrifices performed before altars in the Kong temple complex as the major form of veneration.
Early debate centered on exactly how Kongzi should be regarded: was he (36) an “uncrowned king in his own right,” reflecting his supposed descent from the Shang rulers, or was he a commoner whose philosophical contributions deserved recognition in the form of aristocratic titles? When Tang Gaozong visited the Kong Temple in 666, Kongzi was “First Teacher” (xianshi 先師). In 739, Emperor Xuanzong raised his title (p.59) to “King of Exalted Culture” (Wenxuanwang 文宣王). The prosperity produced by imperial favor was subsequently reversed as Tang power weakened following the An Lushan rebellion (755–63), a cycle that was repeated in later ages. The vacillating fortunes of the Kongzi cult, laid out in an Appendix, had direct bearing on the collection of architectural structures making up the temple complex which was periodically destroyed by war, neglect, fire, and politically-inspired attacks.
The fortunes of the Kong lineage were directly correlated with the political tides sweeping the country. The head of the Kong lineage was imperially promoted from “Baosheng Marquis” to “Duke of Exalted Culture” (Wenxuangong 文宣公, subsequently “Duke of Fulfilling the Sage”) in 739, with the responsibility of perpetuating the veneration of Kongzi and protecting the cult's relics. Along with honorific titles came the right to have his effigy housed in buildings with architectural features defined by sumptuary law that reflected his status and sacrifices of kingly proportions. The imperial grants of estates and dependent households to guard, maintain, and preserve the graves and temples made the Duke, head of the Kong lineage, a wealthy and powerful figure during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).
As an exemplar of the state's patronage of Confucianism, Dukes had to choose sides during periods of dynastic transition. When Duke Kong Duanyou 孔端友 fled southward with the Song rulers during the twelfth-century Jurchen invasion of north China, the victorious Jin invaders awarded the title “Duke of Fulfilling the Sage” to his younger brother who remained in Qufu, creating northern and southern Kong descent groups that both claimed the sole right to perform ancestral sacrifices to the Sage. The schism ended when the Mongols conquered South China and confirmed the northern branch as the true heirs. A similar situation occurred in 1948, when the head of the lineage, Kong Decheng 孔德成, joined the Nationalist government exodus to Taiwan.
Kongzi was not the sole object of worship in the Kong Temple. Neo-Confucian scholars like Zhu Xi 朱熹 and Cheng Yi 程頤 highlighted Mencius (Mengzi 孟子, 372–289 BCE), Zengzi 曾子 (Zeng Shen 曾參, 305–435 BCE) and Zisi 子思 (Kong Ji 孔伋, Confucius's grandson) in the transmission of the Way, and these Confucian disciples joined Yanzi 言子 (Yan Yan 言偃, 502–? BCE) on the altars of the Kong Temple complex. Titles were eventually awarded and sacrificial halls were established for Kongzi's major disciples, their fathers, and for Kongzi's wife. At its apogee in the early nineteenth century, the Kong Temple complex held a multiplicity of historical artifacts, including early texts and steles inscribed by emperors, famous scholars, and officials that were erected over almost two millennia. Ordered sequences of gates, courtyards with semicircular ponds and bridges, stele pavilions, and halls were arrayed in a south to north ascending hierarchical order along an eastern and western corridor flanking the structures in the central axis, the greatest of which was the Hall of Great Completion, the Dachengdian 大成殿, in which the sacrifice to Kongzi was performed.
The Revolution of 1911, which ended the Qing dynasty and ushered in the modern era in China, created new challenges for the Kongzi cult, which was now “situated within the political space of the nation” (127). Conservatives defended the Kong Temple from attacks by iconoclasts who cast Confucianism as the villain hindering China's attempts to create a New Culture suitable for the nation-state. Despite its secularizing bent, the Nationalist government confirmed the Kong Duke's title, recognizing the continued potency of the cult as a symbol of Chinese identity. The temple itself, damaged during the warlord period and ravaged by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution years (1966–76) and the anti-Lin (Biao 林彪) anti-Confucius campaign of 1974, made a comeback in the post-Mao era. The Kong cemetery, family mansion, and temple complex have been designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO since 1994.
Tourism is the raison d'etre of today's Qufu, and the new profit-making ethos is exemplified in the activities of the Kong Mansion Family Industrial Group, which engages in business promotions. Local authorities seek attractions that will keep visitors for longer than the several hours they tend to spend touring the site and viewing the ritual sacrifice to Confucius staged for their benefit. Flath reports that in 2014 an international chain hotel and new Kongzi museum were on the list of future construction projects. His epilogue presents photographs of the new architecture that strives to combine the old and the new in the now commercialized environment that threatens to overshadow the historical monuments.
Flath's study is full of details that will appeal to specialists of Confucianism and Chinese popular religion, but general readers may require a bit more explanation than he provides. His analysis of the spatial layout of the Kong Temple complex in Ming and Qing times relies heavily on photographs and would have been enhanced by the inclusion of a good map. The reproductions of woodblock prints showing the Kong temple in earlier historical periods are too small to be useful to the reader and lack translated titles. The book has many interesting insights, for example (97–101) the conflict between the Ming/Qing elite's intention of demarcating a sacred space and the public's pursuit of convenience, which resulted in the everyday infringement of the frontal courtyards of the temple by townsfolk seeking a shortcut.
Despite an early sixteenth-century attempt to remove sculptural images from Confucius temples around the country, for most of the time after the middle of the sixth century, the Kong Temple featured his “effigy,” attired in kingly robes and headdress, and sculptural images of his followers. In sacrificing before effigies, the Kong Temple was thus a distinct anomaly to the Confucius temples, wenmiao 文庙, that were part of the townscape of every administrative seat in late imperial China, which featured tablets but not sculptural images as objects of veneration after 1530.
