Tag Archives: Confucius

Nanjing’s Confucian Temple

Sometimes, visiting a big city like Nanjing or Shanghai can be a bad idea, especially if it’s during a national holiday like Spring Festival. Literally, tens of thousands of Chinese people have the same idea, and places like Fuzimiao 夫子 — the Confucian Temple — become so crowded it becomes hard to navigate or even walk sometimes.  For example, this is a recent picture of the temple’s entrance. You can see the doorway into the place, as well as Confucius himself, right above the Chinese guy’s head.  This place was that crowded.

The temple itself is thousands of years old. It has been destroyed and rebuilt. At one point, it was so disregarded that the Kuomintang (KMT) once used the place as a barracks during the civil war / revolution that they lost to the communists.  The place didn’t start undergoing renovation and historical preservation until 1985. Although it’s a tourist trap now, historically the area had been dedicated to studying Confucian thought. Some of the other musuems in this greater area are also dedicated to higher learning and taking the imperial exams. After all, Nanjing used to be the capital of China.

The following are some pictures I found recently on an old phone. This is when I could get in two years back. At the time, I visited the place with my father when he had flown out from Monmouth County, New Jersey, for a visit. I had other photos of the place, but that was on a camera that I eventually lost in Beijing at the Great Wall.

The thing I always find interesting about Confucian temples in China is that it’s not really a “religion,” but you still see altars and places to burn incense and light candles. Confucius never claimed to be a mystical figure, and his book, The Analects, reads more like sagely advice on governing and living — not something about the supernatural regarding god or a pantheon of deities. But, sometimes in Chinese Culture, the line between “religion” and respecting one’s elders and ancestors can be thin.

Greater Fuzimiao

Foreigners misjudge the size of Chinese cities all the time. It can still happen to those of us who have lived in the Middle Kingdom for a couple of years. It can especially happen if your “China experience” is mostly in a smaller city like Changzhou. That’s what happened to me in Nanjing. I went back to Fuzimiao, aka The Confucian Temple, thinking I can spend a few hours and take everything in. There’s a problem with that: it’s too big, and seeing everything would entail more than three hours. There’s not just the temple itself, but other museums.

Plus, once you stray away from the Temple area, you end up in other attractions.  For example, White Egret Park is just down the road, and not by far. It’s walking distance.

There are easily a few things here besides the White Pagoda to occupy a person’s time. The park itself is large with several bridges to a few islands.  Also nearby is this…

In trying to get out of White Egret Park, I accidentally ended up in Dongshuiguan Relics Park. This entails part of an old city wall, but there is more to it than just that. Nanjing has a history stretching back thousands of years. Parts of Nanjing, like the Qinhuai River area has a history stretching back to the Stone Age. So, lesson learned. This is no going to part of Nanjing to “see everything  in a few hours.” In Changzhou, yes, but apparently not in Nanjing.