Every year on September 28, the Quanzhou Confucian Temple will hold the highest standard "Shi Mian Li" to worship Confucius. In addition to the Confucius Temple in Qufu, Shandong, the hometown of Confucius, and the Confucius Temple in Beijing, the capital of the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, it is amazing that such a high-level Confucian temple appears in Quanzhou.
Quanzhou Confucian Temple and Xuegong are located in the center of the central axis of the ancient city, and their status is unparalleled. This group of magnificent courtyard-style buildings was first built in the Tang Dynasty, formed in the Song Dynasty, and completed in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The local educational architecture is composed of a school palace group. The scale of construction is the largest among the seven southeastern provinces in China.
After 19 large-scale constructions, the Quanzhou Confucian Temple still completely preserves more than 500 sets of antique Confucius ritual vessels, musical instruments, and dance sets made during the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty, as well as Hindu-style stone statues from the Yuan Dynasty, cultural relics from the Song Dynasty, and secondary art from the Qing Dynasty. Machined column foundations. These precious cultural relics are important remains and historical witnesses of the spread of Confucian culture in Quanzhou and the blending and coexistence of multiple cultures.
As the "highest institution of learning" in ancient Quanzhou, the Confucian Temple and Academy of Quanzhou ushered in the glorious era of imperial examinations where "humanities flourished throughout Fujian". In more than 1,100 years from the eighth year of Zhenyuan in the Tang Dynasty to the thirtieth year of Guangxu in the Qing Dynasty, 2,454 people in Quanzhou passed the Jinshi examination, including those in the Song Dynasty. There are as many as 1,418 Jinshi in Quanzhou, ranking first among all prefectures in the province in terms of number. Ouyang Zhan, Zeng Gongliang, Su Song, Cai Xiang... When you open this list of "student masters", you will see that each of them is a star-like name, leaving a strong mark on many fields in ancient China.
Over the past thousands of years, Quanzhou Confucian Temple and Academy, under the attention and protection of generations of local officials and rural eunuchs, have respected Confucius and studied learning, and they have remained new for a long time. Cultural exhibitions and activities with unique Confucian characteristics such as the Confucius Ceremony, the Writing Ceremony, the Coming of Age Ceremony, and the Apprenticeship Ceremony tell the world in the form of cultural return that the thousand-year cultural heritage has not been interrupted.
Editor in charge: [Ren Shuai]