REINVENTING CONFUCIUS AND HIS SHRINE: THE TEMPLE OF CULTURE (WENMIAO) IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA
Open Access
- Author:
- Tang, Kwok Leong
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 08, 2018
- Committee Members:
- On-Cho Ng, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
On-Cho Ng, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Kathlene T Baldanza, Committee Member
Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Committee Member
Madhuri Shrikant Desai, Outside Member
Carol Reardon, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Confucianism
Confucius
Kongzi
Temple of Culture
Ming dynasty
Qing dynasty
Cult of Kongzi - Abstract:
- The dissertation is a political, institutional, and cultural history of the cult of Kongzi (Confucius) in late imperial China, the symbolic and physical center of which was the Temple of Culture. Since the time of the Tang dynasty, when the court elevated the veneration of Kongzi into a state cult, every subsequent regime followed suit, according the ancient master/sage the highest honor and utmost respect. Both the state and the literati saw the cult of Kongzi and the Temple of Culture as a supreme expression of “the transmission of the authentic Way” (daotong), a cultural authority and tradition that was independent from, albeit complementary to, the “succession of legitimate imperial rule” (zhitong). Ideally, it functioned as a check against the autocratic power of the throne. Yet, as this dissertation argues, the cult of Kongzi and the Temple of Culture also came to serve as a blunt political instrument for promoting imperial authority. In 1530, the Ming court purposefully changed Kongzi’s time-honored posthumous status from “king” (wang) to “teacher” (shi), thereby circumscribing the cult of the ancient sage specifically as a cultural entity. Significantly, the literati provided the Ming emperors with the theoretical arguments and ritual innovations to define the cult in such a way that it strengthened imperial authority, as evidenced by the ritual manuals published in the early seventeenth century, which consciously mitigated the political importance of Kongzi by clearly honoring him as the greatest “teacher” of all time. The Qing emperors, in their own ways and under different guises, utilized the Temple of Culture as a tool to assert imperial might and impose state ideology. In the process, they invented and ushered in new ritual traditions that defined the cult of Kongzi. By studying the commingling of politics, culture, religion, and institution in the evolution of the Kongzi cult and its temple, the dissertation seeks to reveal the complex process of the formation of imperial ideology in late imperial China.