Qufu holds the longest continuously used family burial ground on earth, and the most thoroughly documented episode of its destruction.
The cemetery
The Kong Lin is a walled wood of about a hundred and eighty hectares holding more than a hundred thousand graves of Confucius's descendants, across roughly two thousand years and some eighty generations.
Nothing else of the kind exists. Burial there was restricted to the lineage, records were kept, and the genealogy of the Kong family, continuously maintained and periodically revised, is among the longest documented family trees in the world.
The trees were planted by successive generations, many brought from the disciples' home regions.
The temple
Consecrated within about two years of his death in the fifth century BCE, his house preserved as a shrine.
It grew to some four hundred and sixty rooms in nine courtyards along a north-south axis more than a kilometre long, on the plan of a palace, because successive dynasties enlarged it as a way of announcing what kind of state they were. Honouring Confucius was a claim to legitimate, literate, orderly government.
The Kong Family Mansion beside it housed the Duke Yansheng, the hereditary title held by the senior descendant, one of the longest continuous noble titles anywhere, and abolished only in the twentieth century.
November 1966
Red Guards from Beijing Normal University, led by Tan Houlan, came to Qufu during the Destroy the Four Olds campaign and worked over several weeks.
Confucius was the explicit target, the personification of everything the campaign existed to attack, and attacking him was a way of attacking the Party's own conservatives.
What was done:
- Stelae were smashed, including many centuries old.
- Graves were opened, in a cemetery where burial had been continuous for two millennia.
- The tomb of the seventy-sixth-generation Duke Yansheng was dug up and his remains hung from a tree before the mansion.
- Statues were destroyed, buildings defaced, and the temple's central image damaged.
Estimates of the total destruction vary widely and are not reliably established. Figures for stelae broken and graves opened circulate in the tens of thousands and rest on later accounts rather than contemporary records.
Now
UNESCO inscribed the site in 1994. Ceremonies are held annually on 28 September.
The state that permitted the attack now sponsors the commemorations, funds Confucius Institutes abroad, and has substantially rehabilitated Confucius as a national emblem of social harmony.
That rehabilitation is current politics rather than settled history, and it is contested, both by those who regard it as instrumental use of a philosopher for state purposes, and by those who point out that the same institution presided over the graves being opened.