Traces of the Sage: Monument, Materiality, and the First Temple of Confucius by James A. Flath (review)

Traces of the Sage: Monument, Materiality, and the First Temple of Confucius surveys the history of the temple to Confucius (Kong miao 孔廟), or as author James Flath refers to it, the “Kong Temple,” in Qufu 曲阜. This volume examines the various reconstructions of the temple from Han times to the present, with an emphasis on modern times. As the author notes in the Preface, this is not a work about Confucius or the legacy of his thought. Traces instead explores “the work of creating architecture, the art of constructing memorials, and the problem of managing sacred space,” and it focuses on the “temple’s physical attributes, management, and maintenance” (p. 2). The first four of the book’s seven chapters explore the premodern period; the last three, the modern period up to the year 2014. The volume includes a character glossary, bibliography, index, endnotes, several tables, and an appendix listing the dates of temple restorations. Included also are fifty black-and-white figures and ten color plates. Some figures are reproductions of illustrations from premodern documentary sources, but most are photographs of the exteriors of extant buildings in Qufu. Oddly, almost none of the figures are fully documented. Photograph captions, for example, rarely identify the photographer or note the year the photo was taken—important information relevant to studying spaces that, as this volume documents, undergo continual renovation.

Chapter 1, “Introduction: A Temple under Construction,” outlines the structure of the succeeding chapters and introduces the author’s emphasis on material culture and cultural heritage management rather than intellectual history. The author’s wide-ranging theoretical approaches are not always clear in this chapter or later in the book, and greater attention to developing the book’s overall problematique in this brief introduction would have been helpful. The author follows a largely historical approach in Chapter 2, “Kong Temple as Structure,” which surveys major developments in the temple’s structure from the Han to the Qing. Chapter 2 includes an iteration of pseudo-biographical legends about Confucius that only developed in Han and early medieval times, but some of these legends appear to be taken at face value, as they perhaps were by many of the temple’s visitors over the centuries.

Moving from space to ritual, Chapter 3, “Ritual as Material Culture,” explores selected aspects of ritual practice at the Kong Temple from the Han to the Qing, although the discussion sometimes moves beyond Qufu to a survey of larger intellectual trends. Here one finds a welcome emphasis on praxis and resource management rather than ritual theory, which has been explored by others. Yet even though the focus of the book is ostensibly material culture, the pull of written sources is ever present: in this chapter as elsewhere, some of the most engaging accounts of the temple are textual sources, such as the Ming and Qing first-person accounts of visitor’s experiences at Qufu. The importance of written sources for understanding space appears also in Chapter 4, “Kong Temple as Space,” which explores in detail the spatial arrangement of the various architectural components of the Kong Temple. The temple’s archways, chambers, and gates bear written inscriptions, and it is these textual allusions that give meaning and uniqueness to the Kong Temple’s constructed spaces.

Chapters 5 through 7 focus on the fate of the Kong Temple in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Almost half of the book is devoted to the modern era, and these latter chapters are some of the strongest in terms of historical detail. Chapter 5, “Kong Temple and the Modern Politics of Culture,” relates how the Kong temple’s various handlers negotiated the exigencies of the wild political shifts of the twentieth century—the end of Qing ritual systems, the chaos of the early twentieth...