The Temple of Earth, first known as the Fang Ze Temple. In the thirteenth year of Jiajing (1534), it was renamed the Temple of Earth after the restoration, which was the place where the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties sacrificed the "Imperial Land God", that is, the land god, which was the second of the five altars in the ancient capital of Beijing, and also the largest existing altar of the emperor in China, covering a total area of 374 hectares.
In 1925, jing zhaoyin at that time, similar to the current mayor of Beijing. With the consent of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the time, the Temple of Earth was renamed "Jingzhao Park" and some sports equipment was added to build the first stadium in Beijing. In 1928, after Jingzhao Park was renamed as a citizen park, the park was gradually abandoned for some reasons.
After the peaceful liberation of Peiping, the government renovated and opened the abandoned garden into a park in April 1957, and there are still ancient buildings such as the Fang Ze Altar, the Imperial Palace, the Zai Pavilion, the Zhai Palace, and the Shrine. But do you know that for more than one hundred and fifty years before the construction of the Temple of Earth, the emperors of the Ming Dynasty have been following the religious ceremony of sacrificing heaven and earth together, and only one altar is enough to sacrifice together, so why does Beijing have five altars such as the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of Earth?
In fact, the emergence of the Temple of Earth is not so much a purely liturgical system change as a long-planned political event. It turned out that Emperor Jiajing of The Ming Dynasty was the cousin of the previous Emperor Mingwuzong Zhengde, because the Zhengde Emperor died violently and there was no prince, the Jiajing Emperor was forcibly pulled over, and he was forced to succeed his cousin as emperor.
Not only that, the courtiers forced the Jiajing Emperor to recognize his brother as his father, that is, to let Jiajing inherit the throne in the way of "brother to brother and brother", which made the etiquette-oriented and assertive Emperor Jiajing very angry.
The Jiajing Emperor wanted to inherit the throne by his birth mother living with him in the imperial palace and posthumously presenting his biological father as emperor, but this idea was strongly opposed by the ministers.
This fierce struggle between the emperor and the ministers, known in history as the "Great Ritual Discussion", was finally won because the minister Zhang Xuan quoted the scriptures and used ancient books such as the Zhou Li to refute the views of the Qunchen, and finally the emperor won the victory. And this incident also made the emperor eat the sweetness of establishing his own prestige and consolidating his rule by changing the etiquette system.
Therefore, the Jiajing Emperor found an opportunity to show that the "heaven and earth joint sacrifice" in the sacrifice violated the ancient ritual system and required the willingness of separate sacrifices. In the ninth year of Jiajing, the emperor restored the ritual system of "dividing heaven and earth" in the early Ming Dynasty, and then built a special altar of Fang Ze, which was later repaired and eventually became the current temple of earth.
Therefore, the emergence of the Temple of Earth is not a change in the ceremonial system at all, but a long-planned political event. In fact, the reason why heaven and earth were sacrificed together before was also because Zhu Yuanzhang believed that heaven represented his father, earth represented his mother, and father and mother should live together, so he could not separate heaven and earth. It seems that whether heaven and earth should be divided or should be united depends on the words of the ruler