Temple of Heaven (天坛）

May 6, 2007

I love this place! Seemingly, it’s because of the serene surroundings that it has amidst being inside the urban city of Beijing. I’ve seen that this is the symbol that China decides to parade in the Olympics 2008 Summer games rather than the Great Wall. I’m not very good at the history of this place so I took time to research in Wikipedia (which is banned in China internet, don’t know why).

Temple of Heaven is in the Xuanwu District southeast of Beijing. This ancient temple is one the temples where the emperors prayed for good harvest. I got a hold of a map of the place, but I wasn’t able to finish getting around the place since we took a lot of time taking pictures while in the big hall where it was said that the emperor would shout, and the whole city will hear some rumble (that was before because everything was quieter before!)

Some facts from WIKI:

* The Temple is surrounded by two cordons of walls; the outer wall has a taller, semi-circular northern end, representing Heaven, and a shorter, rectangular southern end, representing the Earth.

* All the buildings within the Temple have special dark blue roof tiles, again representing the Heaven.

* The Altar of Heaven was constructed with details representing the number nine, the representative number of the Emperor.

* It is said that if you stand at the centre of the platform and clap your hands, you can hear the echo because of the concavity of the surrounding wall.

* The House of Heavenly Lord is surrounded by a curved wall, 6 metres tall and 32.5 metres in radius. The wall has one opening. It is nicknamed the ‘Echo Wall’ because a person at one end of the wall (one side of the opening) can hear the voice of a person at the other end of the wall (the other side of the opening).

* The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is 32 metres in diameter and 38 metres tall. It has four inner, twelve middle and twelve outer pillars, representing the four seasons, twelve months and twelve traditional Chinese hours respectively.

* The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests was built without a single nail.

* Hall of Annual Prayer has been said to be a more literal translation of Qi Nian Dian than Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. In fact, the original meaning of nian (meaning ‘year’ in modern Chinese) was ‘harvest’, a meaning still found in phrases such as 年成 niancheng, ‘harvest’. The earliest graph of the character is a representation of a man carrying a sheaf of grain.

Echo hall where you can say something at one end, and the person at the other end will hear it for this reason :

Inside the temple hall

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