Qufu

Qufu was the capital of Lu, one of the states of the Zhou period, founded in the 11th century BC for the family of the Duke of Zhou. The walls of that ancient city, far larger than the present town, can still be traced in banks of earth in the fields around it. Lu was a small state but a conservative and scholarly one, which kept the rites of the Zhou court more carefully than its neighbours, and it was into this that Confucius was born in 551 BC.

He taught here, travelled for years in search of a ruler who would apply his ideas, and returned to Qufu to teach and edit the classics until his death in 479 BC. His house became a shrine almost at once. Successive dynasties enlarged it and granted land and hereditary titles to his descendants: the temple grew to nine courtyards and more than four hundred rooms, and the mansion beside it ran a great estate with its own officials.

The present walled town is Ming, its wall built in 1522 around the temple rather than on the older city site. The family left the mansion in 1937, fleeing to Chongqing during the war with Japan and then to Taiwan during the civil war, where the head of the family still lives. The complexes were badly damaged in November 1966, when Red Guards from Beijing dug up graves in the cemetery, smashed stelae and felled old pines; they were repaired afterwards. UNESCO inscribed the temple, mansion and cemetery in 1994, and the Chinese state has since promoted Confucius as a national symbol, rebuilding parts of the town and reviving the ceremonies.

Qufu's identity is entirely bound to one family and one philosopher. Confucian ritual is performed here as living practice rather than reconstruction alone: the autumn memorial ceremony involves ranks of dancers with feather wands, ancient instruments including stone chimes and bells, robed officiants and set texts, and smaller rites follow the classical calendar. Visiting students and parents leave wooden prayer tablets asking for success in the national university entrance examination, a modern continuation of the old link between the sage and scholarship.

The Kong surname is extremely common in the town, and genealogy is taken seriously; the family's records run to dozens of generations and are periodically updated. Calligraphy, stele rubbing, woodblock printing and the carving of stone are traditional crafts sustained by the temple, and the town has research institutes and academies devoted to Confucian studies, with visiting scholars from Korea, Japan and Vietnam, where the tradition also took root.

Everyday manners are Shandong manners, noticeably formal by Chinese standards: careful seating by age and rank at dinner, insistent hospitality, frequent toasts, and a directness that outsiders sometimes read as bluntness. The town is quieter and more conservative than the coastal cities of the province, and it is unusually full of school groups, since visits to Qufu are a staple of the national curriculum.

About 653,000 people live in the county-level city, of whom some 188,000 are in urban areas; the rest are spread across farming villages on the plain. Inside the walls the population is older and the buildings low, while newer housing, schools and offices have spread east towards the high-speed railway station.

Tourism and education dominate the local economy. Hotels, restaurants, guides, cart drivers and souvenir workshops depend on the flow of visitors, and the city has universities and teacher-training colleges as well as Confucian research bodies. Beyond that the district lives on wheat and maize farming, vegetables, orchards, food processing and light manufacturing, with coal mining in the wider Jining area.

The rhythm is small-town. Markets open early, school groups arrive by coach through the morning, the temple streets fill in the afternoon, and the evening belongs to food stalls, square dancing and children in the squares by the wall. Cycle rickshaws and electric carts are the everyday transport of the old town. Residents complain about ticket prices for their own landmarks, summer crowds and the slow drift of younger people to Jinan, Qingdao and further afield.

Qufu eats Lu cuisine, the classic Shandong school, in two registers. The famous one is Confucian family cooking, developed in the Kong Family Mansion over centuries of entertaining imperial visitors: a formal banquet style of braised and steamed dishes with auspicious names taken from the classics, careful knife work, clear stocks and dishes such as braised sea cucumber, stuffed bean curd and slow-cooked meats. Several restaurants in the town cook versions of it, and it is best understood as ceremonial food rather than everyday fare.

The everyday register is northern and wheat-based. Steamed buns, flatbreads, boiled dumplings and hand-pulled noodles replace rice at most tables; jianbing, the thin crisp pancake of mixed grains rolled around raw spring onion and fermented bean paste, is the usual breakfast. Tofu, braised or in clear soup, mutton soup, freshwater fish and pork with garlic and scallion make up the usual dishes, with vinegar and raw garlic on the table.

Local products are sold along the temple streets: grain liquor, dried mountain vegetables, walnuts and chestnuts, and sweets and pastries sold as souvenirs. Shandong's fruit reaches the markets in season — peaches, apples, pears and persimmons — and the evening stalls outside the walls grill skewers of lamb and sell fried snacks and cold noodles well into the night.