Temple of Heaven - Beijing China


Today my cousin and I visited The Temple of Heaven located a bit south of Tian'anmen on line 5 of the subway (tiantandongmen).


My favorite spot was the Circular Mound Altar, which is most significant this time of year! This is a photo of my cousin Elliott looking regal as he poses.

The Circular Altar has three layered terraces with white marble. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368 A.D. - 1911 A.D.), the emperors would offer sacrifice to Heaven on the day of the Winter Solstice every year. This ceremony was to thank Heaven and hope everything would be good in the future.


Another important building in Temple of Heaven is Imperial Vault of Heaven. If you look at it from far away, you will find that the Vault is like a blue umbrella with gold head. The structure of it is like that of Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest, but smaller in size. The structure was made of bricks and timber. The Vault was used to place memorial tablets of Gods. White marble railings surround the vault.


The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest is a big palace with round roof and three layers of eaves. Inside the Hall are 28 huge posts. The four posts along the inner circle represent four seasons-spring, summer, autumn and winter; the 12 posts along the middle circle represent the 12 months; and 12 posts along the outer circle represent 12 Shichen (Shichen is a means of counting time in ancient China. One Shichen in the past equaled two hours and a whole day was divided into 12 Shichens). The roof is covered with black, yellow and green colored glaze representing the heavens, the earth and everything on earth. The Hall has a base named Altar for Grain Prayers which is made of three layers of white marble and has a height of six meters.

Thanks to: http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/beijing/heaven/ for the intel!

Comments

Dexter Nicholson said…
australian immigration visa

Did you know that the Temple of Heaven is seen as the most holy of Beijing's imperial temples. It has been described as "a masterpiece of architecture and landscape design".
April 7, 2010 at 10:31 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Twitter Experiment - Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas

UT Dallas History Professor Dr. Monica Rankin, @monicarankin, wanted to know how she could reach and include more students in the class discussion. She had heard of Twitter... The following is a short video describing her " Twitter Experiment " in the classroom with comments from students about the pros and cons of Twitter in a traditional learning environment. I am Graduate student at UT Dallas pursuing a Masters in Emerging Media and Communication (EMAC) and collaborated with Dr. Rankin to see how Twitter might be used in her US History 2 class. This experiment was both exciting and a bit daunting... The video is one of my projects for a digital video class with Dean Terry, @therefore, and part of a class project in my content creation and collaboration class with Dan Langendorf, @dlangendorf. http://emac.utdallas.edu @kesmit3
Read more

Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet Freedom

Text of Clinton's speech: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/21/internet_freedom?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full Part1 Only a week after Google's announcement to the world that it would no longer censor in China, the timing of Clinton's speech likely makes the relationship between Google and the US Government seem closer than it actually is. Not to mention that..historically The Chinese have not taken all to well to direct confrontation or any challenge to their absolute authority and Goggle's move followed by Clinton's speech makes me, as an Emerging Media and Communications Graduate student, a bit uncomfortable. I'm currently living in Beijing and have had an opportunity to ask many locals what they think about the Google 'threat' (as it is now being called). For the the most part, people think Google's decision is entirely motivated by profit. And, quite frankly, those inside China do not have access to blogger.com, so h...
Read more

Youku.com on THIS 中国 SIDE of the Great FireWall...

Image
So, there are advantages to the Great Fire Wall. What are they? Full length movies on Youku... What is Youku.com? Well, it's like YouTube, but... BETTER? (that's what a girl in class told me last week) hmm. The catch? If you try to load it from the USA, you get an error: But if you load it from China? You see the the full-length feature film which looks like this: Yeah for Intellectual Property...
Read more