Suzhou Confucius Temple

Located at No. 45 Renmin Road, it was listed as a cultural heritage site in Jiangsu Province in 1957.
Suzhou Confucius Temple, also known as the Prefectural School, was originally called the State School and was first established in the Northern Song Dynasty in 1035. It was founded by Fan Zhongyan during his tenure as a prefect, utilizing the former site of the Southern Garden of the Five Dynasties Wu Yue Qian family. The layout was designed as ‘a grand hall to the left, a public hall to the right, a pond in front, and chambers on the side’. Fan Zhongyan reformed the old system by integrating the official school with the temple for worshipping Confucius, creating a new pattern of ‘temple on the left and school on the right’, which was later emulated by other regions.

In 1089, Fan Zhongyan’s son, Fan Chunli, expanded the temple using the spare land of the Southern Garden. During the Southern Song Dynasty’s Jianyan period in 1130, it was destroyed by war and left with nothing. In the 11th year of the Shaoxing era (1141), Liang Rujia, the prefect of Pingjiang, reconstructed it. Since then, until the 3rd to 7th years of the Tongzhi era of the Qing Dynasty (1864-1867), when Li Hongzhang and Ding Richang successively repaired it, there have been more than 30 recorded renovations and expansions over 700 years according to inscriptions and historical records.

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In the Southern Song Dynasty, there were 230 rooms, and during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the area exceeded 150 acres, approximately 100,000 square meters. Opening hours are all year round, closed on Mondays; open from Tuesday to Sunday from 09:00 to 16:00.

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