Beijing's Temple of Heaven is a cosmos drawn in wood, stone and nines
Twice a year a Chinese emperor left the Forbidden City, gave up meat, and prayed at a complex where every circle, square and pillar count stood for something in the heavens. One slip in the rites was thought to doom the whole country's year, so the architecture itself was built to help carry his voice upward.
The Yongle Emperor, who also built the Forbidden City, founded the complex in 1420. It began as the Altar of Heaven and Earth and took its present name in 1534 under the Jiajing Emperor, who added separate temples to the Sun, Earth and Moon elsewhere in Beijing. Qing rebuilding had fixed most of today's layout by 1749. The emperor ruled as Son of Heaven, so offering public respect to the power behind his throne, mostly through harvest prayers, was a serious duty. Ordinary people were barred from even watching the procession.
Symbolism is everywhere. Heaven was a circle and Earth a square, so the outer wall is rounded at its taller northern end and squared at the lower southern end, and the round buildings sit in square yards. The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, 38 metres tall and built entirely of wood without nails, has inner, middle and outer rings of pillars read as seasons, months and the traditional two-hour divisions of the day. Lightning burned the original in 1889 and it was rebuilt a few years later. Dark blue roof tiles throughout stand for the sky.
To the south, the Circular Mound Altar is an open platform on three marble tiers where nine, the emperor's number, governs everything: a central slab ringed by nine stones, then eighteen, out to an outer ring of eighty-one. Its guardrail bounces the voice of anyone speaking from the centre, a resonance meant to help prayers reach Heaven. Between altar and hall, the Imperial Vault of Heaven sits inside the Echo Wall, which carries sound a long way, and a raised walkway 360 metres long climbs gently to the hall.
The site has had a rough modern history. Anglo-French troops occupied it in the Second Opium War, and in 1900 the Eight-Nation Alliance used it as a command post for a year. After the Qing fell, neglect let several halls collapse; Yuan Shikai staged a Ming-style prayer there in 1914 while angling to become emperor. It opened as a public park in 1918, and UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1998.
Source: Temple of Heaven
