China Traditional Rural Ancestral Temple

Ancestral hall, also known as ancestral hall, ancestral hall, ancestral hall, etc. It is a place to worship ancestors, records the glory and tradition of the family, is a family temple and a symbol of Confucian traditional culture. In ancient times, China people had a tradition of offering sacrifices to their ancestors. The Zhou Dynasty established a perfect ancestral temple system with strict hierarchy. The emperor built seven temples, five temples, three doctor temples and one temple. Since the Five Dynasties, there have been more and more architectural phenomena of folk ancestral temples. In the Southern Song Dynasty, Confucian scholar Zhu advocated the establishment of folk temples to commemorate the four generations of ancestors of the family. During the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, Xia Yan wrote to the imperial court, demanding that the restrictions on the construction of private temples be lifted.

From then on, the imperial court no longer restricted the construction of folk ancestral halls. Why are there so many ancestral temples in the south and so few in the north? First of all, many families in the south are northerners and they moved to the south. A person's descendants become a family after the flowers are scattered in the south, 100 people, 100 families. So the family size is very small, so a village may have several ancestral halls! When northerners come to the south, they compete with the locals for land. People in the same area all speak with different accents. The pressure of survival competition forces southerners to improve family cohesion, and building ancestral temples is a good way.

Of course, we also need to build earth buildings to strengthen our defense. The situation in the north is just the opposite to that in the south. In the north where Han people have lived for generations, a big family will have many branches and descendants, some hundreds of thousands, some tens of thousands, and a big family in the same area only needs to build an ancestral hall. The relationship between northerners and compatriots is also relatively friendly and less hostile. So there is a large population in the north, but there are relatively few ancestral halls. Second, the north is at war and the south is at war.

The main threat faced by ancient China came from the northern grassland, which was located in the front line and vulnerable to foreign invasion. The north was the political center of ancient times. More wars and chaos, more destruction of agricultural production in the north, and more population decline. In troubled times, people are a matter of food, clothing, housing and transportation. If there are many escapes, the ancestral temple will naturally be difficult to preserve. There are far fewer wars in the South, especially before the Qing Dynasty, and the South was rarely affected by the war. The stability of ordinary people's lives makes the preservation of ancestral halls easy.