While in Beijing I took Maggie to the Confucius temple.  I had heard that it was being renovated and I wanted to take a look.  We hopped in a cab and told the driver to take us there.  He had not heard of it, which I took as an indication of how obscure it was.  I gave him the general neighborhood and he dropped us off just across the street from the Yonghegong Lamist temple.  The people there directed us around the corner and down the street.  After paying our Y10 admission fee, we entered and found a dilapidated compound:

   
     The main courtyard was surrounded by hundreds
of stelae, large stone tablets carved with the names of men who had passed the highest bureaucratic examination, based on the Confucian classics, at various times during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911):

    
     Upon closer inspection, it seemed that the stelae had been vandalized.  Some had deep scratches, as if raked with a metal tool; others had obviously been broken in pieces and cemented back together.  I imagined that the place had been ransacked during the Cultural Revolution.

    A lackadaisical renovation was underway.  A few workmen were rebuilding the wooden structures and laying a new pathway.  Nobody seemed to be in much of a hurry, and the materials and tools were simple, crude even.  This was quite a contrast to the frenetic pace and modern methods of the numerous hotels and office buildings springing up around Beijing.  And the improvements being made to key tourist sites, like the Imperial Palace and the Summer Palace, were obviously of a higher priority than the slow and haphazard work on the Confucian temple.  Money clearly trumps tradition when it comes to renovation funds.   The government may want to bring Confucius back, but the revival seems to be taking a back seat to continuing economic growth.

     We could not enter the main hall, which was blocked by a corrugated metal obstacle:

    
     And then I noticed them.  At the base of the blue steel gate were dozens of bundles of joss sticks, brought not by government functionaries or guilt-ridden capitalists, but by ordinary people searching for a connection to the Confucian past.  The top-down, official Confucian revival may be compromised by economic interests, but a bottom-up popular demand for Confucian meaning is evident.

    We found something similar at the Guozijian Imperial College right next door to the Confucian temple.

      There we chanced upon a bridge over a small moat, reminiscent of the larger features of the Imperial Palace:

     When we walked across we realized that the bridge was adorned with hundreds of small wooden amulets, each with one side emblazoned with the character "fu," for good fortune, and the reserve side inscribed with wishes for good luck in school. 

     The national college entrance exam had just passed, so I guessed that many students had come to this site, which had once been the place where the Emperor recited aloud chapters from the classics to the assembled students and scholars, in search of blessings from the spirits of the past.  Indeed, when we went in the hall, we found two women selling the wooden amulets.  We bought one.  They told us to write a wish for good luck in school on the back, and then take it to the statue of Confucius in the rear courtyard and ask the Master for his aid:

       
     We skipped the obeisance but wrote a wish for Maggie’s success in next year’s seventh grade and added the charm to the host of others:

     Maggie’s faux socialist styling lent a bit of irony to the exercise.

      All in all, it was an instructive afternoon.   It seems that people, students especially, have some contemporary use for the Confucian past.  The government may have its purposes and ideas for the selective invocation of Confucian ethics, but average people have their own understandings.  I have been paying more attention of late to how the government has been proceeding.  I now realize I have to look more carefully at popular feelings.  I don’t know what, precisely, Confucianism might become in a modern Chinese context, but, whatever that may be, it will be driven as much by popular desires as by official proclamations.