The Ming and Qing capital was laid out as a ritual instrument. The classical prescription placed the ancestral temple to the left of the palace and the altar of soil and grain to the right, and Beijing follows it: the Taimiao and the Shejitan stand on either side of the approach to the Forbidden City. Altars to Heaven, Earth, the Sun and the Moon were set at the south, north, east and west of the capital, so that the emperor's year of sacrifices traced the compass.
The most important of them was performed at the Circular Mound in the Temple of Heaven precinct, built under the Yongle emperor in 1420 and enlarged afterwards. Before the winter solstice the emperor withdrew to fast, then processed south in silence through cleared streets. The altar itself is open to the sky and unroofed, three tiers of white marble, because Heaven was not housed. Tablets for Heaven and for the imperial ancestors were set out, a whole bullock was burned in a green tiled furnace, and jade, silk and prepared texts were offered while the emperor knelt and prostrated in a fixed sequence. A separate spring service at the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests asked for the grain crop.
Only the emperor could perform this rite, which is what made it the pivot of the claim to the Mandate of Heaven. It ended with the dynasty in 1912, and Yuan Shikai's attempt to revive it in 1914 was widely read as exactly what it was, a bid for the throne. The precinct is now a public park and a World Heritage site.