This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Confucius was born around 551 BCE in Zou, in the state of Lu, and began teaching privately around the age of thirty, eventually instructing more than three thousand students over the course of his career. Later chroniclers singled out roughly seventy of them as outstanding, the disciples who would go on to carry his teaching forward after his death.
Teaching was not the whole of his life in Lu. He entered government service and rose to Minister of Crime around 501 BCE, using the position to try to curb the power of Lu's fortified noble houses, families whose private strongholds had come to rival the state's own authority. That effort failed to hold, and Confucius left Lu around 497 BCE, spending years afterward away from the state where he had taught and served before his death around 479 BCE.
His disciples compiled his sayings into the Analects after he died, preserving a teaching that had circulated, until then, only among the students who had heard it directly from him in Lu. What his death changed for Confucianism's spread was the shape it would have to take without him: a private teaching career confined to one state and one generation of students left behind a text rather than an institution, and the philosophy that bears his name would not become an organized tradition with a spread of its own to record until centuries had passed.