The plain is also where Chinese state religion took the shape it kept, and its structure is worth stating plainly because it does not resemble a church.
Every level of administration maintained altars. The altars of soil and grain stood beside the ancestral temple in each capital, and the pair together stood for the state itself, so much so that the phrase became a synonym for the dynasty. Officials sacrificed on schedule to the powers of their jurisdiction: mountains, rivers, the wind, the harvest, and the previous holders of their own offices. Failure to perform the sacrifices was a dereliction of duty rather than a private lapse.
The Zhouli, an idealised handbook of offices, describes this apparatus in systematic detail, listing the officials responsible for each category of sacrifice, the music, the vessels and the timing. It is a blueprint rather than a record of any actual government, and its influence lies in the fact that later dynasties repeatedly used it as one.
Confucius belongs inside this system rather than outside it. His concern with ritual propriety is a concern with the correct performance of exactly these observances, understood as the framework that makes social order possible, and his reported reticence about spirits is a reticence about speculation rather than a rejection of the rites.
The imperial cult ended with the dynasty in 1911, but the altars and temples of the northern capitals survive as monuments, and the ritual calendar they served is documented in exhaustive detail.