Tang Emperor Taizong Orders Confucian Temples in Every Prefecture

In 630, the fourth year of the Zhenguan era, Tang dynasty Emperor Taizong issued an edict ordering a Confucius temple built in the state school of every prefecture and county across the empire, standardizing the temples' scale, ritual etiquette and offerings, with Confucius receiving the principal offering as sage and his disciple Yan Hui honored as correlate. The order came as Taizong expanded the state school system his father Gaozu had founded, created a national academy directorate to oversee it, and launched the editing and standard commentary of the Confucian classics for examination candidates, work that built on Emperor Wu of Han's establishment of Confucianism as state orthodoxy over seven centuries earlier already recorded here. Where earlier veneration of Confucius had been concentrated at his home in Qufu and at the capital, the edict planted a Confucian temple beside a school in every administrative unit of China, fusing the empire's educational and ritual life around Confucian learning at a scale no earlier dynasty had attempted. The temple network the edict founded endured through successive dynasties, still standing in provincial and county seats more than five centuries later when Zhu Xi rebuilt the White Deer Grotto Academy, already recorded here.