Mysteries of Kongzhai

Julia K. Murray will speak on Kongzhai, a now-destroyed shrine on the edge of Shanghai, at the University of Texas in Austin.

In recent decades, the religious aspects of traditional veneration of Confucius (ca. 551-479 BCE) have been denied and suppressed, and the ancient sage is usually portrayed as a paragon of secular humanism and ethical culture.  This conception makes it hard to grasp the significance of Kongzhai, a now-destroyed shrine on the edge of Shanghai, where a seventh-century descendant allegedly buried Confucius's cap, robe, and jade ornaments.  This lecture will examine the multivalent significance of these "relics" and their relationships to alternative forms of representation, such as iconic images and illustrated hagiographies, and will focus particularly on the efforts of 17th and 18th-century patrons to develop Kongzhai into a destination for scholarly pilgrimage.

 Julia K. Murray is Professor of Art History, East Asian Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin (http://arthistory.wisc.edu/bio/murraybio.html) . This year she is also a Senior Fellow at the UW Institute for Research in the Humanities, where she is writing a book on the history, visual culture, religious practices, and cultural significance of a now-destroyed shrine to Confucius that formerly stood on the outskirts of Shanghai. She has written widely on Chinese art, and most recently served as the guest-curator and catalogue author for the 2010 exhibition Confucius: His Life and Legacy in Art at the China Institute Gallery in New York.