Abstract:
The suburban offering sacrifice to the Heaven was the essence of the national religion in ancient China. By communicating with the Heaven at the summit of land, the emperor obtained the absolute right to bridge the holy world with the secular world as the legitimate basis and primary source of legitimization of imperial power. The ceremony and propriety of suburban sacrifice-offering in the Han Dynasty went through a very complex process of evolution. Emperor Wu in the Han Dynasty set up the ceremony of suburban sacrifice-offering in a necromancer-like manner; Wang Mang in the late Han Dynasty established a Confucian system of sacrifice-offering; frequent practices of “offering sacrifice to the Heaven” in the Wei, the Jin, and the Northern and Southern Dynasties served only as the symbol of the overthrowing of the former dynasty and the founding of a new one. Finally compilation and documentation of large-size volumes of ceremony and proprieties in the Sui and the Tang Dynasty indicated the end of the system of suburban sacrifice-offering.
