Nagasaki Confucius Shrine

The Confucius shrine at Ouramachi in Nagasaki is the only one in Japan built throughout in Chinese style. It is a Confucian hall rather than a Shinto shrine or a Buddhist temple, and it went up in 1893, paid for and put up together by the government of Qing China and the Chinese community living in Japan. A museum of Chinese history stands next to it and the two are run as one.

Confucius lived from 551 to 479 BC, in the Spring and Autumn period of China. He taught that a person should hold to benevolence, right conduct, propriety, wisdom and good faith, and his sayings were gathered by his followers into the Analects. What he taught shaped education and morals across East Asia, not only in China.

Nagasaki had a Confucian hall long before this one. A scholar named Mukai Gensho founded a hall with a Confucius shrine at Kozenmachi in 1647, and it was moved across the city in 1717. It became a teaching office in the last years of the shogunate, passed into private hands after the school reforms of 1871, and was eventually taken down in 1959.

The present shrine is a separate foundation. Land at Oura was secured in 1892, building began in February 1893, and the work was finished that November. It took its present form in a rebuilding in 1967, and the museum was added in 1983.

For most of the twentieth century the shrine also held a school. The Jichu primary school for the children of Nagasaki's Chinese residents was founded inside the grounds in 1905, recognised by both the prefecture and the Chinese ministry of education, and moved to a new building in front of the shrine in 1967. It closed in 1988 as the number of children fell, and a language school took its place.