A hanging-scroll portrait of Confucius painted in Japan by Kano Tan'yū
Portrait of Confucius, ca. 1658
Marked Qufu

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Confucius

Kong Qiu, known in the West as Confucius, was a teacher and minor official in the state of Lu. His ideas about family duty, good government and learning, recorded by his followers in the Analects, shaped China for two thousand years.

Place
Qufu · The state of LuAsia
Laid out as
A lifeOne person’s life, from birth to death, and what they left behind.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IA poor scholar in Lu
  2. IISeeking a ruler who would listen
  3. IIIThe Analects
  4. IVTeaching anyone who came
  5. VConfucius after Confucius

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Confucius
  • Yan Hui
  • Mencius

Objects

  • The Analects on bamboo
  • The Temple of Confucius, Qufu

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

551 BC to 479 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?