Ditan

Ditan holds two of the oldest characters in Chinese writing. The character 地 (dì) appears in oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty around 1250 BCE, meaning earth or ground in contrast to 天 (tiān), heaven. The character 坛 (tán) describes an elevated platform built for ritual purposes, its form rooted in 土 (tǔ, soil), and denotes any raised altar where sacrifices were made. The compound 地坛, earth-altar, appears in Zhou-dynasty ritual texts as a generic term for consecrated ground given over to earth deities, centuries before the Beijing structure was built.

The specific structure in Beijing was built in 1530 by Jiajing, the eleventh emperor of the Ming dynasty. Jiajing was a reformer of state ritual who believed his predecessors had incorrectly combined the worship of heaven and earth at a single site. He separated them, constructing Ditan to the north of the Forbidden City for earth ceremonies and retaining Tiantan, the Temple of Heaven, to the south for heaven ceremonies. The altar platform is square, not round, because Chinese cosmological writing since the Zhou associated heaven with the circle and earth with the square.

Every summer solstice from 1530 until 1914, the emperor or his regent traveled from the Forbidden City to Ditan to perform the grand sacrifice. The ritual involved offerings of silk, grain, and animals on a yellow-roofed pavilion, while the officiant faced north, the direction associated with earth in Chinese cosmology. When the Qing dynasty replaced the Ming in 1644, the Manchu emperors adopted the ceremony unchanged. The last performance was in 1914, conducted by Yuan Shikai, who briefly restored the imperial rites to legitimate his presidency of the Republic.

The park opened to the public in 1925. For decades it was simply a quiet green space in northern Beijing, visited by old men playing chess under ancient cypress trees. Then in 1991 the writer Shi Tiesheng published the essay Wo yu Ditan (我与地坛, I and the Temple of Earth), describing the years he spent at the park after he was paralyzed at age 21 in 1972. The essay, now considered one of the masterworks of modern Chinese prose, made Ditan a literary site as much as a historical one.