Shanghai's Confucian Temple, known as the Wen Miao, stands in the old city in the Huangpu district, a short walk south of the Yu Garden and the Bund. The original foundation is Ming, though what stands today is largely the result of eighteenth and nineteenth-century rebuilding, and it follows the standard plan of a Confucian temple: an entrance through a screen wall, a pond bridged in the middle, halls around courtyards, and the main hall with the sage's tablet at the centre rather than an image.
The temple
The building is small compared with the great Confucian temples of Qufu or Beijing, and its interest lies in the details: the stone carvings, the old trees in the courtyards, the tablets and inscriptions, and the sense of a working civic institution in the middle of a dense residential district. Confucian temples were also the seat of the imperial examination system's local administration, which explains the ritual layout - the pond and bridge mark the passage into the scholarly precinct. It is a quiet place, and it functions as a small museum of the examination culture as well as a temple.
The lanes around it
The streets immediately around the Wen Miao were traditionally the city's book and stationery quarter, and some of that trade survives: small shops selling brushes, ink, paperweights, seals and cheap books. The surrounding lanes are among the last stretches of the pre-war old city to keep their low-rise scale, though the area has been under pressure from redevelopment for years, so what you see now may not be there indefinitely. This is a part of Shanghai that is neither the Bund nor the shopping streets, and walking it is worthwhile.
Practical notes
The temple is within reach of the Laoximen and Yuyuan Garden metro stations, and it fits naturally into a walk that starts at Yu Garden and ends on the Bund. The temple charges a small admission fee. Because the surrounding lanes are residential, keep voices low and ask before photographing people at their doors. The old city food streets nearby supply lunch; the whole area takes half a day at an unhurried pace and combines well with the old town's garden.
