The Prefecture Confucius Temple created by Fan Zhongyan|Suzhou Confucius Temple (1036)

|Suzhou Confucius Temple (1036). Suzhou Confucius Temple, located on People's Road in Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province. The Suzhou Confucius Temple Prefecture School was established by Fan Zhongyan, a famous minister of the Northern Song Dynasty, in the second year of Jingyou (1035), and has a history of more than 980 years. The year after Fan Zhongyan took office as the governor of Suzhou, he set up a school and built a temple on the site of the South Garden. The temple and school are combined (that is, the Confucius Temple Prefecture School is combined). Fan Zhongyan hired Hu Yuan, a famous educator at the time, as a professor. Because of his good management of the school, it became famous all over the world and became a model for county schools in various places. After subsequent expansions, the scale of the Prefecture School Confucius Temple in the Ming and Qing Dynasties was very large, covering an area of nearly 200 acres. It was praised as the crown of the academies in the south of the Yangtze River. The existing area is only one-sixth of that time, and the important buildings that have been preserved include the Lingxing Gate, the Ji Gate, the Dacheng Hall, the Chongsheng Temple, the Seven Star Pool, and the Minglun Hall, which is now a national key cultural relics protection unit.