Altar of the Land and Grain

Feb 15th, 2007
Posted by handicraft

In the Zhongshan Park in central Beijing lies a terrace filled and surfaced with earth of five different colours.This is Shejitan(the Altar of the Land and Grain),popularly known as Wusetu(Five-Coloured Earth).


The classical sense of the word she means the God of the Land or Soil,while ji rfers to the God of Grain.Shejitan was the site where ancient emperors held rites of worship and offered sacrifices to the Gods of Land and Grain and prayed for good harvests.

The terrace is an elevated square bordered with three tiers of low walls of white marble.The surface earth shows five patches of different colours with nuclear demarcation--green to the east,red to the south,white to the west,black to the north and yellow in the middle.The arrangement symbolizes the ancient principle that"all earth under the sky belongs to the emperor".

The five colours of the altar,some say,are also intended to represent the five elements(metal,wood,water,fire and earth)which ancient Chinese philosophy held to compose the physical universe.

 According to others,the altar could be taken as a rough model showing the distribution of different types of soil in China as the the various colours of the earth on the terrace point approximately to the same directions in which soils of similar types actually lie in the country.

What is noteworthy is that the altar gives prominance to the yellow colour by putting yellow earth in the middle.Yellow was held in high esteem in old China because it is the colour of the Yellow River,the once-supposed only cradle of the Chinese civilization.And for the same reason,all Chinese still call themselves the descendants of the Yellow Emperor,a legendary leader in prehistoric China.

Besides,yellow is also the colour of the ripe grain,whose god was the object of worship at Shejitan.The land and the grain,both yellow in colour,made up the material foundation of the imperial power,and therefore yellow became the imperial colour in China.This was another reason for putting yellow earth in the middle.


Originally a square stone column stood at eh centre of the altar to symbolixe the rock-like soledarity of the empire.It was removed in 1950.


The Altar of the Land and Grain was built in A.D.1421 in the Ming Dynasty(1368-1644).Since then,sacrifices had been offered by the emperors of different generations twice a year in spring and autumn until the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.

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