Images for Iconoclasts: Images of Confucius in the Cultural Revolution

Abstract

Confucius died and was buried in 479 B.C.E., and he was never seen again. Or so one would think. “You may forget me as I once was,” Confucius reminds us in the Zhuangzi, but there is something unforgettable about me that will still live on. Confucius’s physical frame was concealed from sight below ground, but his body and face were not forgotten either by his followers or his detractors, each of whom remembered him (or remembered him) in different ways. People created semblances of Confucius that reflected their own visions of the past, and constructions of his body took on many lives of their own over the succeeding centuries. [excerpt