Confucius, 551 BC–2011

The life, the books, and the afterlife. One line per event, from the documents.

551 BCBirth in Lu, by Sima Qian's reckoning four centuries later. Two commentaries put it a year earlier. Nothing near-contemporary dates it.
539 BCA Qi minister reports that in his capital artificial feet are expensive and shoes are cheap. Confucius is twelve.
537 BCThe duke's household in Lu is divided into four shares among the three great families; the Ji take two.
517 BCA cockfight between two noble families of Lu ends with the duke attacking the Ji, losing, and fleeing to Qi. Confucius is in his thirties and nowhere in the record.
513 BCJin casts its penal code on an iron cauldron. The chronicle gives Confucius an objection, set down by later hands.
509 BCThe exiled duke's body comes home. The Ji head orders a ditch dug between his grave and his ancestors'; an officer talks him out of it. Years later Confucius, in office, has a second ditch dug to join the grave back.
505 BCJi Pingzi dies. His steward Yang Hu imprisons the heir and takes control of Lu for four years.
502 BCYang Hu is beaten. The rebel holding the fortress of Bi sends for Confucius. He wants to go, Zilu objects, and so far as anyone wrote down, he does not.
500 BCThe meeting with Qi at Jiagu. Confucius is ritual assistant; Qi plans to seize his duke; he calls on the soldiers and argues them out of it.
498 BCThe three families' fortresses are ordered razed, with Zilu in charge. Rebels from Bi reach the duke; Confucius orders the counter-attack. The third fortress never comes down.
497 BCHe leaves Lu, over music girls or a portion of sacrificial meat. He had held one office, the officer for crime and punishments; its dates were never written down.
497–484 BCThirteen years abroad: Wei, Song, Chen, Cai and Chu. The itinerary is Sima Qian's; the Analects gives none.
484 BCHome to Lu, unsent for. Ji Kangzi runs the state; his steward is Ran Qiu, a student of Confucius.
481 BCA minister of Qi kills his ruler. Confucius, seventy and without office, asks the duke to act. The duke says: Tell the three chiefs. They refuse.
480 BCZilu is killed in a coup in Wei, stopping to retie the strings of his cap. His son Boyu and his student Yan Hui had died before him, in the same few years.
479 BCHe dies, in the fourth month of summer. The annals of Lu give him eight characters.
468 BCEleven years after his burial the duke of Lu leaves for Yue. The three families are still standing.
c. 100 BCSima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, chapter 47: the life, the offices and the itinerary everyone now knows.
59 BCThe Haihun tomb is sealed with copies of the Analects and a mirror-stand carrying a short life of Confucius, height included.
1313Zhu Xi's edition of his book becomes the syllabus for the state examinations.
1662The Latin name Confucius reaches print, in a Jesuit book made in Jiangxi; properly in Paris in 1687; in English in 1691.
1760Oliver Goldsmith invents a Chinese philosopher in London and gives him the line about rising every time we fall.
1862The word Confucianism, by the Oxford English Dictionary's first record.
1879Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East begins, filing Confucianism as a world religion.
1905September: the examinations are abolished.
1909Leonard Lyall's The Sayings of Confucius, the translation the book quotes.
193922 November: Guy Lombardo records ‘Confucius Say’. By February 1940 Life calls it a national craze.
1966November: Red Guards from Beijing come to Qufu, and the grave is levelled.
1985June: an American newspaper column puts his name on Choose a job you love.
201111 January: a bronze of him nine and a half metres high goes up outside the National Museum on Tiananmen Square. About a hundred days later it is moved.

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