Truemors
There are approximately 6 million Confucians in the world. About 26,000 live in North America. Confucius lived 551 BC - 479 BC.
His writings deal primarily with individual morality and ethics, and the proper exercise of political power.
A man who could have been described as a living treasure of Chinese social culture has died in Taiwan.
Kung Te-cheng was the most senior descendant of the great Chinese philosopher and sage, Confucius, whose teachings 2,500 years ago have perhaps influenced more than any other Chinese communal culture and that of several other Far Eastern countries, too.
Kung died in Taipei on Tuesday, aged 89, after a full and colourful life largely dedicated, by force of the accident of birth, to the celebration of his famous ancestor.
Kung was born in 1920 at Qufu in China's eastern Shandong province at the 500-room family mansion, attended by 1,000 servants.
His birth was a matter for huge celebration in Qufu because his father, Kung Ling-i, had died three months before. Kung Ling-i's wife had not produced a male heir and his concubine, Kung Te-cheng's mother, had borne two daughters.
A disastrous struggle loomed for the succession to lead the Kung family and control the vast wealth that successive emperors had bestowed on it to honour the Confucian heritage.
Kung Te-cheng's birth saved the day and, because of his father's death, he was immediately given the title Duke of Yansheng, meaning "continuing the line of the sage," which had been held by the family's senior male since 1055.
Kung's nobility did not last long, however. In 1935, when he was 15, the Kuomintang government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who was toying with socialism at the time, abolished aristocratic titles.
But the bloodline of Confucius was too central to Chinese culture to be ignored. In place of his dukedom, young Kung was made Sacrificial Official to Confucius, with the principal duty of overseeing the annual ceremonies to mark the sage's birthday each Sept. 22.
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