The Study On The Evolution Of The Belief Places In Chaozhou

The belief places play a significantly important role in a city construction and have a close relationship with the forming and development of the urban morphology. Chaozhou, an ancient city, has been a political and cultural centre in the eastern area of Guangdong province from Han Dynasty. Because of its historical reason, the belief places have been a major element in the forming of its city space. So it is meaningful to analyze the process of the spacious evolution of the belief places in the inner city of Chaozhou.In this paper, we inspect the belief places’types, spreading conditions and spacious evolution of each dynasty in Chaozhou by making an on-the-spot investigation and by collecting the related materials from the official records of Chaozhou. At the same time, we try to restore them. On these basics and from the existing belief places, we summarize the citizens’worship space patterns and the relationship between the belief places and the inner city streets. Under the rich belief atmosphere among Chaozhou inhabitants, we discuss and try to find out the protection measures for the belief places while developing the ancient city construction in order to make the belief places continue in a complete and organic form and to enhance the main element of the ancient city-the belief places.The main body of paper consists of five parts.The first part is the introduction. It includes the review of the domestic and foreign researches on this subject; the summary of the general history, dynastic history and city history in Chaozhou; this paper’s study plot, boundary and content, etc.The second part is the brief of Chaozhou’s development process since Han and Jin Dynasties; the brief of Chaozhou’s city construction and its spacious evolution process in every historical period, such as the repair and construction of the city wall, the transition of local government office, the construction of the belief places and the government’s aid organization.The third part is about the classification of the belief places in Chaozhou’s inner city. They are the official ancestral temples, the Buddhist temples, the Taoist abbeys and the folk belief places; the analysis of their being condition and their distributed characteristics in every historical period from Tang Dynasty to the modern society.The fourth part includes two narrations about the belief space of ChaoZhou city. One is the worship space of belief places; the other is about the handling ways of the belief places’ space and the city boundary.The last part is the conclusion based on the above analysis. It shows the importance of the protection consciousness of the belief places during the procedure of the ancient city protection.