WEATHER CHATTING
A SITE TO CHAT WITH HEAVEN
The Temple of Heaven, literally the Altar of Heaven is a complex of Taoist buildings situated in southeastern urban Beijing. The complex was visited by the Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties for annual ceremonies of prayer to Heaven for good harvest.
In this site the emperor send out the preyer to Heaven and then, in the next year the Heaven will reply this information from the emperor in the way of weather. Sometime is good….sometime….
THE EARTHLY MOUNT
The Earthly Mount (圜丘坛) is the altar proper, located south of the Imperial Vault of Heaven. It is an empty circular platform on three levels of marble stones, where the Emperor prayed for favorable weather. It was built in 1530 by the Jiajing Emperor and rebuilt in 1740.
The Imperial Vault of Heaven (皇穹宇) is a single-gabled circular building, built on a single level of marble stone base. It is located south of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests and resembles it, but is smaller.
It is surrounded by a smooth circular wall, the Echo Wall, that can transmit sounds over large distances. The Imperial Vault is connected to the Hall of Prayer by the Vermilion Steps Bridge, a 360 meter long raised walkway that slowly ascends from the Vault to the Hall of Prayer.
WEATHER EVENT
Because of the inscrutability of weather the forecast is needed by peopel. Human beings try to capture the evens from the future through the understanding of the past. It is like a kind of chartting in which the words (data) are accumulated from the past events and make some sentences ( theory ) to talk abut future. I think maybe it is a important aspect of the meteorology. Of cause, the difficulty of predicting the weather is the reason that the chatting suhould continue between the nature and the rationality of human beings. The weather alway a unpredictable event.
