the most beautiful views of Confucius Temple. Apricot Platform In the center of the courtyard in front of Dacheng Hall stands the Xing Tan Pavilion (), or the Apricot Platform. It commemorates Confucius teaching his students under an apricot tree. Each year at Qufu and at many other Confucian temples a ceremony is held on September 28 to commemorate Confucius' birthday. Stele pavilions A large number of stone stelae are located on the premises of the Temple of Confucius. A recent book on Confucian stelae in Qufu catalogs around 500 such monuments on the temple's grounds, noting that the list is far from complete. The steles commemorate repeated rebuildings and renovations of the temple complex, contain texts extolling Confucius and imperial edicts granting him new honorary titles. While most of these tablets were originally associated with the Temple of Confucius, some have been moved to the temple's grounds for safekeeping from other sites in Qufu in modern times. The inscriptions on the stelae are mostly in Chinese, but some of the Yuan dynasty and Qing dynasty stelae also have texts, respectively, in Middle Mongolian (using the 'Pags-Pa script) and Manchu. Some of the most important imperial stelae are concentrated in the area known as the "Thirteen Stele Pavilions" (十三碑亭, Shisan Bei Ting). These 13 pavilions are arranged in two rows in the narrow courtyard between the Pavilion of the Star of Literature (奎文閣, Kuiwen Ge) in the south and the Gates of Great Perfection (大成門, Dacheng Men) in the north. The northern row consists of five pavilions, each of which houses one large stele carried by a giant stone tortoise (bixi) and crowned with dragons; they were installed during the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong eras of the Qing dynasty (between Kangxi 22 and Qianlong 13, i.e. A.D. 1683–1748). These imperial stelae stand 3.8 to 4 m tall, their turtles being up to 4.8 m long. They weigh up to 65 tons (including the stele, the bixi turtle, and the plinth under it). The southern row consists of eight pavilions, housing smaller steles, several in each. Four of them house stelae from the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115-1234) and the Mongol Yuan dynasty; the others, from the Qing dynasty. A large number of smaller tablets of various eras, without bixi pedestals, are lined in the open air in "annexes" around the four corners of the Thirteen Stele Pavilions area. Four important tortoise-borne