HIST 270 · Chinese History · Chapter 14 · Lecture 3
One Life Through the Ming World: The Examinations, Wang Yangming, and the Villages
Background for the lecture "One Life Through the Ming World": the examination ladder and its odds, Tan Yunxian, Wang Yangming and his radical followers, the lijia system, lineages, compacts and charity · 1370–1600
Act I: The Ladder (Review Question 7)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 14, "The Examination System and the Lives of the Educated," pp. 234–237, with the Biography of Tan Yunxian, p. 237. Reading-guide question: discuss the evolution and social impact of the civil service examination system during the Ming dynasty.
The exams return
Under the Yuan, examinations were held from 1315 but supplied only a small share of officials (slide B). Taizu revived them in 1370, suspended them in 1373 because he thought the graduates bookish and useless, and restored them for good in 1384. From then on the provincial and metropolitan examinations were held every three years. Office could still be reached in other ways, through the National University, recommendation or, increasingly in the late Ming, by purchase of a degree, but the jinshi became the road that mattered. Ebrey's point that educated men were eager to serve even under emperors who beat and executed officials is worth stressing: the prestige of office survived its dangers.1
One orthodoxy, one essay
The curriculum was fixed on the Four Books, with Zhu Xi's commentaries as the official reading (slide C). This choice had been made before the Ming: the Yuan curriculum of 1313 already prescribed the Four Books with Zhu Xi's commentaries and had already dropped poetry. Ebrey explains the absence of poetry by Zhu Xi's view that it did nothing for moral growth (p. 234), which is a fair account of the reasoning but compresses the history; the Ming inherited the exclusion. The Yongle emperor's Great Compendia of 1415 made the Cheng-Zhu commentaries the textbook of every candidate.
The required form was the "eight-legged essay" (baguwen), named for its paired, balanced sections (slide D). Ebrey notes that it built arguments by analogy and balanced statement. The form developed gradually and became fixed in the Chenghua era (1465–1487). Later critics, especially in the twentieth century, made it a symbol of everything wrong with the old order, and the very phrase "eight-legged" became an insult for formulaic writing. Elman's work argues for a more balanced view: the essay demanded close knowledge of the classics and real skill in argument, even if it rewarded conformity.
Three rungs and the odds
The ladder had three rungs (slides NN, F). Candidates first passed a county or prefectural test to become a shengyuan, government student, a status that brought privileges such as exemption from labor service and corporal punishment but that had to be kept by passing periodic retests. Shengyuan could sit the provincial examination, held every three years in each provincial capital, to become a juren, "recommended man." Juren went on to the metropolitan examination in the capital and then the palace examination to become jinshi. The Ming made the juren stage a degree in its own right, so that a juren could be appointed to lower office. Ebrey's table (p. 236) gives the likely ages and pass rates, and slide F reproduces it; the slide's percentages should still be checked against the printed table, because the course OCR is damaged at that point.
The odds grew worse as the population grew. Ebrey's figures make the point: the Ming produced about 89 jinshi a year, fewer than the Southern Song's 135 even though the Ming population was much larger. Ebrey counts about 30,000 shengyuan by 1500; by the end of the dynasty, on Elman's estimates, there were several hundred thousand. In a provincial capital five to ten thousand men might sit the exam for perhaps a hundred places. For most candidates, the examinations were a way of life, not a ladder.
Family strategy
The exams were written in classical Chinese, which had to be learned like a second language, so families who could afford tutors began early (slide J). Boys started memorizing texts at four or five; by fifteen a diligent student had memorized the Four Books and Five Classics, some four hundred thousand characters. Lineages set up schools and paid for promising boys. Ebrey notes that the expansion of schooling also opened the road to families of merchants and doctors, and the biography of Tan Yunxian shows one such family (slides K, II). Her grandfather married into a family of physicians; two of his sons passed the exams, and his granddaughter learned medicine from her grandmother. At fifty, in 1511, she published Sayings of a Female Doctor, a casebook of thirty-one patients, most of them women. She used herbal medicines and moxibustion, which required touching the patient, and she diagnosed many working women's illnesses as the result of overwork.2
North and south, 1397
The south, and above all Jiangnan, had more schools, more books and more money, so its candidates won most places (slides L, M). In 1397 every one of the fifty-two men passed in the metropolitan examination came from the south. Northern candidates protested. Taizu ordered a review, rejected its findings and punished the examiners: the chief examiner, Liu Sanwu, then about eighty-five, was banished on account of his age, while other examiners and reviewers, among them Bai Xinzhao and Zhang Xin, were executed. A second list, of sixty-one men, all northerners, was issued that summer. The slide's "Taizu executed two examiners" is close to Ebrey; a precise version would say "punished the examiners, executing several."
The lasting result was a quota system. In 1425 the court divided the metropolitan places into southern, northern and central shares, applied from 1427, with northerners guaranteed thirty-five percent, and each province also had a fixed quota of juren. The examinations thus served a political goal as well as a meritocratic one: holding the empire together by giving every region a stake in the state.
A strong answer to Review Question 7 describes the institution, then weighs its social effects: a shared culture across the empire's elite, enormous investment by families and lineages, a growing crowd of degree holders below the top, and quotas that bent merit toward unity.
Act II: The Mind (Review Question 8)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 14, "Wang Yangming's Challenge to Zhu Xi," pp. 237–240. Reading-guide question: in what ways did the philosopher Wang Yangming challenge the orthodox Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi, and how did his teachings shape social and ethical thought in the later Ming?
Youth and failure
Wang Shouren (1472–1529), known by his sobriquet Yangming, was born at Yuyao in Zhejiang into an official family (slide O). In 1481 his father, Wang Hua, placed first in the palace examination, and the family moved to Beijing. The young Wang was restless: he studied military texts, rode, practiced archery and dabbled in Daoist and Buddhist meditation. The most famous story of his youth is that he and a friend tried to follow Zhu Xi's instruction to "investigate things" by sitting before a stand of bamboo to grasp its principle. After seven days Wang fell ill and concluded that the method could not be right. He failed the jinshi examination in 1493 and 1496 and passed in 1499.3
Liu Jin and Guizhou
In 1506, under the Zhengde emperor, the eunuch Liu Jin dominated the court (slide P). When two officials who had criticized Liu were imprisoned, Wang submitted a memorial on their behalf. He was jailed, given forty strokes of the bamboo in open court and demoted to head a postal relay station at Longchang, in the mountains of Guizhou. He arrived in 1508. The slide's "after 1504" can be tightened to 1506–1508. The people around Longchang were largely non-Han, among them Miao and Yi; Ebrey says Wang tried to understand them, and his writings from exile include respectful accounts of local people.
There, according to his own account and his disciples', Wang had his breakthrough (slide Q). Zhu Xi had taught that moral principle (li) is present in all things and must be grasped by investigating things and studying the classics. Wang concluded that principle is not outside the mind: the mind itself is principle, and each person already has liangzhi, "innate knowledge of the good," which selfish desires obscure. Ebrey quotes his statement that if words, even those of Confucius, seemed wrong when tested in the mind, he would not accept them (p. 238). The slide gets the contrast right.
Sages in the streets
Two consequences followed (slides R, S). The first was that anyone could become a sage. If moral knowledge is innate, an illiterate farmer has as much access to it as a scholar, and Wang's followers liked the phrase that "the streets are full of sages." The second was the "unity of knowledge and action" (zhi xing he yi), which Wang began to teach in 1509: to know the good truly is already to act on it, as to see a beautiful color is already to love it; knowledge that does not issue in action is not yet knowledge. Ebrey gives his example of filial piety: a person who knows filial piety but does not practice it does not really know it.
Wang was not only a teacher (slides T, KK). In 1516–1518 he was sent to pacify bandit-ridden southern Jiangxi, where he combined military campaigns with community compacts, schools and new counties. In 1519 the Prince of Ning, Zhu Chenhao, rebelled at Nanchang; Wang raised troops on his own authority and captured him within about six weeks. Jealous courtiers accused him of complicity, and he spent the next years mostly teaching. In 1527 he was sent to Guangxi to suppress uprisings among the indigenous peoples there, and he died in January 1529 on the way home.4
The radicals
Wang's followers split, and the more radical among them took his ideas into the streets (slides U, V). Wang Gen (1483–1541), from a family of salt producers at Taizhou on the Jiangsu coast, founded the Taizhou school and lectured to crowds of commoners about the problems of their lives. He Xinyin (1517–1579) criticized the family as a selfish institution and exalted friendship as the highest relationship; he was arrested and beaten to death in prison. Li Zhi (1527–1602), the most famous of them, attacked the hypocrisy of the moralists, defended the passions and the "childlike mind," argued that women were capable of as much understanding as men, and admired heroes whom orthodox historians condemned. He was arrested in 1602 for spreading dangerous ideas and took his own life in prison.5
A strong answer to Review Question 8 states Zhu Xi's position, states Wang's, names the two key doctrines, and then shows the social reach: lecture meetings, followers among commoners, and the radicals who pushed his ideas farther than he did. It might note, as Lecture 4 shows, that by 1600 the Donglin critics blamed Wang's followers for the moral confusion of the age.
Act III: The Villages (Review Question 9)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 14, "Local Society," pp. 240–241. Reading-guide question: how did the commercialization of the economy and rapid population growth affect the organization of local society, including the role of lineages and community compacts?
Growth
The Ming population roughly doubled or more (slide X). Ebrey's range runs from about 60–80 million at the founding to about 150–200 million by 1600. Historians debate both ends; the early Ming registers counted about 60 million, and estimates for 1600 range from 150 to over 200 million. The growth came from long peace after the founding wars, recovery of farmland in the north, more double-cropping of rice in the south and the spread of commerce. The deck adds the American crops, linking back to Lecture 2. That link needs care: maize and sweet potatoes arrived in the sixteenth century, but their contribution to population growth came mainly in the eighteenth century, so they were not a major cause of Ming growth.
Commercialization ran alongside growth (slide Y). Cheap water transport let regions specialize. The Yangzi delta became the center of cotton and silk textiles, with peasant households spinning and weaving for merchants; coastal Fujian grew sugar cane and, by the early seventeenth century, tobacco; and the imperial kilns and private workshops at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi made porcelain for the court, the empire and the world. Market towns multiplied in the delta in the sixteenth century. The slide's "late 1500s" date for Fujian tobacco is a little early; tobacco reached Fujian around 1600 and spread rapidly in the following decades.6
The lijia system
Taizu's village order was the lijia system, created in 1381 with the Yellow Registers (slide Z, which dates it "from the 1370s"). Households were grouped into units of 110. The ten wealthiest households took turns, a year at a time, serving as lizhang, "head of the li," and the other hundred were divided into ten groups of ten, each with a rotating head. These men collected taxes, delivered them, kept order and reported crimes, without pay. Village elders settled minor disputes. Taizu's goal, as Ebrey says, was to keep the tax runners he hated away from the villagers.
The system broke down (slide AA). Populations moved and grew, registers fell out of date, and the unpaid duties grew heavier as local governments, which had very little legal income, demanded more. Delivering grain to distant granaries or maintaining hostels for traveling officials could ruin a household. Wealthy families escaped duties by registering their land under the names of exempt degree holders. Over the sixteenth century the government converted most labor duties into payments in silver, a process consolidated in the Single Whip reforms associated with Zhang Juzheng in the 1570s and 1580s, which combined land tax and service levies into a single silver payment. The deck's notes could name the reform; Lecture 1 mentions Zhang, and Lecture 4 depends on the silver tax system.7
Lineages
Where the state withdrew, kin and neighbors organized (slides BB, CC). A lineage was a group of male-line relatives descended from a common ancestor who agreed to cooperate, typically by holding land in common to pay for ancestral rites and often for an ancestral hall, a school or relief. Lineages were stronger in the south than in the north, perhaps because of the way migrants settled new land. Ebrey distinguishes regions. In Fujian large lineages went back to Song times; in Huizhou they grew strong on merchant wealth; in Jiangxi educated men formed them to raise their families' standing; in Guangdong most began later. Two refinements. The Jiangxi county studied by John Dardess, named in the deck's notes, is Taihe, not "Taichang." And in the Pearl River delta of Guangdong, David Faure dates the great wave of lineage-building to the sixteenth century, after the Great Rites controversy of the 1520s encouraged the building of ancestral halls by ordinary families; "most only from the 1600s" on slide CC is therefore late.8
Compacts and charity
Community compacts were written agreements among villagers to encourage good conduct (slide DD). The model was a Song compact of the Lü family that Zhu Xi had revised. Members met regularly, recorded good and bad deeds, corrected one another, helped in emergencies and expelled the uncooperative. Wang Yangming used compacts in southern Jiangxi after his campaigns, and his followers promoted them. Many lineages adopted similar rules.
By the late sixteenth century educated observers complained that society's moral fabric was unraveling (slide EE). The gazetteer of She county in Huizhou, compiled in 1609, describes a fall from a golden age when people knew their place to a present in which money ruled, a few grew very rich, most grew poorer, and rich and poor saw each other as enemies. Brook opens The Confusions of Pleasure with that passage. The response was not only lament. Men of means founded benevolent societies, built and repaired roads and bridges, paid for coffins and funerals for the poor and opened soup kitchens in famines. The Pierian Spring slide on the Society for Sharing Goodness (LL) illustrates one: a society founded about 1590 at Yucheng in Henan by the official Yang Dongming, whose members paid monthly dues for good works.9
A strong answer to Review Question 9 connects cause and response: population and commerce outgrew Taizu's village order; the unpaid duties became abuses and were converted to silver; and local elites built lineages, compacts and charities that did part of the state's work.
Pierian Spring: Wang the General, Tan the Doctor
The deck's three Pierian Spring slides are well chosen. Tan Yunxian's casebook (slide II) can be used to ask what a woman physician could see that a male physician could not, since a male doctor was often expected to diagnose upper-class women without a full examination. Wang Yangming's campaigns (slide KK) raise a question students rarely ask about philosophers: how could the teacher of innate goodness also be a ruthless and effective general? Wang's answer was that pacification required both force and moral renewal, and he set up compacts and schools as soon as the fighting stopped. The Society for Sharing Goodness (slide LL) closes the lecture by showing local elites doing what the state could not.
Corrections and Cautions
Corrections and Sources Behind the Slide Notes
The deck's speaker notes are written for students. The instructor-level detail behind them, where a slide departs from Ebrey and the scholarship it relies on, is collected here, slide by slide.
Notes
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Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), chs. 1–3, is the standard study; Elman, Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), is a shorter version. ↩
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Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), ch. 8, is the fullest study of Tan Yunxian. See also Victoria B. Cass, "Female Healers in the Ming and the Lodge of Ritual and Ceremony," Journal of the American Oriental Society 106, no. 1 (1986): 233–245. ↩
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Julia Ching, To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), is a good introduction. Wang's own conversations and letters are translated in Wing-tsit Chan, trans., Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yang-ming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). ↩
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On Wang's career and his community compacts, see Ching, To Acquire Wisdom, ch. 1, and Philip J. Ivanhoe, Readings from the Lu-Wang School of Neo-Confucianism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009). ↩
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Wm. Theodore de Bary, "Individualism and Humanitarianism in Late Ming Thought," in de Bary, ed., Self and Society in Ming Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 145–247; Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee and Haun Saussy, eds. and trans., A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings of Li Zhi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). ↩
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Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), is the classic account of Ming commercialization; on tobacco, see Carol Benedict, Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550–2010 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), ch. 1. ↩
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Ray Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China, chs. 2–4; Liang Fangzhong, The Single-Whip Method (I-t'iao-pien fa) of Taxation in China, trans. Wang Yü-ch'üan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956). ↩
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John W. Dardess, A Ming Society: T'ai-ho County, Kiangsi, in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); David Faure, Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), chs. 8–10. ↩
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Joanna Handlin Smith, The Art of Doing Good: Charity in Late Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), ch. 2, on Yang Dongming's society. ↩
Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation
Benjamin A. Elman, Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (2013). The examinations from the Ming to 1905, shorter and more accessible than his 2000 cultural history.
Ichisada Miyazaki, China's Examination Hell, trans. Conrad Schirokauer (1976). A short, vivid account of what candidates went through, written about the Qing but true to the Ming system.
Wing-tsit Chan, trans., Instructions for Practical Living (1963). Wang Yangming in his own words; the dialogues on knowledge and action are short enough to assign.
Julia Ching, To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming (1976). A clear account of Wang's life and philosophy.
Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee and Haun Saussy, eds., A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings of Li Zhi (2016). The best translation of Li Zhi, with a fine introduction.
Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (1998). Commercial growth and its moral discontents, organized by season; the best book for Review Question 9.
Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960–1665 (1999). Women's medicine and its practitioners, with the fullest account of Tan Yunxian.
Joanna Handlin Smith, The Art of Doing Good: Charity in Late Ming China (2009). Benevolent societies, famine relief and the motives of late-Ming donors.