Chapter 4
The second examination session began early the morning of the eleventh day. By now, the routine was a familiar one to Yizhi. This time, the questions related to the Five Classics. These were the Book of Odes, the Book of Documents, the Book of Rites, the I Ching, and the Spring and Autumn Annals.
Candidates were expected to specialize in one of the Five Classics; Yizhi’s choice was the I Ching, the Book of Changes. It was actually a family tradition; his great-grandfather Xuejian, his grandfather Dazhen, and his father Kongzhao had all written commentaries on the I Ching.
Yizhi also had to quote, from memory, from the beginning of his answer to the question asked in the first session. This was to confirm that he was the same person who had taken the first part, but it made no sense to Yizhi. If a candidate had found someone to take the first exam in his place, wouldn’t the substitute just come the second time, too? But the rules were the rules.…
* * *
By the time the third and last session began, on the thirteenth day, Yizhi was feeling like a horse asked to race too soon after its last competition. But this round was the one that Yizhi had looked forward to the most; this was the essay on government policy. Yizhi was an active member of the Fushe, the Restoration Society, which was a combination of a poetry appreciation club and a political action group.
Yizhi read the first of the five policy essay topics:
In the Records of the Grand Historian, Sima Qian observed that ever since people have existed, their rules have followed the movements of the Sun and the Moon, the planets and the stars. To bring order to the empire, nothing is more important than to promulgate a calendar that explains these movements.
The orbits in the sky appear to be both regular and irregular. Regular, in that a method of computation may be used reliably for centuries, and irregular, in that the computations eventually stray from what is observed. Of those who have discoursed on the calendar from antiquity to the present, some say that there can be a theory by which the seeming irregularities may be explained, and others that these are irreducibles, and thus that the formulation of the calendar must be empirical.
Why, Yizhi wondered, had the examiners put this topic on the test? Doubtless, the chief examiner was involved somehow in the calendar controversy, the struggle among the Confucian, Muslim and Jesuit branches of the Astronomical Bureau for primacy. But what answer was the chief examiner looking for? Did he favor theory or empiricism?
Yizhi mulled over the question further, then started writing.
“The Sage-King Yao directed his ministers Hsi and Ho to study the movements of the celestial bodies. Let us first assume that we rely on theory alone to predict these movements.
“If a snowflake be large enough to be seen with the naked eye, it can be seen to have six branches, as the learned Han Ying observed in the Western Han dynasty. But if one studies the branches more closely, it is evident that they differ in detail from one snowflake to the next. Thus, at one level, snowflakes are regular, and at another, they are irregular.
“The same is true of the Heavens. There are repeating patterns, which is a form of regularity, but the cycles are not identical, which is a form of irregularity. Regularities may combine in a complex manner to produce a seeming of irregularity, and the limitations of man and his instruments may make it impossible to distinguish this seeming from a true, divinely ordained irregularity.
“Moreover, we must ask, is Heaven infinite or finite? If it be finite, then the whole of Heaven can be comprehended by the mind of Man, which is contrary to all the ancient teachings. Hence, Heaven must be infinite. If it be infinite, then the layers of regularity must also be infinite. Since Man cannot comprehend the infinite, the mind of Man cannot supply a theory which alone explains the movements of the infinite.
“But can the calendar be formulated only empirically? No, because then only the irregularities would be seen, and one could only make a calendar of what has already been seen, and not what is yet to come.
“So the calendar must be constructed like a piece of pottery, with the theory as the basic form, and the empirical corrections as the ornamentation.”
There, thought Yizhi. I hope that will satisfy both camps.
The next three policy topics were lengthy and written in a way that made clear the answer that the officials wanted, and Yizhi gave it to them. All he had to do, really, was regurgitate the question without the question mark, turning it into an answer.
The final one was trickier, however. It began by asking for a history of literary examination in China. That was innocuous. But then it asked the candidate to address the balance of “eight-legged” literary essays with policy essays, and even more provocatively, whether examination should be the sole method of selecting officials.
Was this an attempt to send a message to the court, by passing candidates who advocate reform? Or was this a trick, an attempt to provoke reform-minded individuals into revealing themselves, so they could be sidetracked?
He decided that it was too late to try to decide how to proceed. As he composed himself to sleep, he brooded about the examination. What it tested primarily, he acknowledged, was the ability to memorize ancient writings, to structure one’s writing according to the stultifying requirements of the eight-legged essay format, and to draw Chinese characters elegantly. His thoughts turned to his childhood, when he listened to his father Kongzhao, then a district magistrate in Fujian, talk to Xiong Mingyu about the “Western Learning” brought by Matteo Ricci and the other Jesuit priests. That was when Yizhi was just nine years old. Ricci was dead by then, but his legacy lived on.
He couldn’t help but wonder how Ricci had acquired his own learning. Did the Europeans have schools and examinations? Did they have to memorize the writings of Euclid and Aristotle as the Chinese do those of Confucius and Mencius?
The next morning, he started writing his answer to the fifth policy question:
“It was once customary to select candidates for office by a process of recommendation. In order to prevent abuse, it was understood that if the candidate was appointed and did not perform well, that not only the candidate but also the recommending official might be demoted.
“However, it remained common for the recommendations to be limited to young men of certain families, and thus it was difficult to satisfy the needs of the empire by recommendation alone.
“Hence, the system of examination was instituted, and is now dominant. However, the examination tests only the literary ability of the candidate, and not the candidate’s morality or common sense, and thus those who are malevolent or doltish may be given preference.
“In the marketplace, storytellers speak of divine intervention on behalf of candidates whose conduct was exemplary, or against those who behaved repugnantly. They speak of examiners who receive dreams in which Yama tells them to reconsider a particular paper, and of candidates who suffer from nightmares caused by the spirits of those they have oppressed.
“But Censor Mao wrote that in practice, of those chosen by recommendation, only one out of ten is unworthy of reappointment, while of those selected by examination, nine out of ten are disappointments.
“In each prefect and district, let each official be given a quota of men to recommend as filial, scrupulous and just, and then let these be given a special examination.”
Yizhi set down his pen and read through his answers. Satisfied, he handed in his final exam booklet and left the compound.
Year of the Rooster, Ninth Month (October 3–November 1, 1633)
Outside the Nanjing Examination Compound
It was noon on Announcement Day. A giant board had been placed outside the Great Gate, and a large sheet of white paper attached to it. At the top of the paper, two auspicious animals had been drawn, a tiger on the left and a dragon on the right. Below these illustrations, the examiners would soon write the names of those who had passed the exam.
Yizhi was not surprised that it had taken more than a month to grade the papers. First, to avoid the chance that an examiner might recognize the handwriting on a paper, the candidates’ submissions—the black copies—were sent to copyists with only the seat number and the answers visible; the information identifying the candidate was sealed. The copyists made duplicates in vermilion ink and these were given with the originals to the proofreaders, who wrote in yellow ink. Both versions were given to the custodian, who passed only the vermilion copies to the assistant examiners, and placed his seal on the originals. The assistant examiners wrote their comments—mostly negative—in blue ink. The recommended papers were passed up to the associate examiners and, to resolve the highest rankings, the chief examiner. They wrote their evaluations in black ink.
After the examiners had made the lists of candidates who had passed, identified only by seat number, the vermilion copies of those candidates’ papers were compared, in the presence of inspectors, with the black originals. If all was in order, the seal on the cover information was broken.
According to an impeccable source—a courtesan who had entertained the chief examiner a few nights earlier—of the seven thousand or so candidates who had come to the Nanjing examination, only ninety could be given a passing grade, that being this year’s quota for Nan-Zhili Province. Only that lucky few could call themselves juren, “recommended men,” and only they were eligible to take the metropolitan examination in Beijing. Nowadays, to become an official of even the ninth rank, you needed to pass the metropolitan exam, thereby becoming a jinshi, a “presented scholar.”
There would also be a list published of eighteen runners-up. These were thereby qualified as kung-sheng, that is, as a tribute student. They were exempt from the annual qualifying exams, they could take classes at the national university in Nanjing or Beijing, and they would receive an annual stipend of eight taels of silver. It was a nice consolation prize.
Perhaps two thousand candidates were waiting expectantly for the results. Presumably, the others were so sure that they had failed that they didn’t think it worth waiting in the cool autumn air to have their negative expectations confirmed.
There was a blare of trumpets, and the chief examiner emerged from the depths of the compound, followed by the deputy and associate examiners, and some clerks and guards. Yizhi, standing close to the front of the crowd that greeted them with a roar, could see how they all blinked their eyes, blinded by the sun. Yizhi knew that all of the examiners had been locked up within the compound from the day that the first session papers were handed in, on the tenth day of last month, until this very moment.
With a flourish, the chief examiner wrote the name of the sixth ranked passing candidate, leaving space for inserting the first five later. A herald standing beside the poster shouted out the lucky fellow’s name, county and district, lest the assembled crowd bowl over the officials in a mad rush to see who was listed. Then the top-ranking deputy examiner put down the name of the seventh-ranked man, and so on through the day, as each examiner participated in order of rank.
Yizhi knew that the odds were against his passing on this, his first provincial examination, but nonetheless he fidgeted like a monkey on a leash. Vendors worked through the crowd, selling food, drink and good luck charms. Yizhi couldn’t help but wonder what the point of the last would be, now that all the exam papers had been graded, but the charms did sell.
Yizhi waited, minute after minute, hour after hour. Once, a fellow standing a few yards away started jumping and screaming with joy, and Yizhi couldn’t help but hope that this neighbor’s good fortune would prove contagious.
At last, all but the five top candidates had been announced. Now, indeed, Yizhi’s hopes were threadbare, but he waited anyway. Escorted by guards and aides, the provincial governor arrived and exchanged greetings with the chief examiner. The two of them then read off the names of the candidates with the five highest scores.
Yizhi’s name was not among them. He had failed.