Chapter 1
Year of the Rooster, Eighth Month (September 3–October 2, 1633)
First Day (September 3)
Southern Capital (Nanjing)
“Hurry!” cried Fang Yizhi. “I want to get to the government reception station before it closes!”
“I am hurrying,” said his servant, Xudong. “My legs are shorter than yours. How much further?”
Fang Yizhi, unlike his servant, had spent a couple of years in Nanjing previously, and therefore knew the way. “Four more blocks. Straight ahead.”
Fang Yizhi was something of a prodigy. By age fourteen, he had memorized the Four Books and the Five Classics, all 431,286 characters of them. He had sailed through the district, prefectural and qualifying examinations; it was time, everyone he knew said, for him to attempt the provincial examination.
He wore the uniform of a sheng-yuan, a dark blue robe with a black border, and a “sparrow top” cap with a “gold flower,” a gold foil ornament attached to a piece of red paper. While he held no actual office, any sheng-yuan was considered, for purpose of social precedence, to belong to the ninth and lowest rank of the civil service.
They had put off leaving Yizhi’s family until the last possible moment, as his first son, Zhongde, had been born in the fourth month of the year before. Finally, his father, his wife and his aunt had combined forces and shooed him out the door and down the road from Tongcheng to the nearest port, Zongyang.
Fortunately, by imperial edict, they had the right to fly a banner reading “Applicant for the Imperially Decreed Provincial Examination of Nan-Zhili Province.” Consequently, they were waved through all the customs stations and thus made good time down the Yangtze River to Nanjing.
Xudong, some years older than Fang Yizhi, had served Fang Yizhi’s father, going with him to Beijing in 1628 when the father had been appointed Director of the Bureau of Operations. Fang Yizhi, in the meantime, had traveled to Nanjing, Hangzhou, and elsewhere. When Fang Yizhi’s grandfather died in 1631, the father resigned his office, returned to their hometown of Tongcheng, and observed the twenty-seven months of mourning dictated by the Code for the death of a father.
When the time came for Fang Yizhi to journey to Nanjing to take the provincial examinations, his father had insisted that Yizhi take old Xudong with him. Even now, Yizhi wasn’t sure whether this was for Yizhi’s benefit or Xudong’s.
“You run ahead if you wish, young master. I’ll be there in my own time.”
Fang Yizhi quickened his pace. Arriving at the station, there was a candidate ahead of him in line. By the time the clerk in charge was ready to interview Yizhi, his breathing had slowed back to normal.
The clerk looked tired. “Credentials, please.”
Fang Yizhi handed them over. First, there was the declaration, signed by a magistrate of Tongcheng as guarantor, listing Yizhi’s lineage and attesting that for the past three generations, Yizhi’s family had not engaged in a base occupation, and that he was not in mourning for a parent or grandparent. Yizhi had been lucky that it had been his grandfather, not his father, who had died in 1631. That would have barred Yizhi from taking this sitting of the provincial examination, and it was given only once every three years. For the death of a grandfather, the required mourning period was only twelve months.
Next, Yizhi produced the certificate from his county, signed by the provincial director of studies and countersigned by the chief instructor at the county school, verifying that his score on the qualifying examination had been high enough that he was within the quota of candidates that his county was allowed to send on to the provincial level.
He heard a polite cough behind him; it was old Xudong. Yizhi was happy to see that Xudong had stopped at one of the shops outside the station and bought the necessary writing stock. As Yizhi had previously ordered, Xudong had gotten a large stack of scratch paper, and also three booklets of white answer sheets, each with twenty-two red lines. Each line would hold twenty-five characters. Each booklet would be used at one of the three exam sessions.
Fang Yizhi sat down to fill out the identifying information on the cover. Name and age were easy, of course: Fang Yizhi, twenty-two years old. But what, he wondered, should he put down as his identifying physical characteristics?
“Brown eyes, black hair,” he wrote. “Pale complexion. No beard.”
“Put down ‘very long legs,’ sir.”
“Xudong, please don’t look over my shoulder.” Then he sighed and wrote, “Tall.”
Yizhi handed the folders over to the clerk, who gave him a receipt. Yizhi would not see the answer booklets again until the day of the exam.
Eighth Day (September 10, 1633)
“Boom!” The sharp report of a cannon being fired overwrote the vague murmur of people and carts in the street outside Yizhi’s lodging. Here in Nanjing, with its great walls and large garrison, there was no reason to fear that it heralded a bandit attack or a pirate raid. It was the midnight cannon, the first call to proceed to the examination compound. Yizhi had tried to sleep as best he could the day before, because he knew that he wouldn’t get much sleep this day.
He was just finished dressing when the second call came, two shots in quick succession. Half an hour had passed. He left his lodging, Xudong trudging behind him, carrying Yizhi’s writing materials, chamber pot, food, padded sleeping quilt, oilcloth screen, candles and other necessities.
They passed the Old Court, as the locals called the brothel facing the Jiangnan Examination Hall, and crossed the Qinhuai Canal separating the two. Even at this hour, there were a few pleasure boats out, and Yizhi could hear the strumming of a zither. They passed through three stone gates, arriving at last at the Great Gate, the actual entrance to the compound.
Here, in the great courtyard fronting the gate, the candidates were gathered, grouped by home district. Yizhi, being from Tongcheng, had been told to line up with the third group, marked by a pole from which three lanterns were hung.
The size of the crowd was already considerable. Here in Nanjing, there were perhaps five or ten thousand candidates.
Boom, boom, boom. It was now one in the morning, and the Great Gate slowly opened. There was no surge of candidates toward it, because the roll call was still in progress. With time to kill, Yizhi spoke to some of the other members of his group. As he expected, most of them were of the gentry class. Of the remainder, almost all came from merchant families. In theory, a farmer or artisan could take the examination, but few could afford the time taken away from earning a living for the years necessary to master the examination topics.
At last, every member of the third group had been verified, and a minor official led them through the gate.
Just in front of the gate, Xudong passed the bundles to Yizhi; servants were not allowed inside the compound. “Good luck, sir!”
Yizhi had barely shouldered the burden before he had to set it down again. Four soldiers surrounded Yizhi, searching him for contraband. After they searched his person, they examined his belongings with equal thoroughness, even slitting open dumplings in the hope of finding something. A soldier who found even a piece of paper with writing on it, however innocuous, would receive a reward of three ounces of silver. At last, they waved him on to an inspector, who grudgingly issued him an entry certificate.
At the next gate, there was a second inspection. If any illegal items were found here, the inspector who had passed Yizhi at the first checkpoint would be punished. Next came the Dragon Gate, the entrance to the actual examination area. This opened onto a broad avenue, stretching far to the right and left, with numerous watchtowers.
From that avenue, lanes led to the actual examination cells. Each lane was marked, in order, with a character from the sixth-century Primer of One Thousand Characters. That, of course, was the very first poem Yizhi and his fellow candidates had read as children; “Heaven and Earth, Dark and Yellow…” it began.
A soldier led a group of twenty candidates, including Yizhi, to their lane, and pointed out the large earthenware jars of fresh water that stood to one side of the entrance. Here, the candidates would collect drinking water (or water to put out a fire, if a candidate working at night by candlelight fell asleep and set fire to his cell).
Their guide then motioned them to their cells, each of which was numbered. Here, they would stay until the tenth day of the month, the end of the first of three examination sessions. As Yizhi walked down his lane, the smell of the public latrine, at the far end of the lane, became stronger. Yizhi was thankful that his cell was no more than halfway down.
Yizhi looked over his cell, which was unprepossessing. It had brick walls, a wood roof, and a packed dirt floor. The only furniture in the room were three boards; there were holes in the walls for inserting the boards so one would serve as his seat; the second as his desk; and a third as a shelf on which to place his ink stone, ink, brushes, water pitcher, and so forth. The cell was even smaller than the house that Yizhi had rented when he last stayed in Nanjing—that one Yizhi had nicknamed “Room for my Knees” as, when he sat on the bed with his legs hanging over the edge, his knees nearly touched the wall. The cell had no door, but Yizhi could hang a curtain across it, if he wished.
Yizhi sighed, laid his bedding on the seat board, and tried to fall asleep. It wasn’t easy, as his body was longer than the seat board. He tried drawing his legs up, but it was disconcerting to have either his knees or his feet hanging over the edge. At last he lay down on the floor on the cell’s diagonal, using two staggered boards to create a base of sorts. He couldn’t help but wonder whether finding a way to get a good night’s sleep was part of the test.
Shortly before sunrise, he was awakened. “Papers!” demanded the man who had just entered the cell.
Yizhi handed over his entry certificate and county credentials. “Are there more candidates than usual this year?” he asked politely.
“Speak only to answer my questions,” snapped the clerk. Outside the examination compound, he would bow his head if Yizhi, a sheng-yuan, passed, but here he had authority over Yizhi.
The clerk pulled out Yizhi’s answer books, and carefully compared the information on the entry certificate to that on the books. He stamped the answer books with the symbol tuĭ—checked—without this mark, Yizhi couldn’t turn in his answers.
Yizhi reached out for the answer books but the clerk pulled them abruptly out of his reach. Instead, he handed Yizhi another form. “Sign this receipt!” he barked.
Yizhi did so, and handed the signed receipt over. And at least received the precious answer books.
Now Yizhi had to await the arrival of an assistant examiner with the actual questions for this session. He found himself arranging and rearranging his writing instruments. The physical effort, however small, was a welcome distraction.
The assistant examiner arrived, pushing aside the curtain Yizhi had hung. “So, does the prisoner have any last words before the sentence is carried out?” he joked.
Yizhi wasn’t amused, but knew better than to complain. He took the problem sheet, and looked it over. It bore several questions, as well as the seal of the assistant examiner. The questions were, of course, on the Four Books: the Analects of Confucius, the Mengzi of Mencius, Zisi’s Doctrine of the Mean, and Confucius and Zengzi’s Great Learning. He also had to compose a poem of a particular kind.
“You have until the tenth day,” the official reminded him.
Yizhi roughed out his answers to the first two questions, then set his papers aside to get some sleep. He was abruptly awakened by the sound of screaming. He stumbled blearily to the door of his cell, and pulled back the screen. He looked up and down the lane, but saw no sign of anyone in trouble, so he went back to sleep.
* * *
The next morning, a guard came by to check Yizhi’s entry permit again. The administration wanted to make sure that no substitution had been made in the course of the night.
This guard checked the description on the entry permit closely, and then wished Yizhi well.
“Wait,” said Yizhi. “What was that disturbance last night?”
“Oh, that,” said the guard. “One of the candidates was visited by the ghost of some girl he had wronged. When we came into his cell, he was screaming, ‘Forgive me! Forgive me!’”
“Really? Did any of you see the ghost?”
“Not I. But you know the saying, ‘In the examination hall, wrongs will be righted; those aggrieved will take revenge.’”
“Was he kicked out of the examination for bad moral character?”
“No,” said the guard. “The gates are not opened until the tenth day. Why, if the spirit had frightened him to death, we would have had to toss his body over the wall.” He spat into a corner. “But given his state of mind, he will surely spill ink on his paper, or smudge his writing, or write a character sloppily; that will disqualify him.”
After the guard left, Yizhi wondered what to make of the incident. Had the man seen a ghost? Or was he just troubled by a guilty conscience? Well, thinking about the matter any further wasn’t going to get Yizhi any closer to finishing his answer. He reviewed what he had written on the scratch paper, and then wrote out fair copies in his answer booklet, taking his time. He, at least, would not have any writing mishaps!
Yizhi slept soundly on the ninth day, his sleep unmarred by ghostly visitations (real or imaginary), and he turned in his answers early on the tenth day.