Rebirth of the Ming Dynasty: Sixth Generation of Glory, I don't want it

The great affairs of the country lie in sacrifice and military affairs.

——"Zuo Zhuan·Cheng Gong Thirteenth Year"

The ancients summarized this a long time ago.

There are two kinds of national affairs: one is sacrifice and the other is war.

The Imperial College originated from "sacrifice".

Therefore, the Imperial College has a profound "sacrificial" characteristic. For example, the principal of the Imperial College is called "Jijiu".

During the Sui Dynasty, the Imperial College was separated from the Taichang Temple and became an independent, specialized educational administrative department, and the function of the Imperial College was officially determined.

【Development of the Imperial College】

There were actually three Imperial Colleges in the Ming Dynasty, and the earliest one was built before the founding of the Ming Dynasty.

In 1359, in the first month of the th year of the Yuan Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the establishment of a county school in Wuzhou. He hired Confucian scholars Ye Yi and Song Lian as teachers of the Five Classics, Dai Liang as the schoolmaster, and Wu Shen, Xu Yuan and others as instructors. This was the predecessor of the Imperial College.

In 1364, the th year of Zhizheng in the late Yuan Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed himself King of Wu and established hundreds of official departments.

In 1365, in September of the th year of Zhizheng, Zhu Yuanzhang built Yingtianfu School. In the same year, Yingtianfu School was changed to Imperial College of Beijing. Official positions such as doctor, assistant teacher, school principal, school recorder, music director, book director, and food director were set up.

In 1368, the first year of Hongwu, the Ming Dynasty was founded.

In 1369, the second year of the Hongwu reign, Linhao (now Fengyang, Anhui) was made Zhongdu, and the Zhongdu Imperial College was established, and the officials of the Imperial College in the capital (Nanjing) were ordered to lead it.

In April 1381, the th year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang issued an edict to rebuild the Imperial College at the foot of Jiming Mountain because the original site was located in a busy city and was too small.

In March of 1382, the th year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered that the Imperial College be renamed the Imperial Academy.

In May of 1382, the th year of Hongwu, the new Imperial College was completed and the new school building was officially put into use. The old Imperial College was changed to Yingtian Prefecture School.

In 1393, the th year of Hongwu, the Zhongdu Imperial Academy was abolished.

In 1403, the first year of the Yongle reign, the Imperial College in Beijing was established.

In 1420, the th year of Yongle, the Beijing Imperial College was renamed the Imperial College, and the Imperial College in the capital was renamed the Nanjing Imperial College. Students were then divided into two academies, the southern and northern ones.

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【Campus of Imperial College】

With the temple on the left and the school on the right, it is divided into teaching area and sacrificial area.

The sacrificial area is mainly used for sacrifices, and the worshipper is Confucius, which I will not elaborate on here.

The main hall of the teaching area is called Yilun Hall, which is the office of the chief priest, that is, the principal's office.

There are six halls behind Yilun Hall, namely, Ruxing, Xiudao, Chengxin, Zhengyi, Chongzhi and Guangye, which are places for students to study.

There are also dormitory rooms for students.

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【Scholars of the Imperial Academy】

There is one chief academician, who is of the fourth rank; one secretary, who is of the sixth rank; one supervisor, who is of the eighth rank; one registrar, three doctors, and sixteen assistant teachers, all of whom are of the eighth rank; three school directors, who are of the ninth rank; and three school recorders, who are of the ninth rank.

Jijiu was the chief official of the Imperial College, Siye assisted Jijiu in managing the Imperial College, Jiancheng was in charge of the Shengqian Hall and was responsible for supervising the discipline of teachers and students, and Boshi was responsible for giving lectures to students. Assistant teachers, Xuezheng and Xuelu were responsible for tutoring students.

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【Days and schedules of Imperial College students】

There are only two days off every month, the first and fifteenth day of the month.

There are classes every day, morning and evening.

All members of the morning class must attend, the chief lecturer, and the teachers, staff, and students must stand and listen. (Stand and listen to the class!!!)

After the chief lecturer finished, the evening classes started with the doctoral assistants and other teachers.

【The school contents and learning tasks of Imperial College students】

Classroom teaching:

The textbooks of the Imperial Academy mainly focus on the Four Books and Five Classics: The Book of Changes, The Book of Songs, The Book of History, The Spring and Autumn Annals, The Book of Rites, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects, and The Mencius. They also include Liu Xiang's The Garden of Talks, the Laws and Regulations, the Nine Chapters on Arithmetic, the Imperial Edicts, and Huiwen.

In addition, you also need to learn archery.

(Note: In the early Ming Dynasty, Wushe was required to be a subject, but in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, Wushe became a mere decoration.)

Daily homework:

The first is to practice calligraphy. You have to copy a calligraphy every day, and the worst calligrapher will be slapped on a bamboo board.

The second is to memorize, once every three days, at least 300 words, if you can't memorize it, you will be spanked.

The third is writing. You have to complete 6 articles every month. If you fail to submit 6 articles on time, you will be severely punished.

【The teaching system of the Imperial Academy】

The Imperial College of the Ming Dynasty was divided into three levels and six halls for teaching.

The elementary classes consist of three halls, namely Zhengyi, Chongzhi and Guangye.

The intermediate class consists of two classes, Xiu Dao and Cheng Xin;

There is only one class for advanced classes.

The Imperial College divided students into three levels and six halls according to the depth of their knowledge. If students in a lower hall wanted to be promoted to a higher hall, they had to upgrade based on the point system, that is, the accumulated credits through examinations determined whether students could be promoted or graduated.

The points are as follows:

The Imperial College stipulated that there would be twelve examinations per year, three examinations per quarter, or one examination every month.

Students who do well on the test get one point.

Average students get half a point.

Students who fail will receive no points.

Only students who score eight points and do not violate any major school rules can enter the next grade.

Even at the highest level, Ruxing Hall, one still needs to get eight points to graduate.

In other words, even if you get average scores every time, you will still have to repeat the grade.

Graduates could get recommendations from the Imperial College to do internships in court departments, which was called "li shi".

Those who went for internship were called "clerks" by various departments before they obtained formal positions. They had no rank but received a salary, which was about one stone of rice per month.

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【Why did the Imperial College decline?】

The Yuan Dynasty before the Ming Dynasty did not have a complete system for training and promoting officials.

After Zhu Yuanzhang established Wu, he had no one to use and could only adopt three approaches at the same time.

One is to allow some local nobles in Jiangnan to be recommended to serve as officials in the court;

The second was to establish the Imperial College to cultivate a reserve force of direct officials.

The third is to select talents through imperial examinations to serve as officials in the court.

Although these three steps seemed to be implemented simultaneously, in reality the imperial examination system did not make much progress for quite a long time.

Because in 1370, after the first imperial examination of the Ming Dynasty ended, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the suspension of the imperial examination. It was not until 1385, the th year of Hongwu, that the imperial examination was resumed.

The entire suspension lasted fifteen years.

During this period of silence, the game between imperial power and officials was extremely intense.

An example mentioned earlier is that Zhu Yuanzhang cut off the source of the problem by sending students from the Imperial Academy to local areas to directly connect with the people. This move sidelined the local gentry and essentially broke the tradition that imperial power did not extend to the countryside.

Many students of the Imperial College became high officials in the capital or in local areas after their internship period.

Therefore, during the Hongwu and Yongle dynasties, the status of the Imperial College was as solid as a rock.

However, this road became increasingly crooked.

There are many external factors, but here I will mainly talk about the internal factors.

Specifically, we need to talk about the source of the students of the Imperial College and the welfare of the students of the Imperial College.

【Classification of Imperial College students】

In the Ming Dynasty, all students who entered the Imperial Academy were called Jiansheng.

The classification of students is divided into four categories:

Jujian - Juren entered the Imperial Academy to study. It refers to scholars who failed in the imperial examination and entered the Imperial Academy to study.

Gongjian: Students enter the academy to study. Students are scholars selected from the local areas. Gongjian is the main force of the students in the Imperial College.

Yinjian - The children of officials are admitted to the Imperial Academy to study. When an official reaches a certain rank (the third rank for Beijing officials), the court will grant the official's descendants a number of places to study in the Imperial Academy. In addition, if the official's rank is not high enough, but the official died for his loyalty or defended his country to the death, he can also be admitted to the Imperial Academy.

Lijian - You can go to the academy to study by donating money. You can get in if you pay enough money.

The tributes are divided into four categories:

One is annual tribute. The Ming Dynasty had a quota to send outstanding students from all over the country to study at the Imperial Academy every year.

The second is to select tribute students. This is because most of the students sent by local areas every year are selected based on seniority. These people are old and have little knowledge. Therefore, the court wants to select a group of young and strong students, which is the selection of tribute students.

The third is tribute, which means when the court has a major happy event (the marriage of the emperor or the prince, etc.), a number of quotas will be released to local governments.

The fourth is to pay tribute. All students who pay grain as a donation to enter the academy are considered to have paid tribute.

In addition, there are two smaller categories of students entering the prison.

Yisheng - Any sons of local officials or foreign male and female students who come to supervise their studies are called Yisheng.

Talented students - Any talented and well-educated person in the society can also enter the Imperial Academy to study, but this method requires recommendation from someone, and the recommender must be of high status or great reputation.

In conclusion, as for the student status, besides being a good student, one can also get it by paying taxes, grain and money.

【Benefits of Imperial College Students】

The laws of the Ming Dynasty stipulated that all students were exempt from tuition, provided with food and accommodation, paid wages, and their families were exempt from labor service.

Free tuition and salary are very necessary for children from poor families, but rich families don’t care about it.

But the rich care about the last item - exemption of their family members from labor service.

In the Ming Dynasty, anyone who was not an official could not escape the Dingyi service.

Dingyi involves high risks. For example, you have to carry weapons and food to guard the border, or to build roads and drain floods. Once you are assigned, you have to go. If you evade the service or let someone take your place, your whole family will suffer if you are found out. If you go, you may be seriously injured, disabled, or even killed at any moment.

Therefore, this benefit of the Imperial College has become a bug.

Anyone who could afford it would donate a student for their children to study at the Imperial Academy.

Here, there is a bigger bug in the Imperial College.

If you have money, you can donate money to enter the Imperial College as a student, but to graduate from the Imperial College, you don’t just need to be rich.

It takes at least four years to complete the required credits, and you must pass all exams to graduate. After passing the exams, there is also an internship period.

According to historical records, before the Tianshun period, students had to recuperate for ten years before being assigned a calendar.

What this sentence means is that before the Tianshun Dynasty, students had to study in the Imperial Academy for ten years before they could graduate and go for internship.

In other words, before the Tianshun Dynasty, as long as one entered the Imperial Academy as a student, even if one could not study at all, one would have a good reputation and could avoid at least ten years of labor service for the family. If one performed well during the career and obtained one or two official positions, then the entire family would have crossed the class and no longer had to bear the labor service.

As a result, there were a large number of students who paid to study in the Imperial College.

They occupied the student quotas of the Imperial Academy, preventing poor people who really wanted to study and needed state subsidies from entering the Imperial Academy.

There are many people who cannot graduate even after ten years.

The imperial examination was restored in the middle of the Hongwu reign, and the Xuande reign began to divide the list into north and south. The court gradually tended to select officials from the successful candidates in the imperial examinations. Later, as the cabinet gained power, there was a saying that only successful candidates could enter the Hanlin Academy, and only Hanlin scholars could not enter the cabinet.

The Imperial College began to decline from its heyday.

Of course, the decline of the Imperial College was not only due to the above reasons, but also due to other factors.

Changes in the national talent selection system

The impact of the national fiscal crisis

The addition of regular students and tribute students

The destruction of the Imperial College's talent recommendation system

The rise of local Confucianism and academies

Note: Lishi is a system of internship for students created by Zhu Yuanzhang. (This system is highly recognized, but it will be discussed later.)