On April 7, 1930, a case occurred during the imperial examination that shocked the government and the opposition.
On this day, Zhu Yuanzhang went to the court as usual to listen to the government. Suddenly, one sonata caught his attention, and the next few recitals were all the same content. After carefully reading the sonata, he understood what had happened.
It turned out that after the February trial list, a total of 51 people such as Song Chun were admitted, and none of them were northerners. The candidates who fell off the list in the north expressed their dissatisfaction and came to Nanjing to file a complaint, and the city of Nanjing was in chaos.
At the same time, an explosive news spread: in this exam, the examiner cheated for personal gain!
At this point, more than a dozen inspectors jointly wrote a letter requesting Zhu Yuanzhang to thoroughly investigate the case. So there were those recitals in the court.
Zhu Yuanzhang hated official corruption the most. During the Hongwu years, when the anti-corruption and anti-corruption system was extremely harsh, officials were all trembling and trembling, and did not dare to make any mistakes. In this case, the examiner dares to stand up to the wind and commit crimes? Look at the chief examiner, Liu Sanwu, a Hanlin scholar who is nearly eighty years old, and the figure who participated in the formulation of the law and the imperial examination system, can make such a low-level mistake? It's impossible to think about it.
But this list is so conspicuous that one has to wonder. So many northern candidates, none of them can make the list? Not to mention Zhu Yuanzhang, even Liu Sanwu's old colleagues had some doubts.
The song was constantly drifting like snowflakes, and outside the palace were a group of fallen students who cried out for grievances. Zhu Yuanzhang patted the table, check, check me! Whether it's a god or a ghost, you have to find out for me!
One of the "Four Major Cases of Hongwu", the North-South List Case, has thus begun.
Zhu Yuanzhang set up a twelve-member investigation team to be responsible for the case. These twelve men, each of them, are elite. They re-pasted all the exam papers, word for word.
At the same time, all the examiners who participated in the examination were interrogated. After two months of investigation and interrogation, the results came out: the list on the list was exactly the same as the previous list, and there was still no northerner!
This result surprised all the investigators, is it true that the northern examinees are so bad?
The truth is really bad. After the founding of the Ming Dynasty, the education situation of the whole country showed the characteristics of a large gap between the north and the south, and the south was far ahead of the north. The reason is very simple, after the Jingkang Disaster, the north was ruled by foreign races for hundreds of years, and education was destroyed to pieces. The data shows that in the several imperial examinations in the early Ming Dynasty, the champions were all southerners, and most of the candidates on the list were also southerners.
But even if the northern candidates are bad, they will not be able to make the list, right? How did the whole army perish this time? This is inseparable from Zhu Yuanzhang. In the sapphire case he personally created, more than 10,000 people were killed, and almost all the northern officials were implicated. In this way, the northern candidates were discouraged by the career path, coupled with the fact that the level was not high, the whole army was naturally destroyed.
After Zhu Yuanzhang learned of the results, he became even more angry, indiscriminately, cut down several people in the investigation team, and sent Liu Sanwu and several other examiners to the frontier, all of which were accused of "Hu Lanyu Party."
In June, Zhu Yuanzhang personally read the papers and admitted sixty-one northern candidates. Huang Guan was the first place, Han Kezhong was the second place, and Wang Shu was the third place. This list is called the "North List".
Since then, the Ming Dynasty's imperial examination system has undergone major reforms - the north-south division!
But soon the problem came again, as the competition for candidates in the south became more and more fierce, resulting in too difficult examinations in the south, while the north was relatively simple. As a result, many southern candidates changed their household registration and ran to the north to take the exam. As a result, the imperial examination has become very unbalanced.
To this day, the drawbacks of the regional examination still exist, and many parents spend a lot of money to modify their household registration in order to let their children enter the university. From ancient times to the present, educational equity has always been the goal pursued by human beings, and it is hoped that in the near future, this goal can be achieved.