Pay attention to ▲Calligraphy Commune▲ With thousands of book elites,
Explore a new way of life in China's calligraphy, painting and printing!
Source l "The Examination Paper of the Tibetan Temple of the Institute of Sinology of the Académie de France (Generational Preface)"
Written by l Dai Tingjie
Translated by l Sam Wing-fong
分享 l 书艺公社（ID：shufaorg）
In November 1908, Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi died one after another, and Prince Zaifeng, who held the supreme leadership, allowed the scholar Sun Jianai to play a request to burn all the useless old files of this chapter that were damp or moldy. It was probably in the spring of 1909 that Luo Zhenyu, who was then a counselor of the Faculty and would become famous in the future, informed the Minister of Military Aircraft of these imminent and irreparable losses. His intervention was echoed, tempering his enthusiasm for the destruction of the document. After the completion of each subject in the Qing Dynasty, the original volume of the new jinshi's policy writings, which was stored in the cabinet treasury in the southeast corner of the Forbidden City, was shelved in the high cabinet and strictly supervised by the guards. If it had not been for the tragic twists and turns of history, the ravages of time, the gluttony of insects and rats, and the greed of mankind, which had turned them into dust, fallen into damage, or scattered in all directions, the entire batch of nearly 27,000 examination papers would have been passed on to future generations. Since 1646, the third year of the founding of the Qing Dynasty, the establishment of the Wendian test, in 1904 will be to abolish the behavior, where 258 years, a total of 112 subjects, a total of 26,849 Chinese-style scholars. Five years later, in 1909, the Imperial Court decided to transfer some of the cabinet records to the Faculty so that the treasury that had been in disrepair and on the verge of collapse could be repaired as long as it had been promised. At this time, although the archives have been repeatedly affected by fires and floods over the years, there are still millions of files. Immediately, the red book was placed in the Guozi Prison, and the palace examination papers were stored in the back building of the school department, and after ten years of parking, they were relocated elsewhere.
Ten years ago, in order to cope with the long-standing shortage of inventory space, an "evil wind" blew into the inner warehouse, and a large number of copies of archives were first incinerated, and then a large number of originals were affected. In November 1908, Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi died one after another, and Prince Zaifeng, who held the supreme leadership, allowed the scholar Sun Jianai to play a request to burn all the useless old files of this chapter that were damp or moldy. It was probably in the spring of 1909 that Luo Zhenyu, who was then a counselor of the Faculty and would become famous in the future, informed the Minister of Military Aircraft of these imminent and irreparable losses. His intervention was echoed, tempering his enthusiasm for the destruction of the document. But in fact he could not stop it, because by the end of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, 10,662 bundles of red books were removed from the shelves and piled up outside the storehouse to be burned. Luo Zhenyu was ordered to go to Japan in May and returned to Beijing in July, and one of the many great deeds of his life, which was probably completed after his return to Beijing, was the preservation of a large number of archives that should have been discarded, the so-called 8,000 sacks (due to a shortage of funds in the ministry, which could not supply good and stable wooden boxes, these archives were haphazardly stuffed into 8,000 ordinary sacks intended for transporting rice). In the long years of 1909, the archives of the Great Treasury were threatened like never before, not only in danger of being burned, but also facing the covetousness of the people. The publication of the destruction was the best excuse for the cabinet officials to take possession of the valuable books and documents in them, with impunity and a clear conscience, not to mention the fact that some of them had already compensated for their meager salaries with sporadic and ordinary stolen goods. The archives of the dynasty were hit by the wave of purging, and the palace examination papers were not exempted. Zhao Binglin, the imperial historian, claimed with exaggeration: "The cabinet has cleared the treasury, produced the examination papers of the Imperial Palace, and burned them." He also said that if it were not for the kind help of a "Sichuan Fan Zhongshu" in the cabinet, his own trial strategy would not have survived. On November 28, 1909, the "Recent Affairs of the Beijing Division" on October 16, 1909 wrote: "Now that the imperial court has changed the law and reformed the law, and the old habits have been eliminated, yesterday the cabinet was instructed to carry out the ancestral dragon of Fu Zhilong with the torch of the palace examination papers, court examination papers, and scattered hall folds accumulated over the years. The Shanghai newspaper added: "Cabinet secretaries and scribes, etc., have occasionally obtained celebrity inkblots for private collections, and also preserve the essence of the country." Later generations, however, were not necessarily so lenient.
Although he was in the palace, on December 9 and October 27 of the lunar calendar, he heard that when the cabinet was repairing the treasury in August, he "searched" old banknotes and rare editions, which were handed over to the Faculty. Scholar Yun was amazed, and he recorded the incident in detail in his diary, and added: "There are more than 30,000 books of the library from the beginning of the country to the present palace, and all the strategies of celebrities are in the house. The princes of Zhonghan chose their famous ones such as Liu Wenqing [Yong], Zhu Wenzheng [Jue], Weng Qinxi [Fang Gang], Hong Zhicun [Liangji] and the like. It's a pity that it's too late to know, and it's too late to ask for gifts from you. "At that time, the competition for August was over. Presumably it was done very secretly, so that Yun Yuding, who worked in the National History Museum, although he was very close to the cabinet, did not hear about it until two months. One of the first to start was Lu Runzhen, who was the champion of Tongzhi in the thirteenth year of Tongzhi and wanted to worship a scholar. In the summer of that year, Cao Yuanzhongzhong, one of the twelve cabinet monarchs who was ordered to prepare for the cleaning and relocation of the archives, could not wait to present the examination paper of Lu Kentang, the seventh ancestor of Shangshu, to Lu Runzhen. Before Lu sent this 24-year examination paper of Kangxi to be framed, he wrote an inscription on the back of his ancestor's essay, noting his excitement at the discovery of the paper, dated August of the lunar calendar, and four years later, several celebrities were inscribed on it, such as Xu Shichang, who would later become the president of the Republic of China. Cao Yuanzhong, who had the heart of a collector, not only curryed favor with this Shangshu, his teacher, and his fellow villagers, but also used his position privileges to collect for himself: decades later, the philologist Wang Xinfu retrieved the three-way examination papers that had belonged to Cao Zhongshu in the pile of old papers sold, proving that he had adapted to the time and was not as firm and uncompromising as people say. The collapse of power and the repair of leaky warehouses were not the only reasons for the scattering of examination papers stored in the large warehouse. Daku was not an inaccessible fortress as we imagined, at least not in the second half of the Qing Dynasty. It is said that Yao Wentian raised people "when the official cabinet is in the book, he often goes to the cabinet to take the examination paper of the champion hall of the calendar department, and he must read a book every day" (he was in the fourth year of Jiaqing). The palace guards and the thick walls of the Forbidden City did not prevent the archives from being destroyed by theft. For example, in the winter of the eighth year of Xianfeng (1858), "the cabinet copy library, there are traces of the window of the donation, and several pieces of lost old copies are checked." Or in the autumn of the third year of Guangxu (1877), the two doors inside and outside the real warehouse "the seals fell off, and the iron locks were moved", and they were sent to check, but they "lost 218 pieces of baggage". Chen Kangqi was outside the Tongzhi Guangxu period, in the Liulichang bookstore, occasionally saw "there is a Qianjia palace trial strategy". The test paper of Zou Zhongyi, the ancestor of Gao, who was hidden by Governor Zou Minghe, was found in the Daoguang period (this Gaoshuzu was the Dingyuan of the ninth year of Shunzhi). Bachelor Wu Yusheng, who was in charge of cleaning up the cabinet papers, wanted to follow the example of his colleagues and wanted to get his hands on the examination papers of his great-grandfather Ngo Dinh Chen and his uncle Wu Chung-chun, both of whom had won the imperial examinations. However, in vain, these two passes are no longer in the library, along with other "long-lost" test papers. Later, Wu Yusheng found his great-grandfather's original papers in more than 20 large cabinets where the Liu family in Jiangxi Province had the examination papers of Youba, Chao Examination, and Palace.
How did all these test papers end up in private hands? Sun Xingyan, a great Confucian of Qianjia, recounted that his ancestor Sun Shenxing, a flower explorer in the late Ming Dynasty, was known for his integrity, and took advantage of his position as an official in the Ministry of Rites to "take out and hide the Chinese-style examination papers of the 23rd year of his calendar and hide them at home," which were passed down from generation to generation. Such a disregard for the rules of the imperial court will not be unique, presumably there is no shortage of examples in the Qing Dynasty, and in the Republic of China, everyone competed to follow suit. Judicial scholar Xu Qian was once a member of the Committee for Handling the Aftermath of the Qing Dynasty, and when he was inspecting the Wenhua Palace, he happened to discover that he had tried to make a plan in the 29th year of Guangxu, so he "took it home"; Yi Peiji, who was also a member of the committee and later became the director of the Palace Museum, turned a blind eye to it. More than 10 years earlier, Lu Xun had obtained his late grandfather's examination papers, and his friend Xu Shoushang, who had joined the Ministry of Education (formerly known as the School Division), had recently entered the Ministry of Education (formerly known as the School Division) and saw it in the autumn of 1912 while rummaging through a pile of stored examination papers, and then took them away. When Lu Xun recorded this incident in his diary, he used the word "seeing the return", which shows that all these people have no sense of plundering the state's property, and those friends who helped them do not feel that they are complicit: they are just returning the property to its original owner. To retriev one's own by "seeing one's return", Gai should not be confused with embezzlement born of greed. In a famous article, Lu Xun made a scathing revelation of Ouchi's bad luck and people's covetousness. At the end of the article, he sharply criticized China's difficulties in protecting state property: "If the authorities are laymen, they will spoil things, and if they are insiders, they will steal things." ”
In the first days of December 1917, when Fu Zengxiang was appointed chief of education, the files handed over to the Ministry of Education were still kept. Fu's love of writing and books drove him to find the whereabouts of the palace examination papers. Since there was a leak in the cashier's book, he opened six or seven "big white wooden boxes" containing the files, inspected them himself, and found that "the scrolls of the famous people and celebrities no longer exist." Since there was nothing better, he retreated to the next best thing, and took a fancy to the forty-six test papers, which had a certain reputation, and the Jinshi, who had dozens of test papers, because he was born in Sichuan, like him, made the old mistake and took them away. The thousands of volumes left behind were sent to the History Museum at Wumen the following year. (Fifteen years later, in 1933, 34 wooden boxes containing 15,115 examination papers left the museum and were transported to Nanjing to find a place to hide.) Based on this, can we boldly estimate that Fu Zengxiang's "white wood box six or seven" contains about 3,000 test papers) In the summer of 1918, Lu Xun worked in the Ministry of Education for a period of time. In his narrative, Fu Zengxiang is cautiously referred to as F. Mr., or F. Overall length. Day F. He went to try the sack, and the inside of the inspection was filled with a mess of twenty bags, and there was not a single examination paper in the temple. He also said that there were a few other boxes, but they were all second- and third-class rolls, and the higher-ranked ones had already been stolen, and the champion rolls were the first to be stolen. He also pointed out that this bad habit of possession continues. The most noteworthy documents, which were placed on the table, were at once replaced by F. Overall length, Y. Vice-Minister, and C. Counsellors, who are obsessed with old paper, take it to inspection: when they return it, it is always a little less than the original......
The May Fourth Movement ended Fu Zengxiang's political career. After his resignation, the former chief minister had an opportunity to appreciate a number of precious documents that had flowed out of the Great Interior and had already disappeared; according to Lu Xun's words, if this proficient expert had the opportunity to live in office, he would not hesitate to "steal out" these treasures. In the summer of 1920, Fu Zengxiang went to Huainan to visit books, and walked to Baoying, north of the Yangtze River, to visit the old Dezhai full of precious books of Liu Qirui, a descendant of a famous family. This Chinese-style man in 1903 has lived a life of retreat since the advent of the Republic of China. He was a cabinet secretary, and together with Cao Yuanzhong and several other colleagues, he was responsible for the preparation of the transportation of archives to the school. This was a great opportunity for this rare book lover to snatch away the ancient Song editions that had filled the cabinet shelves for centuries, as well as the extremely valuable Qing archives, including a number of excellent palace examination papers. After several days of deliberation, Fu Zengxiang purchased three of the thirty-two Song and Yuan books. Most of these books flowed out of the cabinet treasury, which was the real purpose of his trip. These kinds of "remnants" cost him "4,000 yuan" (he revealed in his diary that the country's soldiers were moving, and the land was full of chaos, and he threw this huge amount of money, which is really similar to a crazy and discouraged person). He didn't buy any other books, just admired the original papers of the one hundred and nine Tongdian exams in his master's collection, which made him feel satisfied. These dazzling scrolls gathered a group of prominent ministers and literati of the Qing Dynasty, such as: Zhang Yushu, Lu Longqi, Zhang Ying, Li Guangdi, Zhao Zhixin, Zhang Tingyu, He Zhuo, Sun Jiagan, Chen Hongmou, Zheng Banqiao, Zhu Qi, Weng Fanggang, Zhu Yun, Qian Daxin, Wang Mingsheng, Zhao Yi, Yao Nai, Shao Jinhan, Wang Niansun, Dai Zhen, Ruan Yuan, Zhang Huiyan, Ji Yun, Gong Zizhen, Wei Yuan, Tao Shu, Yu Yue, Zeng Guofan, Li Ciming, Ye Changchi, Kang Youwei, etc. (Among these many good papers, Fu Zengxiang did not expect that there would be his brother Zengjun's second-class papers; he planned to ask the owner for concessions in the future) This batch of trial strategies won with a high ranking. There are 14 passes to enjoy the honor of Jinshi and the first, that is, the first three yuan, of which the champion policy seven passes, the list eye one pass, and the flower six passes. The second class has five passes. If we add the next six, together with the top four, to form the top ten, these experiments have been personally evaluated by the emperor and received supreme favor. The papers with such an excellent ranking bring brilliant brilliance to Liu Qirui's more than 100 Tongzang volumes, and the old Dezhai covers the best palace examination papers in ancient and modern times.
Zhuang Yaodian test papers
Graphic and text comprehensive source network, sharing this article is intended to convey more valuable information. Together with thousands of calligraphy elites, we will explore a new way of life of calligraphy, painting and printing in China! The original text does not represent the viewpoint, position and value judgment of the Calligraphy Commune. If you have any questions about the content, copyright, or other questions of the work, please contact the Book Art Commune.
Welcome|Connect
To contribute to the article, please contact: xshufa event report, please contact: shiyu798 to join the community of Shuyi Commune, please contact: xshufa business and marketing cooperation, please contact: shiyu798
At the end of browsing, remember to follow @Shuyi Commune to watch more valuable articles in time