At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, all civilian officials with more than seven pins, as long as the official's assessment period expired for a period of time, they all had a son to inherit qilu. This relatively relaxed system of appointments to the children of the early Ming Dynasty was gradually restricted, and there were side clauses: these children had to enter the state prison to study first, and they had to pass a special examination before they could become officials. Soon, the provisions for special examinations were abolished, but the yin officials were limited to the direct heirs of officials with more than three pins.
In fact, throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties, the rule of the civil official Yinshu was that the son of a civilian official could enter the army without examination and serve as a five-pin official; There are some specific examples that clarify the operation of the Yinshu system and the role of the emperor's special favor, such as Zhang Tingyu's greatest rights and other privileges in Yinshu for his sons, and the eldest son Zhang Ruoyi,000 who was given the low-rank title of Lieutenant Commander of Enyinshu before he ascended to the rank of Second Rank in the eleventh year of Yongzheng. After entering the government service, the lieutenant of light vehicles, this low-ranking knighthood, is only an honorary position, not practical, and has no importance. Zhang Tingyu's special status enabled him to obtain formal Yinshu rights for his second son Zhang Ruocheng; but after Zhang Ruocheng passed the Qianlong Ten Years Examination, he did not need this Yinxu privilege. Zhang Tingyu again had a close relationship with the emperor, and this Yinxu privilege was granted to his third son Zhang Ruoshu. Zhang Ruoshu died young in the office of a member of the household department, and since then this yinxu privilege has been suspended.
As a result, Zhang Tingyu's youngest son, Zhang Ruochun, was unable to obtain a higher family name than Gongsheng, so he had to donate money to obtain an official position. In particular, it should be pointed out that Zhang Tingyu's three sons and one grandson have received yinshu privileges that have exceeded the scope of the usual yinshu. Zhang Ruowei was 74 years old and was the main beneficiary of the emperor's special grace. Fifty-one years after Qianlong, zhang Ruozhuan was appointed as a cabinet scholar for the first time. According to the custom, this position was filled by a person with a prominent name, and for this reason, the emperor stated that this appointment was entirely due to the emperor's nostalgia for Zhang Tingyu and could not be used as an example. Another point to note is that Zhang Ruoyi and Zhang Ruocheng both eventually became officials to Erpin, but both died before their term of office expired, so they failed to obtain the right to yin for their descendants.
Therefore, Zhang Ruoxia's eldest son had to start by donating to the prison, and then he was selected as a person in the examination, and finally he was appointed as the chief of the five pins of the sixth department of the central government; after the second son passed the tribute examination, he became a scribe, and finally the official was county cheng; Zhang Ruocheng's only son had to be a prisoner when he died. It can be seen that these three houses of the Zhang family not only did not get any real yin shu right, but also their social status declined sharply. Only the seventh of Zhang Ruozhuo's eight sons was able to hold the official position of chief of the sixth department of the central government of ZhengLiupin, but died soon after. Zhang Tingyu and Ruo Wei's renzi rights ended here.
However, among Ruo Wei's eight sons, Zhang Zengyi was the most successful, also because of a prominent grandfather, who enabled him to go to Zhejiang as an envoy, so ren ziquan could be extended for another generation. However, all the other sons must first donate a prisoner, and then donate a small official, of which only one sub-official is from the seventh product. Therefore, three generations after Zhang Tingyu's death, only a few of the Zhang family have become mid-level officials, and all of them have to pass examinations or donations. In the Ji family, only the second son of Ji Xuanjun actually enjoyed the power of Yin Xu and became an official in the prefect.
In the late 18th century, because the emperor missed the Ji family's second zaifu, he gave his sixth generation of concubines the lowest noble title, which was not customary to be hereditary, but the emperor still let him pass on another generation. That is, the sixth generation and the seventh generation, but they have only obtained a redundant position. If there is no special gift from the emperor to make it beyond the normal range, the shadow power can only be extended to the third generation. The shadow system actually has no effect on the continuous downward movement of families.
We have reason to believe that the statutes of the Qing Dynasty were stricter than those of the Ming Dynasty: First, for most of the Ming Dynasty, powerful eunuchs and ministers were often able to ask the emperor for special gifts of Yinshu for their children or relatives, but often because of the disasters caused by their abuse of power, they greatly offset the benefits of this temporary expansion of the Privileges of Yinshu. By and large, Officials of the Qing Dynasty were more cautious than Ming officials, and there were far fewer cases of abuse of family power by their descendants. Second, according to the regulations of the Ming Dynasty, if the first YinShu can enter the government through other channels, he can transfer the yinshu privilege to his brother or heir, who will make up for it.
There is evidence that Qing dynasty regulations generally prohibited the transfer of Yinxu's privileges unless special gifts were obtained from the emperor. For example, Cao Zhenyong, one of the most powerful Zaifu in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, once obtained the right to yin for his eldest son, but died early.
Because of his close relationship with the Daoguang Emperor, it was possible for him to transfer this yinshu power to his second son Cao Enying. Cao Enying later failed to pass the imperial examination, and finally remained an official to the post of envoy, so that the Power of the Cao family's shadow son could be extended for another generation. The difficulty of transferring the power of Yin Xu can be further confirmed by the words of the historian Zhao Yi. Zhao Yi served as a personal secretary in the Zaifu Wang Yu Dun family, and later supplemented the cabinet zhongshu sheren and entered the Zhi Military Aircraft Department, so he had a deep understanding of the Qing Dynasty's canonical system.
Wang Youdun granted his eldest son Wang Chengxun the privilege of Yinxu, but Wang Chengxun died in the twenty-fifth year of Qianlong, and he did not make up for a single actual vacancy throughout his life. Zhao Yi said, "There are no re-enlisted people behind my master. One day, Zhao Yi recalled that Wang Youdun had mentioned that the chancellor had a canon behind him, and his son should go to Beijing to give thanks, so after Wang Youdun's death, Zhao Yi reminded the two sons of the Wang family he had taught to come to Beijing to thank the Qianlong Emperor for the funeral; hoping to arouse the emperor's thoughts of loyal old ministers, in case of grace, the two brothers of the Wang family "may be able to get an official."
Zhao Yi's clever plan was supported by fu heng, a close confidant of the emperor and a Manchurian aristocratic politician, and the two brothers of the Wang family were received by the emperor for questioning, and the second elder Wang Chengcheng had to make up for the eldest brother Wang Chengxun to inherit the Yin Shu, and to supplement the head of the household department of Liupin, and the third brother was given the title of person. It is worth pointing out that before the emperor received him, many of Wang Youdun's former colleagues and subordinates had a cold attitude towards the two brothers of the Wang family, and they knew that there was little hope of success in seeking to make up for Yin Xu.
Since Zhao Yi pioneered this example for the two brothers of the Wang family, some high-ranking officials and ministers had to follow this example as another way to obtain the emperor's favor. These examples illustrate that, under normal circumstances, formal shady privileges rarely extend more than two generations. Fortunately, when we were doing quantitative research on the operation of the Yinshu system, we found seven lists of Yinsheng in the Columbia University Library, the Library of Congress of the United States, and Kyoto, Japan, namely the first year of Daoguang, the first year of Xianfeng, the first year of Tongzhi, the first year of Guangxu, the fifteenth year of Guangxu, the twentieth year of Guangxu, and the thirty years of Guangxu. The first four parts are the year of the new emperor's accession to the throne, the fifteenth year of Guangxu is the year of the guangxu emperor's coming of age and marriage, and the last two parts are the birthdays of Empress Dowager Cixi's sixtieth and seventy years old.
It seems that the number of Yinsheng in the Daoguang Yuannian Roster is the total number of Yinsheng in the calendar years that were still alive at that time, and the subsequent rosters are probably the total accumulated in this period; therefore, these seven lists cover about the entire 19th century, but some of them are not included because of death, and it seems that the actual total number of Yinsheng is likely to be larger than the cumulative number shown in the table below.
It must be mentioned that the above-mentioned roster contains only regular Yinsheng and Enyinsheng, excluding the number of Difficult Yinsheng, which was quite numerous in the post-Taiping Heavenly Kingdom period, but the privileges of Nanyin were at best granted to low-level officials, and in most cases, they stopped there. In short, some modern scholars, impressed by the breadth and clarity of the scope and purpose of the pre-Ming Dynasty, have not consulted the legal documents of the Ming and Qing dynasties, let alone referred to family histories and biographies, and exaggerated and distorted the facts about the social impact of the Chinese yinshu system from 500 to 1900 AD.
From our description of the operation of the Yinshu system in some prominent families, and from the overall data we provide, it seems reasonable to conclude that the real impact of the Yinshu system on the long-term downward social mobility of the families of senior officials in the Ming and Qing dynasties was not large.