Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty

By John W. Dardess

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jul 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520327573

John W. Dardess

John W. Dardess is Professor of History at the University of Kansas and author of Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Yuan China (1973) and Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty (California, 1983).

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Confucianism and Autocracy

Confucianism

and Autocracy

PROFESSIONAL ELITES

IN THE FOUNDING OF

THE MING DYNASTY

John W. Dardess

University

of California

Press • Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1983 by

The Regents of the University of California

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Dardess, John W., 1937-

Confucianism and autocracy.

Professional elites in the founding of the Ming dynasty.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. China—Politics and government— 1368-1644.

2. Neo-Confucianism—China. 3. Elite (Social science)

—China. I. Title.

JQ1509 1983 951 ‘.026 82*4822

ISBN 0-520-04659*5 AACR2

isbn 0-520-04733-8 (pbk.)

To my parents:

John Dardess, m.d

Edna W. Dardess

Contents 1

Contents 1

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Confucianism as a Profession in Fourteenth-Century China

Confucian Households as a Fiscal Category

The Shih and Ju as Social Types

Confucianism as Professional Knowledge

The Training of Confucian Professionals

The Confucian "Service IdeaT

Confucian Professional Income

The Confucian Clientele, Professional Labor Control, and Problems of Public Service

The Confucian Professional Community

2 Confucianism in the Yuan-Ming Transition

Ming Tai-tsu (Chu Yuan-chang) in Che-tung

The Che-tung Confucian Elite and the Idea of World-Salvation

Liu Chi (1311-1375)

Wang Wei (1323-1374)

Sung Lien (1310-1381)

Hu Han (1307-1391)

Ming Тai-tsu: The Theory and Practice of Despotism

The Ruler as Ruler: Mechanisms of World-Control

The Ruler as Teacher: The Psycho-behavioral Reform of Mankind

Confucianism’s Response to Ming Tai-tsu

Confucian Conformity and Dissent in the Reign of Ming Tai-tsu

From Sung Lien to Fang Hsiao-ju: Transition and Change in Confucian Professional Leadership

Doctrinal Revision and National Reform under Fang Hsiao-ju

Abbreviations Used in Bibliography and Notes

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I must thank the American Council of Learned Societies, whose grant allowed me to spend a research year (1971—72) in Japan, where I made use of the unparalleled library holdings of the Jimbun Kagaku Kenkyujo in Kyoto, and Seikad Bunko in Tokyo. I am also grateful for the support of the University of Kansas’s General Research Fund over several summers of writing and rewriting. The fund also footed the bill for the typing of the first draft.

Special debts of other (and various) kinds I owe to Grant Barnes, Dan Bays, Anna Cianciala, Wm. Theodore de Вату, Fang Chaoying, Bob Friesner, Grant Goodman, Charles O. Hucker, Don McCoy, F. W. Mote, Mark Rose, Romeyn Taylor, Saeki Tomi, and several conscientious readers whose identities are unknown to me, but whose suggestions concerning revision I followed more often than not. The remaining factual mistakes and interpretive inadequacies are, of course, my own responsibility.

January 1982

Introduction

In China the years 1350-1400 saw the collapse of the Yuan dynasty of the Mongols, seventeen years of popular rioting and civil war, the founding of the Ming dynasty, its momentary collapse and more civil war (1399-1402), followed by its re* founding under die Yu ng-10 emperor.¹ The legacy of those years to die rest of the Ming (1368-1644) and to the Ch’ing (1644-1912) was a sustained principle of imperial autocracy, raised to a higher and purer level than at any earlier time in history. The question that prompts this book is why conditions in the last half of the fourteenth century appear to have been so propitious for the enhancement of political centralization and autocratic control.

The problem is not simple, and it can be approached from more than one direction. G. William Skinner’s recent contribution attacks the matter from the lower end as it were, by showing that from the eighth century a.d. onward the Chinese political system failed to expand apace with die population and the economy and so gradually reduced its functions, sacrificing extent of control in the interest of maintaining at least a minimal degree of unity and security over China’s large geographical space. In this context, the enhancement of imperial autocracy would have to be seen as an adjustment within the political apparatus, an effort to intensify its internal controls at the same time that its administrative capacities over society at large were becoming ever fewer and weaker.

An approach along these lines might help explain why the main features of Ming autocracy, once put into place, could manage to last some five hundred years. It is less helpful, however, in explaining the origins of that autocracy. The fourteenth century was a period not of growth but of economic and demographic decline in China, just as it was in western Europe, the Byzantine realm, and in the Middle East. China s population, somewhere in the 80-100 million range early in the fourteenth century, shrank to some 65 million late in the same century. In these depressed conditions, the administrative results that the autocratic early Ming regime was able to achieve in the fields of economic redevelopment, popular education, population transfer, tax reassessment, and the like were quite impressive. It therefore seems likely that the conditions that created the Ming political system must be separated from the conditions that later perpetuated it.

This book looks into the Chinese social system for clues to the origin of the Ming autocracy. What classes or interests wanted it? Two possibilities can be dismissed at the outset. The Ming state was clearly not a military dictatorship, despite the creation of a powerful military machine in the wars of foundation. Nor, despite the humble peasant origins of the founding emperor, can die Ming system be construed as an instrument of social revolution, put together on behalf of a poor and downtrodden peasant mass.

I began the project by examining a large and little-used body of source material, some 128 collected works (wen-chi), most of them authored by Confucian literati and ranging in date from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth century. I expected that these might somehow yield insights into the problem of the formation of the Ming. As I read these works, it slowly became evident that the essential point to be grasped was that the writers considered themselves inhabitants of a special social universe of their own. They obviously took themselves to be an extraor dinarily select group. Yet it proved hard to explain exactly in what kind of social framework the reality of their sense of eliteness might best be understood.

Did the writers constitute or represent a class in a socioeconomic sense? Were they gentry class spokesmen? and as such did they protect class interests in landholding, officeholding, and privileged fiscal exemptions? and could the founding of the Ming state be analyzed in those terms? Long ago, I began with that assumption. Then I found that arguing it would require that the writings of the literati be taken as fraudulent, or at least irrelevant to the real bets of the Ming founding. There is also the difficulty that local gentry theory (kyoshinron), as that idea has been developed in recent years in Japan, has so far been unable to make a firm conceptual link between the nature and structure of the Ming-Ch’ing imperial state and the socioeconomic interests of the dominant landholding classes of the countryside.² Dennerline has shown quite clearly that the notion of a gentry class does not fit the social bets even in late Ming times. As for the early Ming, a Soviet scholar, A. A. Bokshchanin, has pointed out that the political order does not reflect any perceptible class interests very well. In social terms, then, the Ming founding appears to be an event impossible to explain.

The key to the matter must lie in comprehending Confucianism as both philosophy and sociology at one and the same time. If one takes the Confucian writers and activists as a selfconscious elite within the compass, not of a social class per se, but of a profession in the sociological sense (as the Chinese counterpart of an ulema in the Islamic world), then far from dismissing them and their writings, one can use them to help explain the early Ming urge toward reform, centralization, and autocracy.

The solution seems so obvious that it is odd it was not pounced upon long ago. One obstacle to it may have been Joseph R. Levenson’s widely read essay The Amateur Ideal in Ming and Early Ch’ing Society: Evidence from Painting (available in his Modern China and Its Confucian Past, New York, 1964), a brilliant study that unfortunately, through an idiosyncratic use of concepts, succeeded in firmly pasting the label amateur upon the Ming-Ch’ing Confucian elite. Amateur painters of a very special sort they may have been, but amateur Confucians they decidedly were not. The first chapter of this book argues systematically that there existed in fourteenth-century China something approaching a national community of Confucian public-service professionals, and that while die early Ming state reflects class interests very poorly, it does reflect quite accurately the identifiable interests of a national Confucian professional elite. The aim is to help solve the specific historical problem of the Ming founding, but the analysis should prove to have some relevance for other periods and contexts as well.

The 128 collected works, the main source material for the first chapter, constitute a nearly full listing of all extant works by writers who flourished sometime between the years 1340 and 1400, with a much thinner representation from earlier and later times. These are but a fragment of the total output of fourteenth-century writing, most of which has not been preserved. The remainder cannot be taken as a true statistical sample. Geographical provenance, as determined by the writers’ native places, shows an irregular distribution. Only 12 works, or 9 percent of the total, are by writers whose native places lay north of the Yangtze. The other 91 percent are by Southern Chinese, in whose milieu the Ming state originated. Excluding Szechwan and Yunnan (no examples), only 28 percent of all South China prefectures or the equivalent are represented by writers whose works survive. The distribution ranks Chin-hua prefecture (Kiangche, or Chekiang province) first with 19, then Chi-an (Kiangsi province) with 18, Hui-chou (Kiangche) ii, Soochow (Kiangche) 7, Tai-chou (Kiangche) 6, Ning-po (Kiangche) 6, Shao-hsing (Kiangche) 6, Lin-chiang (Kiangsi) 5, Lin-ch’uan (Kiangsi) 5, Ch’u-chou (Kiangche) 4, plus 1, 2, or 3 each from eighteen other South China prefectures.

The second chapter details die reactions of die Confucian professional community as a whole to the national crisis of the 1350s, and of an important regional segment of that community to the special manifestations of that crisis in the Che-tung hinterland. The chapter shows how die Confucians—as professional menwho considered themselves uniquely competent to diagnose societal ills and prescribe remedial measures— responded to the popular uprisings and die Yuan dynastic breakdown. It further shows why die Confucian elite of Chin- hua and Ch'u-chou prefectures (in Che-tung circuit of Chekiang province) played so strong a hand in the early stages of the Ming founding. It discusses in historical context die special interests of die Che-tung elite, and shows why those interests were well served by as extreme an autocracy as that of the early Ming.

Chapter three moves from history into philosophy and provides an analysis of the work of four Confucian writers of Che- tung, who wrote on the problem of national salvation just before the armies of the future Ming founder conquered their home territory. Three of die writers soon became top-level advisers in the new regime. They were the theoretical founders of the Ming autocracy, although their real interest was not so much in autocracy for its own sake as it was in the larger question of the reform and purification of the Chinese social system.

The fourth chapter shows how the unusually long-winded founder of the Ming dynasty adapted die Confucian outlook generally, and the reform ideas of the Che-tung writers specifically, to the task of creating an autocratic political system for the purpose of effecting a program of national sociomoral regeneration. The revolting horrors die founder perpetrated in the course of pursuing that goal may have owed something to a violent streak in his personality, but even if that is true, that violence was expressed well within the moral and political framework devised by the Che-tung theoreticians. They had failed to foresee die terrible abuses die totalitarian order they built would almost certainly engender.

The fifth and last chapter covers one final attempt by an elite movement within the Confucian profession to prescribe and carry out a nationwide reform, a matter that had been a Confucian preoccupation in one form or another for about half a century. After the collapse of that effort in the Yung-lo imperial usurpation of 1402, the familiar Ming Confucianism with its emphasis on significant but rather less ambitious questions began to take shape. The chapter describes the process of elite formation that led to this last attempt at national reform. It shows how the new elite generation of the 1380s and 90s tried, though it failed, to repair the theoretical errors of its predecessor, dismande the totalitarian moral and political structure of the early Ming, and impose a quite different kind of normative order upon China.

The sociological approach to Confucianism and its role in the Ming founding does not at all require that a static and ideal construct, devised in the West, be clamped as rigidly as a vise upon a group of real people acting in an alien historical and cultural context. What the modern sociology of the professions has to offer is a highly general set of logically connected propositions that appear applicable to certain kinds of occupational groups in certain times and places. Whether Confucianism, in an ideal and static sense, was in fact a profession is beside the point? What matters is that the overall behavior of those who considered themselves Confucians was consciously aimed at, and in some ways achieved, a self-definition and a social role in which one can see a certain logical consistency. The pattern of that consistency falls within the parameters of what in Western sociology goes by the name of profession. Rather than simply yielding a stale definition, that concept can be used to provide a comprehensive framework for an historical analysis and critique of the Confucian endeavor.

Some further remarks are in order about the conceptual terminology deployed in this study. There is of course a risk of distortion whenever alien terms are imposed upon a source material, but either the risk has to be accepted or else there is no way to render systematically the recorded experience of one culture into the frame of reference of another.

Confucianism is an example. The most often used Chinese equivalent of the fourteenth century is sheng-hsien chih tao, the Way of the Sages and Worthies, a phrase that takes in not only Confucius, but also Mencius, the Duke of Chou, and all the other creators of normative civilized life. The substance of Confucian learning I call knowledge base or body of knowledge when speaking of it as a corpus of professional learning; theory, with respect to its abstract, general, and systematized character; or doctrine, with reference to the imperative that Confucian knowledge be firmly trusted, believed in, and put to work to ameliorate a range of social or individual ills. The Chinese equivalents for any or all of these are tao, the Way; chiao, teaching; or hsueh, learning.

I have, however, generally avoided the word ideology, even though Confucian theory or doctrine often functions as ideology insofar as it promotes an orthodox and simplistic view of issues in place of one that is skeptical and appreciative of the complexities of political life.⁴1 prefer to avoid it because however value-laden and heroically simplistic Confucian ideas may have been in their practical application, they were not ad hoc distillations from the general culture (as ideology tends to be), but were worked out by a distinct corps of professional experts on the basis of the established system of doctrinal truth that they guarded and maintained. The word also has further complications that make it a likely source of confusion in a study such as this.

An individual Confucian in Chinese is often rendered with reference to how good a Confucian he is judged to be. Thus we have sheng, sage; hsien, worthy; chiin-tzu, gentleman; hsiao-jen, small man; and the like. The strictly untranslatable terms ju (someone who studies, usually meaning the Confucian books) and shih (someone prepared to lead others) are neutral in this respect, unless qualified by some adjective (for example, chien-ju, "ignoble ju"). A terminological distinction between occupation and profession is not made in the sources; both are yeh.

Inasmuch as this study deals with the ethos of the Confucian professional community, I have also tried to use its own frames of social reference and its own sociomoral terminology, and have provided translated excerpts from the original sources partly for that purpose. Yet I found unavoidable the intrusion of exogenous concepts, for which there are no good equivalents in the written Chinese language of the time. One case in point is reform. There are some occasional approximations to that word (keng-hua, change and transformation; fu-ku, restoring antiquity; and the like), but nothing in routine use that corresponds to it consistently. By reform I mean the intended outcome of the application of expert Confucian knowledge to the remedy of public crises or abuses. Another such concept is centralization, whose meaning the Ming founder approaches when he talk about shaking the cords of the net (chen chikang). Again, however, no Chinese concept in routine use matches very well the word in question. By centralization I mean a change from a state of diffusion toward the visible concentration of responsibility and decision-making authority that, owing to the practical demands of carrying out a reform, must normally accompany it.

This study challenges, in some ways, an earlier view of the character and outlook of the Confucian elites who contributed to the Ming founding. A useful and influential study published by Ch’ien Mu in 1964 surveys die writing of Sung Lien, Liu Chi, Kao Ch’i, Su Po-heng, Pei Ch'iung, Hu Han, lai Liang, and Fang Hsiao-ju—all of whom figure in this book. He comes generally to the conclusion that the first five exhibited a certain psychopathology (hsin-ping), both in their disinclination to condemn the Mongol Yuan dynasty on nationalist or ethnic grounds and in their evident lack of emotional enthusiasm for the Chinese Ming house. The others he praises either for staunch Yuan loyalism (lai Liang), or for advanced antibarbarian views (Hu Han and Fang Hsiao-ju).

In the light of the present analysis of Confucianism as a public-service profession, loyal to its own norms above all, a weak commitment or emotional attachment on the part of its elites to one dynasty or another is less a symptom of psychic ill- health than it is a likely manifestation of a latent tension between a profession and the organization that happens to employ it. The vehement position of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-70) in favor of dynastic loyalty was by no means a universally accepted part of die Confucian ethic in late Yuan and early Ming. Professor Ch’ien neglects to point out that the question of dynastic loyalty was openly discussed, pro and con, by such writers as Liu Chi, Wang Wei, Chou Ting-chen, and Ch’en Mo. The last-named writer devoted an essay to a refutation of the view that the Confucian community had to assume a fanatical (chih-i) posture of loyalty to a failing dynasty.⁵ No such loyalty ethic bound die Confucians; individuals were free to choose for diemselves how loyal they thought they should be. It was not along pro-Yuan or pro-Ming lines that the Confucian community split. Rather, as Chen Mo emphasized in his essay, the dividing line should be (and to a large extent was) drawn differently, with loyalists and non-loyalists of unselfish motive and behavior on one side, and feme- and favor-seekers on the other. The writers discussed the issue of dynastic loyalism much less than they did the terms and conditions of official service in general, however; and one has the impression that the identity of a dynasty was less important to them than the kind of environment and opportunity it provided, or promised to provide, for the advancement of the Confucian profession.

Professor Araki Kengo’s study of Sung Lien as a thinker also deserves some comment in this context. To later generations, Sung Lien’s renown was that of a literary craftsman and man of wide learning. Araki’s concern is to discover why the Confu- cianists of later times held him in such low esteem as a man of ideas. He finds that the problem lies in Sung Lien’s eclecticism, in his easy willingness to assimilate Buddhist ideas as well as divergent Confucian thought systems, and in his consequent inability to project his ideas sharply enough to attract a permanent school of disciples. However, Araki believes that Confucian posterity treated Sung Lien unfairly. People usually consider Ch’en Pai-sha [1429-1500] and his teacher Wu K’ang-chai [1392-1469] the forerunners of Ming Confucianism, he writes. While there may be some good grounds for this, the ‘mind-study that included Chu Hsiism’ that prevailed in the late Yuan and early Ming helped change and revive the stagnant spiritual structure of mankind, and while it may appear heterodox, it is important to note that as it widened minds and brought about a self-liberating intellectual experience, it constituted a transitional phase in the formation of a new thought current and a new Confucianism (p. 39).

Professor Araki writes as a historian of Chinese thought, a mode which I definitely do not adopt in this book. In chapter three, however, I discuss some of Sung Lien’s ideas, and I must agree with Araki s observation that for Sung Lien and Wang Wei and their colleagues the true substance or knowledge-base of Confucianism lay in those areas where it tended to be compatible with Buddhism and Taoism, and where its own various strains converged; and that the substance as thus conceived was expected to have applicability (yung) in the world of the time. Araki points out that this loose formulation of the Confucian t’i was at odds with the much stricter sense of orthodoxy that had led to its earlier formulations in the Sung.

I should like to suggest in this connection that there developed in Yuan Confucianism a disinclination to perpetuate a rabbinical attachment to a fixed and detailed body of orthodox classical scripture and commentary. Efforts were made to adjust and expand the doctrine in accordance with the perceived needs of the Confucian community as times changed. However, the Chin-hua writers of the late Yuan (starting with Huang Chin, in the generation before Sung Lien’s) explicitly stated that conciliation in matters of doctrine must lead to the formation of harmonious collegial relationships among Confucians. Their reading of Sung history taught them that the attempt to define an exclusive intellectual orthodoxy had resulted in militant factionalism and petty wrangling, with disastrous consequences for the maintenance of unity and ethical controls within the profession as a whole. It was definitely Sung Lien’s own aim to redefine the essence of Confucian doctrine in such a way as to imbed it firmly in the ethical structure of the Confucian community.

But that emphasis led to a narrowness of a different kind. It led to a narrow orthopraxy, a surprisingly intense concern for the observance of the highest possible standards of professional conduct. Truce and synthesis on the intellectual battlefront were more than counterbalanced by an all-out struggle to purge the Confucian ranks of all those thought to be morally deviant or deficient. The mass butcheries of the Ming hardly seem at first glance to have had a connection with the demand of the elites for the imposition of ethical controls over the Confucian community, and yet Tai-tsu’s argument for despotic centralization is supported at almost every point by the ethically oriented world view that they had developed in conjunction with that demand.

An important new work in the history of Confucian thought appeared just as this book goes to press. Wm. Theodore de Bary’s Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind- and-Heart (Columbia University Press, 1981) deals fully and ably with a topic largely ignored in these pages—the historical process whereby, from around the late thirteenth century, the core of Confucian theory came to be focused upon the notion of htin-hsueh (the learning of the mind-and-heart). Though my own work lies rather in the field of social history, not the history of thought, it might now be more profitably read in conjunction with de Bary’s.

1

Confucianism

as a Profession in

Fourteenth-Century

China

This chapter sketches out the case for the existence of a self- contained Confucian profession in Yuan and early Ming China. In brief, the argument is that Confucianism may be understood as a profession in the light of the following considerations: (1) the imperial state established Confucian households as a separate fiscal and juridical category, based upon die special functions they performed; (2) those who considered themselves to be Confucians firmly believed that they performed services of crucial importance to the continuation of civilized life; (3) the Confucian knowledge brought to bear upon die problems of civilized life was professional knowledge in that it consisted in an ordered body of generalized and abstract principles or truths, applicable to a wide range of concrete situations, that were beyond the comprehension of laymen; (4) acquisition of this knowledge demanded rigorous and extended formal education and training; (5) though abstract, Confucian knowledge was useful knowledge and demanded of those who acquired it that they apply it to the rectification of certain kinds of social malfunctions; (6) Confucian practi-tioners assiduously cultivated an air of disinterest and impartiality toward their clientele and its problems; and (7) Confucian practitioners constituted a community of professionals that was distinctly different and separate from family, locality, or public bureaucracy as employing organization. The cumulation of these features resulted in the development of a Confucian professional interest, and as subsequent chapters will try to show, this interest had a very strong impact upon the nature of the Ming state that was formally founded in 1368.

Confucian Households

as a Fiscal Category

Not long after conquering South China, the Yuan state instituted a new and complicated household registration system. A prominent feature of that system was its segregation of certain categories of households from the main body of taxpayers. The special categories of households were made to perform on a hereditary basis various functions that the state considered necessary or important. Among these categories were households devoted to such designated occupations as salt manufacture, gold mining, hunting, medicine, artisanry, music, and the army, as well as Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Depending upon the locality, these special households (chu-se hu) constituted a widely varying proportion of the total number of households, anywhere from about 1 percent to about 25 percent.¹

The proportion of Confucian households to the total never fluctuated quite so widely from locality to locality. Generally, it lay somewhere within the modest range of a tenth to a half of one percent (0.1 -0.5%). For example, Hsien-chii county listed 151 Confucian households (ju-hu) out of a total of 27,110 taxpaying households; Tan-’u county listed 33 out of a total of 28,462; Chia-hsing prefecture, 1,088 out of a total of 459,337.²

These were insignificant totals, as the officials of the time were aware. Of the 1,140,000 taxpaying households of Che-tung circuit, a government report emphasized that only 8,724, or less than 1 percent, were ju-hu. Another government document stated that the Confucian households amounted to hardly a fifth the total number of Buddhist and Taoist households?

This was a surprisingly small statistical base for Chinese Confucianism, something which is too often lightly equated or confused with Chinese civilization in general. Even in the early Ming period, when this system of registration was continued, roughly comparable rates still obtained. For Hui-chou prefecture in 1371, there were 59 ju-hu in a total of 117,110; in Hsuan-ch’eng county, 43 out of a total of 31,448.⁴ Yet so much did these households dominate learned expertise that in the first Ming civil service examinations of 1371, of the 120 chin-shih who passed, 64 were men from registered ju-hu, as against only 49 from min-hu (taxpaying households of unspecified occupation), 5 from chiin-hu (military households of Northwest China), and a scattering of men of other odd categories.⁵ These statistics strongly suggest the effective concentration of Confucian knowledge in a specially designated and extremely minute fraction of all registered households.

From among what elements were the Confucian households originally recruited early in the Yuan period? Generally, as the early-fourteenth-century gazetteer for Nanking indicates, those allowed to become registered Confucians were members of old families, including especially the higher-degree holders of the defunct Sung dynasty.⁶ Yuan official documents further state that the award of Confucian registry depended upon a candidate’s ability to prove (1) direct descent from some higher- degree holder, university student, or ranking official of the Sung period, and (2) individual talent or competence as demonstrated by examination. In 1290, however, it was found that there were too many southern talents (hsiu-ts’ai) to admit all of them into the special registry, and many men otherwise qualified by heredity (ken-chiao) and personal competence had to be arbitrarily denied the benefit of special Confucian registry. At best, they could be put on waiting lists, in the event that vacancies should appear in the regular registers.⁷

Yet as time went on, the Confucian registers in some localities shrank by attrition, leaving fewer registrants toward the end than at the beginning of the dynasty. The reasons for this attrition seem obscure. It may have resulted in part from the removal of fraudulent registrants. Some sources also state that many of the old families disappeared, perhaps meaning that they failed to produce competent heirs. The Chien-ning county school had registered under it 75 ju-hu in 1290, but only 59 in 1297; likewise, Shang-yuan county dropped from 74 to 38 over the same period of time.⁸ Sung-yang county early on had 45 registered Confucian households; by 1359 many of those households had died out, and efforts were made to discover more distant kinsmen who were able to make an occupation of Confucianism and put them on the registers.⁹ It is unknown how widespread a phenomenon this shrinkage was. At all events, it will be seen that it cannot be taken as indicative of a general decline of interest in Confucian study in the Yuan period.

A family that merited registration under the ju-hu category was still obliged to pay land tax if it owned land, and commerce tax if it engaged in commerce. The main benefit of ju-hu registry was exemption from service obligations and immunity from minor litigation. The exemption meant in effect relief from the most onerous of a taxpayer’s fiscal responsibilities, because services included not only such unpaid tasks as tax collecting, police work, and government-storehouse keeping, but also the obligation to undertake sales and purchases of certain goods at prices usually set at the government’s advantage.¹⁰ Another im portant benefit of ju-hu registry was that it provided automatic access to the state educational institutions. The ju-hu were placed under the jurisdiction of a prefectural or county-level Confucian school (ju-hsueh), or under one or another of the forty-odd academies (shu-yuan) early authorized by the state to operate in South China. Although it was ordered in 1295 that those not registered as Confucians could not enter the state-run schools,¹¹ it is possible that this restriction was relaxed over time. At least, as will be mentioned further on, there did take place a great growth of academies as well as of private schools in many parts of South China during die Yuan period.

In die eyes of