Chapter 13

Family matters talked through, it was time to talk studies.

Fan Xiliang said rather sheepishly that he'd sat the exams once a year ago: he'd passed the prefectural but failed the departmental, and got a good scolding from his father for it. For this grace examination he'd gone back to Shangyang Commandery in Longzhou, his home registry, to sit it; he'd found the questions rather hard, and was very worried he wouldn't even pass the prefectural — wouldn't that be an even greater disgrace to the family?

Because the question-setting officials were confirmed at different times in each prefecture, the examination dates varied somewhat. Shangyang Commandery bordered Ningxing Prefecture, three days away along the canal; once he'd finished his exam Fan Xiliang slept a full day and a half to recover, then rushed all the way to Yunzhong, the Northern Capital, to waylay Zhuo Siheng.

"What if I'd already sat the exams before?" Zhuo Siheng asked, curious. "Wouldn't you have made the trip for nothing, cousin?"

"It couldn't be!" said Fan Xiliang, sure of himself and rather proud. "Every examination year I'd go to the Ministry of Rites to look at the departmental-exam roll. If you weren't on it, Cousin, then either you hadn't come to sit it or your luck was poor that time — for with my uncle Zhuo's deep scholarly line, how could he ever let you idle at home and let your life go to waste? So all these years without good news of you meant simply that you hadn't yet appeared!"

Zhuo Siheng laughed when he heard this. "Lucky I didn't shame my father, or I'd have let down your 'waiting-by-the-stump-for-a-rabbit' scheme, cousin."

"Father often says I'm not clever enough, so I've only ever thought up methods that are clumsy but useful." Fan Xiliang's tone suddenly dropped. "It shames me to say it — if I'd won a degree and held an office early on, I wouldn't be so bound hand and foot, with no way to seek out news of my own family's whereabouts, having to recognize a kinsman by turning back his sleeve... And coming north in secret this time, I can't stay long to keep you company for the prefectural exam; I have to set off home again first thing tomorrow..."

Not wanting him to belittle himself and lose heart, Zhuo Siheng said gently, "Going back sooner will set your family at ease — that's only right; a grown man like me doesn't need watching over. What I should do is ask you to teach me a thing or two from experience. It shames me to say it, but this is my first time entering the examination compound, and what I know is all what my father used to tell me — how it is now, whether anything's changed, I've no idea at all."

Hearing this, a strong sense of responsibility and of being needed suddenly welled up in Fan Xiliang, and he told Zhuo Siheng everything he knew, great and small, in full. By the time the two of them had finished, a waning moon hung high in the faintly cold autumn night. Fan Xiliang was to take a boat south the next day, and however loath they were to part, part they must for now; they made a promise to gather in the capital on the day of the departmental examination and talk the long night through together, clear to dawn.

Fan Xiliang also gave Zhuo Siheng some silver, saying that though his own monthly funds were limited, his father was, after all, Vice-Minister of the Court of State Ceremonial — a capital official of the senior sixth rank, more or less — and he himself lived well enough, whereas his cousin, out on his own away from home, was just then in need of money to spend.

With an unloving father and a stepmother, and from what Fan Xiliang had said before, one could tell his life at home might not be as good as he made out; but to refuse now would seem too affected and cold, and besides, gazing into Fan Xiliang's eager, earnest eyes, Zhuo Siheng couldn't for the life of him bear to refuse. After all, if he himself gave something from the heart, he too would want it to meet the other's urgent need, and not be turned down.

So he accepted the ten taels of silver and saw Fan Xiliang off to the wharf, the two agreeing to leave letters at a small post-house in the capital, and only in the deep of night did he return to his lodging.

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The next ten days Zhuo Siheng spent in study. In truth, though these years he'd had the household to manage and now and then had to go up the mountain to hunt, he'd never let his studies slip; he always found time to read a little and write a little, and his composition and coursework had by no means grown slack or rusty. But Fan Xiliang had said the departmental exam varied greatly in difficulty depending on the question-setter, and if you ran up against a hard nut, your writing had to be tougher than his before you could get through the ordeal.

Zhuo Siheng was confident of his compositions. His poetry and belles-lettres were only passable, though in versifying on history and working in allusions he could now and then land a fresh line; but set against scholars who specialized in that sort of thing, he'd surely be put in the shade. Still, though the dynasty's examinations tested the policy essay, the discourse and poetry separately — one day each, three days in all, seemingly even-handed — Taizong had once reformed the examinations, holding that "in the grading of high and low, the policy essay and the discourse should as a rule come first," and had struck one of the two literary pieces, the rhapsody, from the old poetry-and-rhapsody test, leaving only the poem. When Zhuo Yan had told him all this back then, Zhuo Siheng had nearly cried aloud in excitement that Taizong was wise, the foremost sage ruler of the dynasty! His own level at writing poetry was already a stretch; a rhapsody would have been the death of him. Happily, this tradition carried on to the present, and the policy essay and the discourse were the primary measure in selecting candidates — greatly to his advantage.

Zhuo Siheng sighed to himself: who'd ever have thought that he, who'd always prided himself on not being weak in any subject, would now be fretting over shoring up a weak spot — the humanities really were hard going.

After this bout of inward reckoning and preparation, Zhuo Siheng, in the breaks between his reading, packed the deerskin bag he'd take into the examination hall with its dry rations and other things, and only waited for the exam to open.

On the seventh day of the eleventh month, in the tenth year of Zhenyuan, the examination compound opened its doors, and the prefectural examination began.

To avoid any suspicion of collusion in cheating, it was only on the day the exam opened that a notice was posted at the gate telling the scholars the cell numbers of their places along the galleries; on entering, they were guided to their seats by the invigilators according to name, with no swapping permitted for any reason at all.

The examination cells were numbered by the Thousand Character Classic. This grace examination had some two hundred-odd scholars in Ningxing Prefecture, and Zhuo Siheng's number was "Cell Jun" — the character jun, "noble man." Somehow, seeing this number, he thought of the Qian hexagram his father had once cast for him back in the exile district: supreme, penetrating, advantageous, upright; Heaven moves with vigor, and the noble man never ceases to strengthen himself.

The opening of the examination was a lively affair; many people of Yunzhong City came to look on, and the neat ranks of scholars filing in in order truly were a grand sight. But because their qualifications had to be checked without error and they had to be searched for smuggled notes, the line moved slowly, and by the time Zhuo Siheng went in, many of the idle onlookers had lost interest and gone home, the passersby thinning out — though the morning light was just right. Before he stepped over the threshold, as if moved by some unseen hand, he turned to look back; but in the outer ground of the compound there were only scholars, prefectural troops, and the families and attendants of the scholars — not that familiar, slightly stooped figure that had once stood right behind him.

The invigilator urged him on, and Zhuo Siheng turned and entered the compound.

The search for smuggled notes and the calling of the guarantors done, Zhuo Siheng was led to "Cell Jun" — a small, square little cell under the gallery, three chi wide and four deep, taking it all in at a glance, no need to look closely. No sooner had he stepped in than the invigilator locked it and lowered the curtain behind him, sealing him inside.

Three days to spend in here — it really was torture.

Zhuo Siheng opened the deerskin bag: everything he'd packed so neatly inside had been rummaged to ruin, and the dry rations and bean cakes, poked to bits to check for anything hidden in them, were in no fit shape at all. He set these aside first, laid out his brush, ink and inkstone, and, following the principle his father had taught him — "before anything else, grind the ink first" — used the clean water from the little handwashing bucket to wet the ink and begin grinding.

By the time the first day's policy-essay paper was handed down, Zhuo Siheng had his ink ground, and the freshly cut fair-copy paper and draft paper gave off a brand-new smell, striking to the senses, as if to tell the scholars that they had come now to a critical pass in their lives, and that fate hung on the single sheet and single brush before them.

Composed, Zhuo Siheng unrolled the question sheet. It read: The dignity of the officials of Han has been admired in every age. Looking upon it now — whom would you be? Why? What ought you to do? Our dynasty has opened its borders a hundred years, down to Zhenyuan; that the throne thirsts for the worthy is because talent is not yet abundant. Where, then, are the officials of Han to be sought?

That is: the array of Han officials has been praised in every age; now, you scholars, looking back on these famous ministers of Han — who would you want to be? Your reasons? And how do you mean to go about it? Our own dynasty, by the Zhenyuan years, has stood a hundred years and more; right now His Majesty opens the examinations and longs for the worthy — so where are the outstanding Han ministers of the histories to be found today? And how is one to find them?

It was a rather interesting question, this joining of history and the present.

A policy-essay answer held several questions within it, weighted above all toward discussing governance, and closely bound to the present moment; one had to tie it to real, practical ground before ranging outward. But that was only the answering approach in the broad sense — there was, in fact, a deeper layer to reading it, one of suiting the response to the times.

Zhuo Yan had once told him that one thing mattered greatly in the prefectural exam: it wasn't only about putting forward sound views and countermeasures, but also about using one's writing as a way to display the fruits of one's learning — what's called drawing widely on sources and proving one's breadth by allusion — showing the depth and range of one's reading, and giving proof that one had not merely a basic education but the ability to study deeply above and beyond it.

In the prefectural exam, an impressive command of prose was sometimes more important than the actual content of the essay. For the prefectural exam was the first tier, not the elite contest that came later; what it screened for was "qualified," not "outstanding."

With that, Zhuo Siheng settled his draft in his head and at once had his direction for setting brush to paper.

In the "Appraisal" to scroll fifty-eight of Ban Gu's Book of Han — the biographies of Gongsun Hong, Bu Shi and Ni Kuan — the famous ministers of the reigns of Emperor Wu and Emperor Xuan had been listed off like a waiter reeling off a menu of dishes. Zhuo Yan loved this piece dearly; he said that in the days when the family was still flourishing, a friend of Siheng's grandfather had brought over Chu Suiliang's Ni Kuan Appraisal for them to enjoy together, and the grandfather had suspected the piece was an Ouyang Xun imitation, the two of them squabbling over it in a tangle and neither giving way — while he himself, young at the time, had been drawn to both the writing and the calligraphy, and could not forget it for a long while after; grown up, he'd copied out a version himself, mounted it, and hung it in his study to spur himself on.

And so the recitation of this piece Zhuo Siheng had learned character by character from Zhuo Yan, until it was letter-perfect in his memory; now the allusions flowed smoothly from his brush, and the names of the Han ministers of Emperor Wu's reign listed in it, like a spread of stars ranged across the sky, appeared one after another beneath it: Mei Cheng, Zhufu Yan, Bu Shi, Sang Hongyang, Wei Qing, Jin Midi, Dong Zhongshu, Ni Kuan, Gongsun Hong, Shi Jian, Shi Qing, Ji An, Han Anguo, Zheng Dangshi, Zhao Yu, Zhang Tang, Sima Qian, Sima Xiangru, Dongfang Shuo, Mei Gao, Yan Zhu, Zhu Maichen, Tang Du, Luoxia Hong, Li Yannian, Zhang Qian, Su Wu, Huo Qubing and Huo Guang...

He opened by writing "the altars of the House of Tang, the dignity of Han officialdom, admired and envied in every age," laying out allusions and recounting deeds, and chose Gongsun Hong as his answer — because Gongsun Hong was "expansive and widely learned," and so could help the court solve many problems of differing origins; and because he was one who, "though he passed through hardship and ups and downs, remained temperate, fair and even, holding his talent ready to respond." Though at first he'd been dismissed for conducting himself in ways that didn't suit Emperor Wu of Han, he hadn't let himself go to waste, but lived on calmly, until the state and Emperor Wu needed him again, when he brought out policies that cut to the ills of the day, so that the emperor at last recognized his ability and his level, and raised him to the height of a minister's station to assist him.

Zhuo Siheng argued that a man like this, though he had his personal faults, in the end "let no private failing taint his conduct as a minister" — his flaws never impaired his service to the state as a scholar-official; he kept public and private tolerably distinct, and above all he was "for the state and for the worthy, holding to his talent and keeping his loyalty," dying at last in the office of chancellor, a rare good end.

Of course, though he'd given rise to the idiom "Gongsun's hemp-cloth quilt" — meaning that though his household was wealthy he angled for a reputation by seeming poor — the truth was probably that, with so many famous ministers in Emperor Wu of Han's reign and the competition so fierce, he'd wanted to make his image loom a little larger in the emperor's mind so his proposals would be adopted; that could hardly be counted a moral stain. And besides, the others really were rather hard to write about.

Write about Wei Qing and Huo Qubing, and he ought to be sitting the military examination instead;

write about Zhao Yu and Zhang Tang, and harsh, punishing officials simply couldn't be held up as an ideal in a peaceful, well-governed age;

write about Dongfang Shuo and Mei Gao, and he probably hadn't the gifts of a comedian;

write about Sang Hongyang and Dong Zhongshu, and even he felt it would seem a touch too deliberate;

write about Sima Qian or Sima Xiangru, and with a pen like his he'd best not reach for the moon and try to leech fame off the greats;

write about Huo Guang, first of the Eleven Meritorious Officials of the Qilin Pavilion? Then he'd be tired of living...

All told, thinking it over and over, striking the balance between whom he admired and what suited him, Gongsun Hong was a good choice either way.

Adding plenty of words spurring himself to become a famous minister, Zhuo Siheng finished the first three questions, then turned to the system for selecting officials, saying that the Han recommendation system had at first been carried out well enough, choosing such talents as to form an array for the ages; but later the system had gradually degenerated into a plaything of the powerful and the great houses, and so was inferior to the examinations of the present dynasty. If one wished now to use the examinations to select talents like the famous ministers of Han, one still had to "rule with folded hands and draw in men of talent from every quarter" — for Emperor Yang of Sui, too, had once called himself a diehard fan of Emperor Wu of Han, admiring "the dignity of Han officialdom," and after all his thrashing about had come to the end of being killed by his own subordinates at Jiangdu, his state marching toward ruin. Mere admiration and imitation were meaningless; one had truly to choose a fitting method according to the age one lived in, and avoid treading Emperor Yang of Sui's old road...

He answered the policy essay quickly, and so rested early. The northern examination compound in the eleventh month was bitterly cold indeed; to prevent smuggling, no lined clothes or lined bedding were allowed. Luckily he had the two blankets Huiheng had sewn and prepared — one of felted wool, one of fur-lined hide — single-layer though they were, they served very well against wind and cold, and folded over him he could manage a decent sleep. Which he'd have slept better still, had the scholar in the cell to his left not ground his teeth in his sleep.

With the policy-essay stage behind him, the remaining two stages were much easier.

Zhuo Siheng met with no more hard problems. The only trouble was that on the last day, as he was copying onto the exam sheet the regulated verse he'd drafted on his scratch paper, the scholar in the cell to his right suddenly burst out howling and wailing, as if mourning a dead parent, in a violent fit; the sudden shriek startled him into a slip of the brush that left a huge smear of ink on the sheet. Luckily there was time enough, and a regulated poem hasn't many characters, so he asked the invigilator for a fresh sheet and copied it out again, handing in his paper on time in the end.

For all three days he lived in the tiny cell. Even though Zhuo Siheng didn't freeze, for want of experience he'd brought too little in the way of dry rations, and on the last day, with nothing to eat, he had to gulp down the hot broth the compound provided to fill his belly. Some of the scholars weren't so lucky: every night a few crying for their mothers and fathers were dragged out, and others had eaten something bad, so that the whole row of galleries reeked with a smell hard to bear. And from what his cousin had told him earlier, at the prefectural exam Fan Xiliang had sat, someone too frail had run a high fever from the cold on the very first night and been carried off as well.

When the scholars of Ningxing Prefecture came out of the examination compound, all three stages done, the setting sun was at its richest.

So hungry he could only stand propped against the wall, Zhuo Siheng was much like the other scholars — all of them half-dead. Candidates who'd come from afar as he had, if they had no kin along, had donkey-carts arranged by their inns and lodging-houses to take them back; those with family to meet them were steadied by house-servants, or set upon by parents, brothers, uncles and nephews all at once, hauled and shoved into carriages.

But beneath the tall catalpa tree outside the compound there was no one at all; Zhuo Siheng, alone, with no one to tell of the answers he privately thought so fine, could only drag his deerskin bag in silence and trudge wearily toward the little room he was lodging in, in a stranger's house.