Ch'ing Dynasty Education Materials in the Department of Special Collections, UCLA

Vol. 10, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1989 CH'ING DYNASTY EDUCATION MATERIALS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UCLA Benjamin Elman Two groups of rare materials of interest to Ch'ing social and intellectual historians are now available in the Han Yii-shan Collection in the Department of Special Collections as part of the UCLA University Research Library. The collection at UCLA enables scholars to get at materials that are for the most part unavailable anywhere else in the world. Altogether the collection contains almost 500 imperial civil service examination and related papers (in both Chinese and Manchu languages) and twenty-four printed works on private Confucian academies. Dating from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, these have been organized according to date and will soon be microfilmed for more general use. David Zeidberg, Director of the Department of Special Collections, and James Cheng, Director of the UCLA Oriental Library, are presently arranging appropriate microfilm exchanges with the Morman Genealogical Library in Salt Lake City (and through them with the No. 1 Historical Archives in Beijing), which will permit the specialized library collection at UCLA to develop and grow. The most important part of the Han Yii-shan Special Collection contains the original palace examination papers of 2 1 1 chin-shih candidates for the imperial Confucian civil service from 1646 to 1904. In addition, the collection contains 39 special examinations in the Manchu language given to Chinese and Manchu Hanlin academicians, which Professor Pamela Crossley of Dartmouth College helped to identify. Examination "papers" (actually accordion-folded into a rectangle slightly over nineteenby -five inches containing thirty pages) prepared by Chinese and Manchu students give us a unique window from which to look into the educational world of late imperial China before the abolition of the imperial examination system based on the Confucian classics in 1905. When complemented with source material available in Japanese archives, the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and the No. 1 Historical Archives in Beijing and elsewhere via the Morman Genealogical Library, we are able to recreate the ideological mind set that permeated the classically-inspired questions and Late Imperial China 10, No. 2 (December 1989):139-140 T by the Society for Qing Studies 139 140Benjamin Elman answers to the examination. In addition, we can reconstruct the complex institutional framework within which that ideological mind set was transmitted from the official examiners who represented the imperial court and central bureaucracy to the county and prefectural levels of local society where the ladder of success in imperial China began. In addition, the UCLA collection contains many rare gazetteers and other manuscripts from several Confucian private academies where students prepared for the imperial examinations. Among these are 98 extremely rare student examination papers from two prominent nineteenth-century academies: Chung-shan shu-yuan and Tsun-ching shu-yuan. Most are in good condition and are scheduled for microfilming. Private academies, which prepared many candidates for the local examinations , were by the eighteenth century a commonplace in every part of the country. Such local educational institutions were not only centers for teaching and learning. They were also a venue for the printing of books and the storage of woodblocks from which books were printed. Examination manuscripts and related works from these academies in the UCLA collection provide us with an additional vantage point from which to evaluate the links between official examinations and the private schooling system prominent among elite Confucian gentry. Together, the official examination "papers" and academy manuscripts furnish us with an indispensable resource for understanding traditional Chinese education. In June, 1989, an international conference on "Education and Society in Late Imperial China," sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation , and the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, brought together in Santa Barbara, California, scholars from Taiwan, Canada, the United States, and Europe in a cooperative effort to reevaluate the intellectual nature and social and political significance of education from 1600 to 1900 in China. Conference participants were able to view the Han Yiishan Collection at UCLA at a special reception sponsored by the Department of Special Collections, International Studies and Overseas Programs (ISOP), and the...