Heroes within Bowshot: Examination Administration, the Lower Yangzi Delta, and the Qing Consolidation of Empire, 1645-1720

When Xu Yuanwen (1634-91), Hua Yixiang and Ye Fang'ai (1629-82) placed first through third in the Palace Examination of 1659, it was already the fourth time since 1647 that those honors had been swept by scholars from Jiangnan province.² Two-thirds of 1659's "tripod bracket" (dingjia), as the top three winners were called, would go on to careers of scholastic and political influence. Xu Yuanwen would become censorate president, Hanlin chancellor (twice), Board of Revenue president, and grand secretary. The first of three brothers to win a jinshi-each of whom placed in the top tier-Yuanwen also paved the way for the creation of the most influential and powerful Han political and academic patronage network of the late seventeenth century.³ Ye Fang'ai would oversee the compilation of several imperially commissioned works of scholarship (including the Ming History), serving as Hanlin chancellor, imperial tutor, and metropolitan examiner along the way. The Kangxi emperor Aisin Gioro Xuanye (r. 1662-1722), moreover, appointed him one of four chief officiators for the special 1679 examination to recruit men of "broad learning and extensive erudition" (boxue hongru).⁴ Beyond the bond of fellow graduate (tongnian), Ye and Xu shared another: they both hailed from Kunshan, Jiangnan. That locale's subsequent enshrinement in examination lore as a birthplace for scholastic excellence alongside other lower Yangzi Valley cities like Wuxi, Deqing and Changshi-not to mention Suzhou-betokens a process vital for the consolidation of Qing rule in the late seventeenth century: the reestablishment of southern influence in bureaucratic politics via civil service examinations.⁵ Viewed in the context of late imperial civil service examination history the recrudescence of southern dominance appears a foregone conclusion, since the epicenters of academic excellence clustered in Jiangnan and Zhejiang throughout the Ming and Qing, and quota regimes designed to prevent southern hegemony were a feature of both eras.⁶ In 1659, however, the role of the region's elites in the new imperial order remained fraught with the complexities of the Manchu conquest.

Ye and Xu's hometown, for example, lay roughly twenty-five kilometers from Jiading, whose inhabitants Qing forces (comprising Han troops) slaughtered in their campaigns against Ming loyalist strongholds in the region in 1645 when Ye and Xu were still boys.⁷ Xu had lost kinsmen to the conquest's bloodshed, and his famed maternal uncle Gu Yanwu (1613-82) refused to serve the new dynasty. Two years after their examination triumph, moreover, both Ye and Xu were implicated in the Jiangnan tax case of 1661, when the regents for the young Kangxi emperor endorsed a brutal crackdown on tax evaders and protesters in the lower Yangzi Delta. Their official careers resumed only when their names were cleared later in the decade.⁸ At the same time, the regency began persecuting scholars connected to the allegedly seditious Outline of Ming History, the first of several Qing literary inquisitions targeting lower Yangzi Valley elites that continued in the eighteenth century with the cases of Jiangnan literatus Dai Mingshi (1653-1713) and Zhejiang official Zha Siting (1664-1727). Court suspicion of southern literati derived from their role in the factionalism that ostensibly hobbled the late Ming bureaucracy as well as their involvement in several resistance movements and Ming rump regimes that were only recently quelled. Late Ming literary associations such as the Restoration Society (Fushe) were seen to provide the organizational basis for both factionalism and loyalism, and had been outlawed on three different occasions. Such measures had not, however, prevented more than 150 Restoration Society members from taking Qing civil service examinations or serving the new state, which they did promptly: twenty-four of 1649's metropolitan class were adherents, including optimus Liu Zizhuang.⁹ Both Ye and the Xu brothers, moreover, were involved in early Qing literary societies, while the latter were related by marriage to figures active in the delta's resistance movements.¹⁰

These concerns remained fresh when court heralds proclaimed Ye and Xu's achievement in the Hall of Supreme...