An Official’s Path in the Great Ming: Records of a Hundred Strange Encounters

During the Hongzhi reign of the Ming dynasty, Shen Yanqiu, a poor scholar, enters government service after placing among the top three in the imperial examinations and is appointed an editor at the Hanlin Academy. He is driven by the ambition to “raise the emperor to the heights of Yao and Shun,” but crashes headlong into the tangled traps of officialdom. At court, grand secretaries form cliques based on shared hometowns and examination years, and a single “you are not one of us” is enough to dismiss sound policies as heresy. In the provinces, prefects falsify disaster reports for the sake of their “achievements,” county magistrates curry favor with superiors through “gifts,” and even lowly post-station clerks dare to extort passing officials in the name of “official business.”

Shen Yanqiu witnesses all manner of corruption: cheating in the imperial examinations, the buying and selling of posts, and the abuse of power for personal gain. Supervising censor officials turn a blind eye to plagiarism in exchange for “writing fees.” Chief examiners use recommendation letters from their “students” as bargaining chips, leaving even brilliant candidates from humble families unable to pass. When capital officials are posted to the provinces, local officials have to put together “welcoming gifts,” or face obstruction at every turn. Shen once tries to break the deadlock through sheer honesty, but is repeatedly framed and nearly loses both his post and his life.

Once he sees through the unspoken rules that “seniority matters more than ability” and “knowing how to handle people matters more than knowing how to do the job,” Shen Yanqiu gradually understands that the corruption of officialdom stems from human greed, flaws in the system, and selfishness. He begins seeking a balance between holding to his principles and adapting to the “rules.” In the end, he uses clear-eyed pragmatism to expose layer after layer of corruption, only to discover, even at the height of his success, that this bizarre and chaotic official world has always been a mirror reflecting all of humanity.