Tip: This is not a fictional plot, but a record of my grandfather's "official career" over several decades. The book unabashedly presents the "hidden rules" of the officialdom of the Qing Dynasty on how to survive at the lowest level of the Qing Dynasty government agencies. Open this book and you will see a "Survival Guide to the Workplace in the Qing Dynasty" for children from poor families that is more exciting than the TV series.
For three generations, my family has been raking the soil for food. At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, there were wars and chaos, and years of famine. Rice could not grow in the fields, and people were so hungry that they gnawed tree bark for food. My great-great-grandfather's great-grandfathers guarded their thin fields and struggled like weeds to survive in troubled times. It wasn't until Emperor Kangxi and then Emperor Qianlong stabilized the world that the world became more stable. Only then did my great-grandfather's great-grandfathers finally have the opportunity to crawl out of the loess pile, dig down the soil again, take root, and begin to cultivate my grandfather. No one expected that three generations of poor family would produce such a "scholar" as my grandfather - he was not a Jinshi with a title on the imperial examination, nor was he a gentleman in official uniform. He was just a clerical clerk in the county government who copied and copied without grades. Looking at the whole village, he was regarded as the best from a poor family. But it was such an inconspicuous job that allowed him to plunge into the lowest level of the Qing Dynasty officialdom. He saw all the human relationships in the county government and the light and dark officialdom. It also dragged our family from the dirt to the edge of the system.
Grandpa never did anything earth-shattering in his life, but he clearly described the world of government and people's hearts in a small county in the Qing Dynasty.
In line with the modern system