The Study Of Jin Imperial Examinations And Literature In Jin Dynast

The contemporary scholar,Xue Ruizhao,spent many years in finishing writing the book,The Imperial Examination System in the Jin Dynasty,in which 1527 Jinshi(a successful candidate in the highest imperial examinations)were recorded.With his book,he did great contribution to the literary world.After that,many scholars corrected some mistakes and added more information to his book,yet many demerits and missing contents were still left in it.This essay follows the previous scholars step and corrects the false points as well as adds more 70 Jinshi to this book.And the exact time when the 70 Jinshi were recruited is identified.The distribution of the Jinshi in the Jin dynasty was not in a balanced way among different districts.The reasons why such unbalance distribution appeared are contributed to the factors as politics,culture,education,population and etc,among which education played the key role.The clanization of Jinshi in the Jin dynasty was very obvious.The distribution of the Jinshi families in different districts was quite unbalanced.The geographical distribution of Zhuangyuan(number one scholar)was almost the same as that of Jinshi and their families' distribution.Although the governors of the Jin dynasty came from Nvzhen ethnics,the Jin dynasty excised the recruiting system of choosing the talented people by their imperial examination marks for more than one hundred years.Many social customs concerned the imperial examination were populous in the society,such as begging the God and inquiring the priest,practicing divination and explaining the omen of the dream,believing in the causeandeffect equation theory and etc.all reflecting people's strong concept that the scholarly honor won in the imperial examination was predestined.In the society of the Jin dynasty,it was very common for a Jinshi to get married with a woman coming from influential official family.The fact that a woman preferred to marry a Jinshi reflected people highly worship towards the successful examinee passing the imperial examination.Compared with the Jinshi in the Tang and Song dynasty,Jinshi in the Jin dynasty were rarely heard involved in a romantic affair.The scope of the imperial examination questions in the Jin dynasty were mainly limited among the Five Classics,and its topics almost were related to being benevolent,clemency,choosing the person of virtue,cherishing the people and etc.All these examining contents reflected the psychological consciousness of the governors' of the Jin dynasty that worshipping the Han ethnic civilization,paying attention to ceremonial rites and music and the penalty administration,looking forward to a time of national peace and order.The method of recruiting talented people by their prose poetries initiated the prosperity of the creation of the prose poetries in the Jin dynasty,yet the narrow topic scope constrained the individual creativity of the poets in the Jin dynasty,which made it difficult for their works to circulate for a long time.The politicalized guide of the examination contents led to the phenomenon that the proses in the Jin dynasty possessed the strong color of comments.The imperial examination topics of the Nvzhen ethnics were key related to the discourses of politics caused that few scholars from the Nvzhen ethnics were famous for prose poetry creation.Several big incidents which were famous toward the end of the Jin dynasty happened in which some scholars with special style of writing were recruited and brought about great impact upon the dispirited atmosphere in the literary world.Among all the talented scholars,Li Chunpu,the then chief of the literary world,played the key role.He wrote prose and poetry with special and creative characteristics,and he liked recommending and interviewing young scholars.He designed examination questions and examined the scholars personally,which all made the prose poetry with unique style in the end stage of the Jin dynasty very populous.Few works of the Zhuangyuans' in the Jin dynasty were left,yet research from the concerned records shows that most of them were knowledgeable and familiar with history with rich prose and high literary achievement.Because of their special fame and social status,Zhuangyuan in the Jin dynasty exerted great influence upon the then literary world.Three factors expressed this phenomenon well: first,the descendents' interests toward literature of the Zhuangyuan families were cultivated through the family inherit;second,the examinees' literary fashion was strongly molded by setting up schools and recruiting scholars by referencing their prose poetries;third,more and more people from Nvzhen ethnics abandoned weapons and took up pens and entered into examination halls by following model of the Zhuangyuan from Nvzhen ethnics,which greatly promoted the development of the literature of Nvzhen ethnics.Among the literary works of the Jin dynasty,there were many works concerning the topic of the imperial examination,for instance,the poems of sending someone to participate in the imperial examination,the poems of congratulating someone of the success in the imperial examination,the poems of consoling someone who fail the imperial examination,the poems of remembering the classmates communication,the poems of the antiphon sung in the imperial examination hall,the poems of the examinee's self expressing feelings and etc.All these poems sincerely represented different emotional experiences of the examinees' while they were taking part in the imperial examination.In other works the customs of the imperial examination and the circumstances of the imperial examination hall in the Jin dynasty were described,which fetched up the missing contents in the book The Records of The Imperial Examination,The History of the Jin Dynasty.