Community Schools and the State in Ming China 9781503625242

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Community Schools and the State in Ming China

Community Schools and the State in Ming China Sarah Schneewind

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

2006

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schneewind, Sarah. Community schools and the state in Ming China I Sarah Schneewind. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-5174-9 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Community schools-China-History. 2. Education and state-China-History. 3· China-History-Ming dynasty, 1368-1644. I. Title. LB2820.S356 2006 379.51'09023-dc22 Original Printing 2006 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Typeset at TechBooks, New Delhi, in 10/J3 Sabon

FOR

MY

PARENTS

Contents

List of Tables

Vlll

Acknowledgements

IX

Table ofMing Reign Periods

xi

1

Introduction

1

2

Shaky Foundations: The Early Ming

6

3 Borders and Bureaucrats: The Middle Ming

33

4 Heroes of the High Ming

s8

5 Philosophy and Politics in Community School Curricula

94

6 Community Schools in Ming Society

112

7 The Locality Fights Back: The Late Ming 8 Conclusion

Appendixes Notes Gazetteers Consulted

255

Works Cited

271

List of Chinese Terms

287

Index

291

List of Tables

2.1 Community Schools Established in the Hongwu Reign Period

21

3-1 Ming Imperial Edicts Relating to Community Schools

51

3-2 Prefectures, Subprefectures, and Counties that Established Community Schools, by Reign

52

3-3 Number of Prefectures, Subprefectures, and Counties that Established Schools, by Decade

54

4-1 Who Established Community Schools in High and Late Ming

61

4-2 Topoi in 31 Commemorative Community School Records

63

4·3 Frequency of the Destruction oflmproper Shrines in Certain Periods

78

A.1 Community school teachers' salaries

176

A.2 Budget for Louxi community school

176

A.3 Community school land

177

A.4 Community school shops

178

A.5 Temples defunct in Yanping in 1525

178

A.6 Converted and revived temples in Zhaoqing

178

Acknowledgements

Darwin, according to Janet Browne, relied greatly on those around him, and so have I. I would like to first thank my teachers at Columbia, who offered valuable help and suggestions all along the way and even after I had graduated, my advisor Madeleine Zelin, Robert Hymes (who is always right), Pei-Yi Wu, Michael Tsin, and Professor de Bary. Thank you to Andrew Nathan for participation in my defense committee. Those treading the graduate school path with me have answered questions, given me sources and suggestions, read portions of the manuscript, and kept up my spirits on two continents, and I would especially like to thank Jaret Weisfogel (for unmatched intellectual companionship), Christian de Pee (may we never see eye to eye!), Liu Hsiang-kwang, Ellen McGill, Rebecca Nedostup, Tobie Meyer-Pong, Yi-Li Wu, Roberta Wue, and Paul Howard. Affectionate thanks to Kang Xiaofei for getting me over rough spots in translation. For help with specific questions, and for sending me primary and secondary sources, I would like to thank Hu Huifeng, William T. Rowe, Bruce Rusk, Lucille Chia, Andrea MacElderry, Daniel Overmyer, Lynn Struve, and Georgia Mickey. Zhang Zhen and Su Yijin helped canvass gazetteers in Shanghai, after Zhang Zhongmin of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences had encouraged me to do an empire-wide survey. Some of the major ideas in this book were formed in conversation with Katherine Carlitz, who has been a wonderful mentor and friend. I have presented pieces of the work in various venues over the years, and am grateful for responses and encouragement from fellow panelist and discussants, especially John Dardess, Willard Peterson, Martin Heijdra (a splendid host and interlocutor), Thomas Nimick, Wing-kai To, and from members of the Columbia Seminars on Neo-Confucianism and Traditional China, especially Deborah Sommer,

X

Acknowledgements

Conrad Schirokauer, Thomas H.C. Lee, Mark Swislocki, Michael Marme, and Ina Asim. I have also benefited from attending these seminars, as I have from hearing papers by my colleagues in the Society for Ming Studies and others at the AAS meetings, particularly in 1999. I am grateful to the staffs of the libraries at Columbia, Shanghai, Suzhou, Princeton, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Southern Methodist University. My time in Shanghai was made possible by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, and I am grateful for their help and for that of the professor and staff of my host institution, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. I wonder whether I would have survived that year without the assistance in all areas oflife unstintingly given by my sponsor, Fei Chengkang. More recently, my colleagues at Southern Methodist University, particularly Alexis McCrossen, Melissa Barden Dowling, and Kathleen Wellman, have offered encouragement and suggestions. The University of California, San Diego, generously paid the subvention. I am grateful to Romeyn Taylor and Paul Katz for detailed critiques of my dissertation chapter on the high Ming destruction of improper shrines. My treatment of the topic will still disappoint those interested in the history of religion on its own terms and those looking for a general discussion of the relation of religion and the state. For slogging through the whole manuscript at various stages, I thank Bruce Tindall, J. B. Schneewind, Robert Matz (whose detailed last-minute reading was really beyond the call of duty!), John Dardess, Edward Farmer, Timothy Brook, Joe Esherick, and an anonymous reviewer. Needless to say, none of these people can be blamed for my remaining errors. Finally, I want to thank those who have fed, clothed, and sheltered me in my wanderings: J. B. and Elizabeth Schneewind; George and Blossom Tindall; Rachel and Hannah Schneewind, and Nickolas Gikas; Julia and Martha Schulman; Geng Deming; and Bruce and Leo Tindall.

Table of Ming Reign Periods

Reign title

Reign years

Personal name

Hongwu Jianwen Yongle Hongxi Xuande Zhengtong Jingtai Tianshun Chenghua Hongzhi Zhengde Jiajing Longqing Wanli Taichang Tianqi Chongzhen

1368-1398 1399-1402 1403-1424 1425 1426-1435 1436-1449 1450-1456 1457-1464 1465-1487 1488-1505 1506-1521 1522-1566 1567-1572 1573-1619 1620 1621-1627 1628-1644

Zhu Yuanzhang. Temple name: Taizu ZhuYunwen ZhuDi ZhuGaozhi ZhuZhanji ZhuQizhen ZhuQiyu Zhu Qizhen (restored) Zhu Jianshen Zhu Youtang ZhuHouzhao ZhuHouzong ZhuZaihou ZhuYijun Zhu Changluo Zhu Youjiao Zhu Youjian

Amid cloudy mountains, layers of green embrace a pure stream; The sky is a bright mirror over ten thousand acres of autumn. The thousand miles ofHuguang's Xiang River have long been here; [In studying] a hundred years ofliterary offerings we also start at the beginning. In all the world, where is there not true happiness? The dynasty today [takes schools] as part of the grand strategy. The [standards of the] White Deer Grotto and Songyang [Academies] are within reach; Gladly I cry that our Way carries on these excellent traditions. -ZhanRong

All over Chu, the green plane trees, with a vein going through; The blue mountains and green water have the same appeal. Long ago the Censor Donghu (Wu Tingju) inscribed his thoughts; The community school existing today has the old national style. The happiness is not forgotten: the various scenes remain. My lofty feelings I always entrust to poetry. Alone and pitifully old, in this place where I have been before, I grasp my brush to inscribe a poem. My thoughts are very full. -attributed to Liu Daxia

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Scholars have presented contrasting views of the relationship between Chinese state and society. Swayed by both the past self-presentations of the Chinese state and its extraordinary reach in the mid-twentieth century, some have argued that it closely controlled society.1 "In China political action of the state has been the single most important factor in determining social change;' as a recent study of Mao Zedong's imitation of the founder of the Ming dynasty put it.> No church, no parliament, no aristocracy pressed independent claims to challenge the absolute rule of the emperor. The extensive bureaucracy that governed the empire was imagined as an extension of imperial authority. 3 Individual officials might protest, but they could not openly organize to combat imperial power. 4 Even the members of the social elite who did not serve in office often extended, rather than threatening, state control.5 This view of China as the homeland of despotism has been important in Western ideas about self and other from the Greeks through Hegel to Jared Diamond. 6 At the other extreme is the view that from early times up to the modern age, a stable substratum of village organization obstinately withstood state intervention? Combined with China's great size, and with the decreasing ratio of officials to subjects as the population grew, this perspective has suggested that the late imperial state was rarely able to organize local society directly. Resident administrators-the magistrates, subprefects, and prefects who constituted the lowest authoritative rung of the imperial bureaucracy-had to rely on local elite men. 8 These men were of the same social class as the resident administrators, but they had their own agendas and bases of power, so that by the late imperial period "the state was of at most limited relevance to local order:' 9 Seeking a middle ground that might qualify China for the historically conditioned transition to democracy, American scholars in the late twentieth century

2

Introduction

looked for some kind of civil society or public sphere between Chinese state and society, particularly in the Qing period (1644-1911). The fascinating body of scholarship that resulted demonstrated instead that official and private initiatives were usually intertwined. 10 The state neither totally dominated society, nor was irrelevant to it, nor left aside spheres in which elites could act independently for the public good. Yet not only recent scholars, but also the statecraft thinkers of imperial China, have distinguished state from society. 11 Clearly government, especially in a nondemocratic society, is in some way separate from the governed. We need a new way of thinking about the relationship between the late imperial Chinese state and the early modern society it governed. The Ming dynasty (1368-1644) is often considered a high point of autocracy. To consider the nature of that autocracy in relation to society, this book provides a detailed examination of one centrally-mandated local institution, the community school. The community school was not an independent local institution, but neither was it merely an instrument of imperial control. It was sponsored, debated, and manipulated not only by emperors, not only by central and local officials, but also by gentry and commoners all over the empire. Initiative in establishing community schools shifted down through the levels of state and society as the Ming period wore on. Schools in China have often been studied as part of a process of Confucianization from the Han period onwards; a recent incarnation of this approach has been a debate on whether the Ming state had effectively usurped the independent moral authority of Confucianism. 12 I am asking, instead, how and why various players, including those who self-identified as Confucians, participated in community schools as state enterprises. The founder of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang or the Hongwu emperor (r. 1368-1398), posthumously named Ming Taizu, embarked on a full-scale reconstruction of China after a long period of division and foreign domination. He and his officials and successors drew on past institutions and new approaches in a fundamental Chinese governing process: jiaohua, or transformation through education. Depending on one's point of view, jiaohua (also translated "enculturation" or "civilization") can be condemned as indoctrination to control the masses, or praised as a way of improving morality and broadening participation in the high-status pursuit ofhumanistic study and self-cultivation. The building of schools at all levels, the promotion of study of the classics, the printing of didactic morality books, the civil service examination system for recruitment into the bureaucracy, community rituals of moral improvement and incorporation into the state, government distribution ofNeo-Confucian ritual manuals, and the like were techniques of jiaohua that went hand in hand with more immediate government tasks such as defense, tax collection, and criminal justice. As another part of jiaohua, the Ming founder, in a move nothing short of extraordinary

Introduction

3

in the fourteenth-century world, mandated not only an advanced school for every county and prefecture in the empire, but also an elementary school, called a "community school;' for every village, to educate every boy. Although in a general sense they were all implicated in jiaohua as one of their functions, no educational institution in China was the same all the time, or had an essential nature apart from its historical existence. While county-level Confucian schools ( ruxue) sometimes really provided higher education, by the mid-Ming they were generally no more than places for students to register. Academies (shuyuan) variously housed high-minded Confucian masters and their disciples, educated students for the civil service examinations, or brought down the wrath of the state as centers of dissent. Similarly, attempts to identify the true or essential nature of community schools have yielded contradictory results. Angela Leung, for instance, considers the charitable school (yixue) and the community school (shexue) fundamentally different. The former was "more genuinely a school of the community than the state she-hsueh [shexue] and its charitable aspect was essential." 13 William Rowe believes the opposite: that it was the community school that was funded by and belonged more closely to " 'the people' themselves-[ to] the subcounty local community." 14 In fact, community schools lack an essential nature. Over time their nature changed; in different hands, their nature varied. 1s For the study of education, scholars like Evelyn Rawski, Chi Xiaofang, and Joanna Handlin rightly take the two (and more) types of primary school together, arguing that in practical terms there is "no clear and consistent distinction" between the terms "community school" and "charitable school." 16 This book takes a different approach, focusing only on community schools. It does explain administration, attendance policies, teacher qualifications and curricula, but it is not primarily a work in the history of education. Rather, this book looks at Ming governance as a relation between state and society through the particular window of the centrally-mandated local institution labeled "community school." 17 In tracing the community schools' shifting fortunes, the book explores what the institutions with this name show about the fate of an imperial policy. Community schools are usually associated with the Ming founder, and it was to gauge the extent of his power over society that I initially took up the task of counting them, a task eased by the efforts of Wang Lanyin in the 1930s. I found about 9355 Ming period community schools listed in gazetteers, and the where and when of these figures make up part of my argument. But in reading the rich post-Hongwu materials on community schools, I began also to see patterns of change in imperial policy, in who promoted schools and why, and in writing about schools: patterns that reflect relations between dynasty and

4

Introduction

bureaucracy, and between state and society more broadly. In the early Ming (1368-1430) community schools appear mainly as an imperial enterprise, aimed at teaching boys the law that the Ming founder hoped would prevent social change (Chapter 2). In the mid-Ming (1430-1470) they were sponsored most saliently by high officials for security and recruitment, and appear predominantly in memorials, prefaces, and commemorative records (Chapter 3). In the high Ming (1470-1530) community schools were founded mainly by resident administrators, were recorded most often in commemorative records and gazetteers, and were sometimes closely connected with attacks on religious institutions (Chapter 4). Later in the high Ming period, the schools were taken up as well by higher profile officials, including Wang Yangming, who left records of the orders and curricula they issued (Chapter 5). In the late Ming (1530-1644), earlier patterns coexisted with a further downward shift in initiative on community schools, to the local community itself (Chapter 7). In all periods, of course, schools affected and were shaped by pupils, teachers, and others in the community (Chapter 6). Many other points emerge, but at a minimum, since community schools were promoted by so many different groups for their own reasons, their success cannot simply be attributed to the power of the Ming founder. The window of community schools also looks out onto practices of historical writing over the last six centuries and more. State and society interacted through documents about institutions as well as through the institutions themselves. As Philip Kuhn says, the written record left by the state reflects both its daily tasks and the maneuverings, views and relations of its personnel, so that "every document ... must be read both as a description of an outer reality and as a reflection of the political needs of its author:'' 8 Ming subjects and officials, as well as emperors, pursued their own interests by both creating and writing about institutions in genres that were intimately connected with the state, and which presented different parameters and opportunities. Those same documents leave a trail for the historian, who often deploys them again for present purposes. The Ming state generally, and community schools in particular, played roles from Ming times through the end of the twentietll century in debates on state and society, society and the individual, education, nationalism, and absolutism. In gathering material for these debates, there is no clear division between "traditional" scholarship and "modern" scholarship. Asian and Western scholars of different periods, nations and persuasions all rely on the same set of sources and even repeat the same conclusions as answers to different questions. What is the relationship between historical phenomena and the contemporary texts that report them? At one extreme, positivists take the text as a record of the phenomenon. At the other extreme, some theorists claim that texts can be

Introduction

5

analyzed only on their own terms, as discourse: that the "facts of the matter" are irretrievable or perhaps never existed. More moderate historians take the text as an imperfect reflection of reality, or the phenomenon as a context that shaped the text. I propose that we look at text and phenomenon together, as products of the same, or at least simultaneous, historical processes. Critical examination of the text must go hand in hand with consideration of the phenomenon it reports; neither can be understood without thinking about the other. This tandem effort is also crucial in understanding the historiography of a given phenomenon, for later writers respond both to their own reality and to earlier texts. I incorporate into the story of community schools the purposes for which sources on them were written, and the positions of historians. This book, then, is a case study of community schools in the Ming period, meant to illuminate two facets of history. First, as centrally-mandated local institutions, community schools exemplify Ming state building and illuminate state-society relations. Second, tracing the schools' roles as discursive objects provides insights into the nature of some commonly-used sources of Ming history, what we may consider documentary institutions. The two facets together also add up to a theory of the Ming state: that its strength lay in its ability, often against the will of the center, to serve as a field-not the only field, not a level field, but a wide one-for social cooperation and competition. To emphasize participation is not to deny exploitation; some of the Japanese scholars who see the traditional Chinese village as a semiautonomous and cooperative unit, for instance, still present its class inequities.'9 Ming people suffered under, worked for, praised, and criticized aspects of the state. 20 Alexander Woodside has written that "Each participant in the government, from the emperor down to the county director of schools, might carry his own unique imaginary map of the ideal government in his head." 21 State personnel and those they ruled not only served and thought about the state, but also turned it to their own uses. The Ming state was built from below as well as from above; as people colonized government institutions and documents for their own aims, they lengthened the reach of the state.

CHAPTER TWO

Shaky Foundations: The Early Ming [For "us anti-representationalists"] truth is thought of in terms of utility rather than in terms of correspondence to intrinsic features of the world. [Terry Eagleton objects that this means] the way things are is just the way you construct them to be ... (Somebody else should construct them? The emperor maybe?) -Richard Rorty, "We Anti-representationalists"

The founder of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, is an impressive figure. He rose from poverty to create a system in which the central government could do nothing without the approval of the emperor. Suspicious or even paranoid, he was determined to manage everything himself. He moved whole populations to distant provinces, and set up new systems for counting and taxing subjects. He cast off or murdered most of his early allies and advisors, and massacred tens of thousands of officials and subjects on charges of corruption and intrigue, introducing into Chinese government a lasting element of terror. He promulgated warnings in his awkward prose to every household in the empire, and forbade his descendants to change his system. He rewrote ritual to position himself as the mediator between Heaven and Earth, and ordered the installation of new cults and new altars in every city and village. Awe at these displays of innovation and power should be tempered by his own writings, which express growing frustration at his inability to control people, show wild swings in policy as one approach after another fails, and are rife with examples of people who flagrantly disobeyed him. Nonetheless, Zhu Yuanzhang appears most often in historiography as an extremely powerful and effective ruler who succeeded in creating a peaceful and orderly society, and whose institutional policies decisively shaped the Ming and perhaps the Qing state, and left a legacy to Mao Zedong. This chapter will use the case of community schools in the Hongwu period (13681398) to both question the Ming founder's power over local social institutions and show why we believe in that power.

The Myth of The Ming Founder Zhu Yuanzhang is usually presented as controlling not only the state, but even the shape of society, so that the early Ming period forms a baseline from

Shaky Foundations

7

which late imperial history can begin. Criticisms of the traditional system often center on Zhu Yuanzhang, although few nowadays go so far as to call him a "totalitarian dictator."' The late Qing cultural critic and reformer Liang Qichao in 1896 attributed to Zhu the eight-legged essay format required for examinations, a symbol of how the traditional education system exhausted people's energy without developing their talent_2 Historian Mi Chu Wiens has described Zhu Yuanzhang as the inaugurator of Ming-Qing despotism, a despotism manifested in "an enormous rural control machinery" that determined the shape of local administration and society. 3 Tsurumi Naohiro wrote that the local institutions of the first Ming reign made the landlord class the basis of an autocratic, unified structure of control, culminating in the emperor. 4 Edward Farmer has argued that although Zhu did not succeed in arresting historical change altogether, the Qing rulers had no choice but to adopt, with few changes, Ming standards for learning, social life, and government: a structuring of society that contained, if it did not entirely inhibit, social and economic change. Absolutism, Farmer comments, forestalled any transformation akin to the Renaissance and Reformation, and the autocracy Zhu Yuanzhang created carried over to the dictatorship of Communist Party in the People's Republic of China.5 Wildly disparate writers, from Ming and Qing officials, to secret society members, to twentieth-century American scholars, to Communist leaders, have presented Zhu's rule as not only effective but also good. A memorial submitted in 1426lamented that talent was scarce and the customs of the literati were slipping compared with the Hongwu period, when teachers were carefully chosen and teaching properly attended to. 6 In the late seventeenth century, statecraft writer Tang Zhen criticized big government in general and the Qing in particular for interfering with normal economic processes and favoring the rich. He contrasted his own day, when rulers and officials were admired for dressing in expensive furs and brocades and drinking from golden cups, with the early Min g. In former times, the underclothes and jackets of the Ming founder were all of simple shuttle-doth [i.e. homespun] ... I have heard that in the hey-day of the Ming, the folk ofWu [Suzhou] did not eat fine grain and good meat. Among the common throng there was no finery; the women did not wear ornaments until they had put their hair up [i.e. come of age]. In the markets no one stocked strange goods, and those without guests to feast did not offer a range ofviands. The houses were without high walls, but thatched cots stood in neighborly proximity. The ways of Wu are to esteem extravagance: how should there have been plainness such as this? It must have been the example of the simple cotton clothes [that the Ming founder wore].7

8

Shaky Foundations

In 1854 Red Turban rebels in Guangdong proclaimed: When Hung-wu, the first Emperor of our Ming dynasty, was on the throne, ten thousand countries opened trade, the Superiors and Inferiors harmonized, and there was no war, no imposition with [sic] the neighboring countries. 8 The usual portrait of a late Ming elite out of touch with the needs of the local people takes as a baseline a very different early Ming, when landlords looked after their respectful tenants, because of the policies of Zhu Yuanzhang. 9 And Mao Zedong, in an attack on higher education in 1965, wrote that T'ai-tsu [Zhu Yuanzhang] and Ch'eng-tsu [Zhu Di] were the only two successful emperors of the Ming. One was illiterate and the other was able to read not many characters. Later when the intellectuals came into power under the reign of Chia-ching [Jiajing] the country was poorly run ... 10 As part of the idea that Zhu was an effective architect of state and society, both popular writers and historians often credit him with spreading primary education through community schools. For instance, one late-twentieth-century scholar wrote that the widespread literacy and general knowledge of the Ming populace that a Korean traveler observed in the late fifteenth century resulted from the edict requiring a community school in each district. 11 Such claims follow in the footsteps of Ming scholars like Chen Jian, a self-appointed celebratory historian of the Ming. Chen recorded, in the late sixteenth century, that the Ming founder had ordered every village in every county to establish a school; thereupon, every poor district and backward place had a school; and, Chen comments, this shows that since antiquity no ruler had carried out so well the twin tasks of nourishing and teaching the people. 12 As we shall see, even within the first reign of the Ming, this rosy picture is questionable. Zhu Yuanzhang did not invent community schools, nor was he the first Ming man to promote them. His support for them was short-lived, and relatively few counties established schools as a result of his edicts. The case of community schools casts doubt on the larger idea that the Ming founder decisively shaped late imperial state and society. But it also shows us an early stage of the origins of the myth in Zhu's own political needs, and illustrates the gravitational pull of the emperor-centered narrative. Even if edicts from the emperor built no schools, even when memorials to the throne from officials changed no institutional policy, these documents about community schools made claims to authority, established ways of writing, and affected the relationship between emperor and bureaucracy and the fates of their authors. By ordering the establishment of community schools, Zhu Yuanzhang was not only trying to achieve concrete aims, but was also making statements about himself and his regime; in particular, he was claiming that the throne had the

Shaky Foundations

9

initiative in institution-building in the villages of China. Early Ming documents became precedents for justifying later community school policies. Later writers also took them as accurate portrayals of effective imperial initiative in shaping early Ming local institutions. The rhetorical utility of an early Ming golden age under a strong ruler, as well as the real power of the Ming throne, gave the idea of Zhu Yuanzhang's effectiveness so much weight that documents challenging the idea, when not ignored, were actually interpreted as supporting it. Even texts that say that the community schools failed to credit Zhu Yuanzhang with creating them, and many stories of failure assume initial success. The early Ming writings on community schools have echoed up through the centuries, often to the exclusion of the much more extensive later Ming materials.

Invention? Having defeated the Mongol Yuan dynasty and conquered most of the historically Chinese territory, Zhu Yuanzhang had big plans. Advised by a group of talented and ambitious political scholars who believed that the emperor could and should morally transform society, Zhu planned to both consolidate his power and make people good.'3 Although at times Zhu preferred a direct connection between emperor and subject, he followed classical and historical precedent by professing faith in the power of institutions. In calling for the rebuilding of prefectural and county schools in 1369, he (or his speech-writers) commented, "I earnestly say, Of the necessary [elements] for ruling a country, jiaohua (transformation through education) is the first. Of the methods of jiaohua, schools are the root:'' 4 But Zhu's faith in specific institutions and their personnel was so frequently shaken that his designs for village institutions went through seven quite different phases, as I have described elsewhere.'5 One of these institutions was the community school. Community schools were established in 1375 as the capstone of the stable, peaceful, hierarchical society designed in the first two phases of the reign. Under an imperial bureaucracy that brought law and justice down to the county level, taxpaying families were registered permanently in their professions and homes, and deities were collected, culled, named, and assigned to commoners and officials at various levels. Laws were promulgated through institutions designed to win support for the new dynasty. Assemblies of one hundred families were instructed to carry out the community libation ceremony and other sacrifices, offering prayers that affirmed neighborly solidarity. Community schools, the final step in incorporating villages into the new Ming order, would instill good morals and habits into young farmers, soldiers and artisans. Describing early Ming community schools is difficult; no surviving source does so comprehensively,

10

Shaky Foundations

and even the imperial edict and ministerial order that established them must be reconstructed from various sources. This section presents the reconstruction of the edict and order to examine, on the one hand, what community schools were supposed to be like concretely, and on the other, what the documents about them achieved rhetorically. When did Zhu Yuanzhang order community schools? The Ming History, the official history of the Ming published by the succeeding Qing dynasty, in its very reduced narration of the events of each reign called the "Basic Annals;' reports succinctly that on Hongwu 8, 1st moon, dinghai day (February 27, 1375), the emperor "ordered the whole empire (tianxia) to establish community schools:''6 The "Basic Annals" includes oilier evidence of Zhu's commitment to education, and excludes items that would cast doubt on it, such as the later "abolition" of the community schools.'7 The selection is intended to make the ruler look good. The main source for the "Basic Annals" was the Veritable Records (Shi lu), compiled at the end of each emperor's reign from the daily court diaries. The Veritable Records of the first Ming reign were rewritten several times for political reasons, and details may have been lost in that process. They record only the first paragraph of the 1375 edict, a paragraph that also survives, with slight differences, in a 1586 encyclopedia, and that is quoted verbatim in many gazetteers. Later gazetteer writers may have consulted the encyclopedia (one of them refers to it in this context), but earlier ones probably had on hand the edict as promulgated. The second paragraph of the 1375 edict survives only as fragments in local gazetteers, from which I have reconstructed it. In February 1375, then, Zhu Yuanzhang instructed tlle ministers of the Secretariat: In ancient times, when the Zhou dynasty flourished, families and villages all had schools, so everyone studied. In this way, transformation through education (jiaohua) was carried out, and customs were good. Today, the capital and the prefectural and the county seats all have schools, but the people of the rural communities (xiangshe) have yet to be transformed by education. The authorities shall immediately establish community schools and hire Confucian teachers to teach the commoners' sons and younger brothers, so as to guide the people to good habits (in accord with Our intentions).'8 Also proclaimed: All the great ministers in the provinces shall earnestly supervise, instructing each prefecture, subprefecture and county to request a government student (xiucai) in every hamlet and village, even if tllere are only thirty-five families, to open a school, in order to teach the sons and younger brothers of military and civilian families to read. [The pupils] may not relinquish their original occupations, but must fulfill them.'9

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11

Historian Wang Lanyin found that the initial edict was followed by an order to the prefectures, subprefectures, and counties from the Ministry of Rites and the Censorate. From overlapping gazetteer fragments, I reconstruct the order as follows: 13th day of the second moon of Hongwu 8 (March 15, 1375): the Ministry of Rites and the Censorate jointly issue orders to the prefectures that they and their subordinate subprefectures and counties shall establish one community school for every fifty families. They shall request government students of learning and deportment to train 20 the sons and younger brothers of military and civilian families. The names of the teachers and pupils shall be reported. Local officials shall regularly inspect the schools. 21 Zhu certainly vetted this order, so I will treat it together with the two paragraphs of the edict. The texts accomplish several tasks in presenting an emperor-centered view. First, they place the initiative in creating schools firmly in Zhu's hands. The court had presumably discussed community schools before the edict came down. In a later context Zhu noted that "Several [officials] say community schools can be put into practice." 22 But any memorials on the subject have not survived; it is even possible that a paper trail was purposely destroyed. Second, unlike some other edicts that had recognized the incompleteness ofMing control-the community libation ceremony, for instance, was initially ordered only in the area around Nanjing-these texts treat all prefectures as subject to court directives. They assert that the state has the power to reach into the village, dealing not only with groups of fifty or thirty-five families, but even with individual teachers and pupils. Adam Schorr has shown that in the early and mid-Ming, there was a faith in the ability of the written word to achieve things, to transmit morality, particularly from the political center. This edict is an example. 2 3 Third, the edict and order refer to an antique model, rather than to more immediate precedents. The opening combines a passage from the ritual classic Liji ("In the ancient teaching [system], families and villages had schools, and the dynasty had a school;') 24 with language from Zhu Xi's preface to the Daxue (Great Learning) about the flourishing times that ended when the ancient Zhou dynasty fell, bringing a decline in jiaohua and customs. 2 5 Using this passage as the centerpiece of the community school edict made Zhu Yuanzhang the heir of Chinese antiquity, and linked him with a long-lived, powerful, and popular myth: that the school system of antiquity had reached to everyone. 26 The first sentence would have been generally recognized as coming from the Liji, even by those who had not read the classic, since it was included in the widely used

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compilation by Zhu Xi, Elementary Learning (Xiaoxue). 27 The language of the Daxue preface, too, would have been very familiar to any literate person, since it was one of the first texts studied. As Farmer has shown, Zhu and his advisors did apply the classics to the problem of restoring Chinese cultural forms. 28 But the appeal to antiquity neatly sidestepped the fact that the community school-like many early Ming institutions-had in fact been inherited from the Mongol Yuan dynasty. 29 In 1270, to encourage production, the Yuan had organized the rural areas into groups of fifty families, called she (Communities). The elders who headed the she were responsible at first for promoting food and textile production, and later for tax collection. In 1286, Khubilai ordered that each she set up a school and choose a man thoroughly familiar with the classics to teach there every winter. The Yuan also set up other kinds of elementary schools, but the community schools (shexue) were specifically located in the villages and were meant for farm boys. 30 As part of rural reconstruction, Yuan community schools were meant to produce moral subjects and perhaps to equip boys with the basic literacy useful in a commercial economy. Making each she responsible for finding its own teacher fits in with a common way the Yuan dealt with the population: rather than try to reach each individual subject, the capital designated groups of various kinds and dealt with the heads of the groups. In other words, community schools were well embedded in Yuan projects, and there is evidence tllat some community schools were actually built and attended in the Yuan period.3' Zhu Yuanzhang must have known that the Yuan had instituted community schools: among other things, the she was a Yuan-period division of rural society that was not employed by the Ming, yet the term "community school" (shexue) was retained, and the ministerial order called for one school for every fifty families-the size of a Yuan she but of no early Ming unit. Yet Zhu Yuanzhang's edict hid this legacy, because legitimacy of the fledgling Ming dynasty depended in part on the story it told of replacing an initially just but later corrupt Yuan imperial house. For instance, when Zhu called for the establishment of county and prefectural schools all over the empire, he indirectly blamed the Mongols for neglecting schools, deplored the mixing of barbarian customs with the ancient ways of dress and ritual, and claimed that schools would gradually transform people, "reviving the old [ways] of the former kings and changing the infectious [Mongol] practices." 32 Rather than admit that his program of moral renovation relied on the institutions of his degenerate predecessors, including community schools, Zhu referred to antiquity. The strategy succeeded. Many writers boasted of the community schools as a Ming accomplishment. One Ming writer gushed that unlike the Han and Song, which had been slow to establish schools after conquering the empire by force,

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doing so only after several generations, the Ming founder had established the national school within three years of his accession, the prefectural, subprefectural and county schools within two years, and the community schools within eight. The Yuan is omitted.33 One gazetteerist writing about a community school commented that the Yuan had focused almost entirely on military affairs, even in awarding the highest civil service examination degrees, and that only in the Ming period were community schools established.34 Another gazetteerist wrote that besides everything being supplied for the county school, "there is also the establishment of community schools, to train young children ... This method was beyond the capability of former dynasties:'35 A Qing gazetteer recounts: The country and city community schools are the inherited system of the ancient xiaoxue (elementary schools). In Song [1071] it was first ordered that the subprefectures and commanderies set up xiaoxue. In 1102, it was ordered that the subprefectures and counties set up xiaoxue and that from 10 years old up all attend them. In the Yuan system, there were Mongol xiaoxue. In Hongwu 8 of Ming the authorities were ordered to establish community schools ... 36 The writer is perfectly willing to put the Hongwu order into the stream of history, but he does not know that there were Yuan period shexue, and refers only to the Mongol-language elementary schools. The influence of the edict's claims carried over into the twentieth century3 7 , although scholars now usually do refer to the Yuan origins of the schools briefly.3 8 An early Qing gazetteer that is generally well-informed about the laws regarding community schools quotes the opening line of the 1375 edict taken from the Liji and then reports, referring to a different ritual classic, that "Ming Taizu's original text was the Institutes ofZhou (Zhou guan). He ordered every fifty families in the empire to establish one community school." 39 For political reasons, the 1375 edict had placed Zhu within the classical tradition. But the edict itself also became a part of tradition. Its language was quoted or paraphrased throughout the Ming in gazetteers, not only in inscriptions commemorating the founding of community schools, but also for prefectural and county schools and for academies. 40 The edict became part of a way of talking about Zhu Yuanzhang's reign that assumed that he had been an effective ruler whose laws and institutions created a peaceful society. Although later writers describe a putative curriculum and other aspects of early Ming community school policy, the edict and order in fact tell us very little about the schools themselves. As schools did under the exemplary Zhou dynasty, they were to give everyone the opportunity to study, and thereby become good. There was to be one school for every village, hamlet, or group of thirty-five to fifty families. 4' Both provincial officials and resident administrators were responsible

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for schools. Provincial officials were to pass down the order, and-unlike in the Yuan community school system, where the Communities themselves selected teachers-magistrates and prefects were to hire teachers, inspect the schools, and collect from the villages the names of pupils. Although the mention of the capital, prefectural and county schools implies that the community schools were part of the same system, community school pupils were explicitly ordered to return to their families' registered occupations; they were not to move up and take the examinations. Rather, boys from both military and civilian families would learn to read and to act uprightly. The first part of the edict called for Confucian teachers; the second part and the Ministry order specified government students, men registered in county schools for the right to take the examinations, who would have been most likely to be willing to take such a jobY That was confirmed in 1382, when Zhu approved a proposal on ranking and employing government students. Those [government students] who are not fit for office should return to their native villages and can be made community [school] teachers. Those who are old or ill but understand the classics can be given posts as education officials [i.e. as teachers in the prefectural, subprefectural and county schools]. 43 The community schools were a useful way to employ these educated and potentially restive men. We know a little, then, about who was supposed to teach and who to study in the community schools. But the edict and order do not say in what buildings schools should be housed; precisely what they were to teach; when the schools should be open; who was to pay the teacher and how much; whether fees would be charged, stipends paid or housing provided; and whether attendance was mandatory for some or all village residents. Later comments Zhu made about the schools suggest that initially attendance was mandatory only for those who could afford to lose their sons' labor, and tliat school was held for much of the year. It may be that detailed regulations existed but have not survived. For Zhu's vision for state and society began to go wrong, and the schools fell victim to dramatic revisions oflocal government.

Abolition? Community schools: In Hongwu 8, an order from the Ministry was received, to open one for every 50 families. In a short time, abolished. In Zhengtong and Tianshun, restored. -1588 NZ Shanghai xianzhi 5/28a

In 1376, just after capping a new local administrative structure with the community schools, Zhu Yuanzhang reacted to a routine bureaucratic practice

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(prestamping blank tax delivery forms) that he thought corrupt by executing hundreds of resident administrators. Then, in response to bad astronomical omens (i.e. presumably in response to public disapproval), he solicited criticism of his actions. One administrator, Ye Boju, responded with a memorial that became famous as a "Ten-Thousand Word Text" such as had admonished earlier rulers. Ye criticized the government along three lines: the enfeoffed princes were too free; punishments were too harsh; and governance was ineffective, for resident administrators were neglecting jiaohua. The court, Ye wrote, had declared community schools an urgent matter and had laid out detailed regulations for the selection of teachers, registration of pupils, curriculum, and so on. But resident administrators complied only on paper. In cities and towns, community schools were no more than plaques over a door; in remote villages they existed only in name. The "little people" were left entirely in ignorance of the virtues. 44 Ye's memorial shows how imperial edicts (like astronomical phenomena) became public property that might indeed legitimate a ruler's power, but could also be thrown back in his face. In the game of words, the emperor did not hold all the cards. Zhu Yuanzhang had stressed the importance of jiaohua and the role of schools in carrying it out; Ye argued that jiaohua, specifically the establishment of schools, should be the prime responsibility of resident administrators, not sometlling they neglected in favor of matters like tax collection. Rules for schools have been issued; Ye says that until Zhu puts some muscle behind them, nothing will happen. The emperor's claims to authority are mirrored in the official's ability to blame him for the failures of resident administrators. 45 Zhu was sympathetic to Ye's views on the educational system, but for his comments on the princes he had Ye thrown into prison, where he died. 46 The memorial may have contributed to ending the early Ming imperial mandate for community schools: indirectly insofar as Ye's criticism of Zhu Yuanzhang's decisions, actions, and effective control fueled the ruler's disillusionment with scholars and officials, and perhaps more directly in that Ye reported that the schools were not working. On the other hand, since Ye's memorial appeared in print, it may have encouraged some later officials to build community schools. Criticism ofhis harsh style did not slow Zhu Yuanzhang down. In 1380, senior Grand Councilor (or Prime Minister) Hu Weiyong threatened the emperor's authority by putting his followers into office, and Zhu believed that Hu had conspired to usurp his throne. In response, Zhu executed not only Hu but, by his own count, some 15,000 people. To prevent any one official gaining such power again, he abolished all executive posts in the Secretariat, leaving the bureaucracy without a chief spokesman, and putting the task of coordinating the various ministries and agencies into the emperor's own handsY In terms oflocal administration, he restricted the power of the magistrates and prefects

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by creating administrative institutions below the county level. The lijia system grouped together no households, who paid their taxes jointly to the capital, bypassing the magistrate. Villagers were told to avoid the magistrate's court by taking disputes to newly-appointed village Seniors. Resident administrators were instructed to cooperate with Seniors and lijia heads in some tasks, and lijia heads were authorized to monitor popular behavior and keep the peace.48 But the very first act of this phase of local institutional legislation was the temporary abolition of the community schools. Historian Wang Lanyin determined that in 1380, elementary education was taken out of the hands of officials. The original order does not survive, but as Wang reconstructs its provisions, the community schools were replaced in law by "winter schools" to be run by local people rather than officials, and held only during the slack season. 49 Widespread state-run elementary education had lasted only five years: "not long;' as one gazetteer puts it. 5° In the tenth moon of Hongwu 16 (1383), the term "community school" was revived, but officials were explicitly forbidden to play a role. The community school was now a fully voluntary, local institution. It is ordered that the prefectures and counties again establish community schools. Formerly, this order was that the authorities of the empire should establish community schools to teach the commoners' boys, but the authorities used this to harass the people, so the schools were ordered stopped and abolished. We hereby again order the commoners themselves to establish community schools and hire teachers to teach their boys. The authorities shall not interfere. (Those who have committed crimes may not teach.) 5' Many gazetteers report an additional provision, which may really have come from later pronouncements: that those who, having leisure or large families, wished to and could afford to study or teach year round, were permitted to do so. Otherwise, virtuous people could open schools according to local circumstances, from the beginning of the tenth moon to the middle of the twelfth moon.s 2 At this point, the detailed regulations Ye Boju referred to may have been discarded as irrelevant. By 1387, another memorialist was complaining that "there are no regulations for village schools:' 53 In this incarnation, the community schools were part of an imperial strategy to weaken or circumvent resident administrators by empowering village authorities. Zhu Yuanzhang came to think that this strategy, too, had failed. From 1385 onward, he fought to eliminate corruption, beginning with a purge centered on the Vice-Minister of Revenue in which at least 7000 officials and commoners were executed. 54 At the same time, to tackle corruption outside the capital, Zhu communicated with all of his subjects directly, through a series of short texts called the Great Warning ( Yuzhi Da Gao), issued in four installments. The short

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texts excoriated corrupt officials and clerks, promulgated and revised earlier laws, enacted new ones, and reported specific cases of corruption and gruesome punishment. The Great Warning empowered commoners to oversee, complain about and even arrest resident administrators and their yamen staff. Everyone was ordered to memorize the text. It served as a passport for petitioners on their way to the capital, and as a talisman: possessing it reduced a criminal's punishment by one degree. The Great Warning reiterated the change in the community school policy (apparently because some officials were urging Zhu to reinstate it as a statecontrolled elementary education program). And it expanded upon the very brief explanation given in the 1383 edict for the 1380 abolition of community schools. "Good affairs are difficult to complete." This is also true of ilie establishment of community schools, which should lead the people to be good and enjoy the blessings of Heaven. But what can be done, when the officials of the prefectures, departments, and counties are scoundrels, and the cruel clerks harm the people without being sated? Once the community schools are established, the officials and clerks regard them as their business enterprise. If there is someone who wants to study but has no money, he is not allowed to enter the school. If there is [someone from a family of] three or four adult males who does not want to study, they take bribes to release him, and indulge his stupidity and villainy, rather than ordering him to study. If there are just two people, a failier and son, whether farmer or merchant, who basically do not have the leisure to study, they just force attendance at school. They both indulge iliose who have money and are unwilling to release those without money even if they do not have leisure to study. They use these people to make up the number of students and cheat the imperial court. Alas, how distressing! ... We fear the ruin of the families of good subjects who do not have the leisure to study, and have temporarily called a halt. Still there are those who do not know the people's difficulties, and are utterly ignorant of how the officials and clerks harm the people. Several of them say community schools can be put into practice. Ah! The ancients said, "It is difficult to be a ruler!" Truly, that is so ... Alas! Only Heaven can oversee the wicked, corrupt fellows. How can they have been born of father and mother? They wickedly do people in, unaware that spirits are watching their every move. Their day of disaster will come; it is only a matter of time. 55 [emphasis added]

According to this account, the community schools as set up in 1375 had enabled officials and clerks to extort money from rich and poor. Apparently, attendance had been compulsory for "extra sons" above one and for wealthy boys. Dardess speculates that some resident administrators "zealously compelled everyone

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to attend these schools ... and [others] demanded either matriculation fees or else bribes from those who wanted to be released."5 6 Here a practical difficulty in treating the empire as uniform becomes evident: Zhu reacted to news of corruption that may have been restricted to schools in a few localities by withdrawing from the project completely. As well as helping to explain abuses in the community schools, the Great Warning was itself a text set to be studied in all schools, and perhaps it was in some placesY In effect, community school education had been reduced to a 75-day indoctrination session. 58 Given these revisions, Zhu can hardly be seen as a great champion of public education. But he succeeded in casting the blame for the failure of his plans onto resident administrators.59 Like the initial edict and order, though less often, this text reappears in later discourse about community schools. One gazetteer reports the abolition of schools by saying: In Hongwu 8, the authorities were ordered to establish community schools. The authorities did not discharge their duty. The Emperor sighed, "Oh, isn't it difficult?" and called a halt. 60 The emperor's sigh clearly refers to the sentences italicized in the Great Warning passage above. Similarly, Education Intendant Li Mengyang's instructions for establishing community schools in Jiangxi in 1513 describe the problem of the rich bribing their way out of attendance and the poor being forced to replace them. Li wrote that the Ming founder had tried to establish community schools but in the end sighed "How difficult!" and abolished them. 6' The quotation of the text casts doubt on twentieth-century historian WuHan's view that the people never even got a look at the Great Warning, let alone memorizing it; but the fact that people read what the emperor said did not mean that they did it. 62 Zhu Yuanzhang's published words became public property, which writers could draw on as they did on the classics, sometimes to promote programs directly opposed to his commands. Li, for instance, cites the abolitionary sigh precisely as he establishes new officially-run community schools. Zhu found that speaking directly to all through the Great Warning, ordering commoners to supervise officials, and invoking spirits to watch and chastise them all, did not create harmony and virtue. He cast a wider and wider net of suspicion, railing against Seniors, lijia leaders, and even the commoners he claimed to champion. Massacres stemming from cases of corruption or disloyalty at court continued: at least 30,000 commoners and low-ranking officials were executed in 1390, another 15,000 people in 1393. 63 Finally, Zhu began to think that his extra-legal prosecutions and mass killings were counterproductive. Preparing for his death, he warned his heirs against excessive punishments

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and issued a final version of his unprecedented Ancestral Injunctions (Huang Ming zuxun), which bound his descendants to certain practices of government, including the absence of a Grand Councilor. 64 For the villages, he compiled the complex and contradictory policies of the past three decades into one document, the Placard of the People's Instructions (Jiao min bangwen). Initially issued in 1394 and made final in 1398, the 41 miscellaneous articles of the Placard repeat, change, and comment on early laws, set prayers for various rituals, encourage family harmony and mutual aid within the village, castigate and threaten corrupt officials and village authorities, and establish a new system oflimited village self-government through "Community Elders" (li lao ren). 65 The Placard also reiterates the 1380 and 1383 edicts placing the community schools into civilian hands, and recapitulates the explanation given in the Great

Warning. Under the Yuan dynasty, many children of villagers had education. In the early period of Hongwu, every village was ordered to establish a community school in order to instruct the children in good conduct. Corrupt officials and lijia people and others took advantage of this and indulged in corrupt practices. The children of families that include adult males have spare time themselves to acquire education, but [the officials] sold their releases to others and did not let them go to school. Thus the children who came from families without adult males and who did not have spare time for education were nevertheless forced to go to school, which caused hardship to the people. Therefore the community schools were abolished. From now on, no matter where they may live, and no matter how many children they have, virtuous people shall all be allowed to open schools for their children. The schools shall open in the tenth month and close in the twelfth month of the year. If a family with many adult males has enough spare time and wants its children to be continually engaged in study, this will be permitted. Those officials, clerks, lijia people and others who dare to oppose and disturb them shall be severely punished. 66 In 1375, Zhu had concealed the Yuan origins of the community schools, justifying them on the basis of the Liji instead, and the edicts mandating county and prefectural schools had referred to the damage caused by the barbarian customs of the Yuan. 67 Now, with the conquest well behind him and perhaps with more sympathy for the difficulties his predecessors had faced, Zhu tacitly admitted that the idea of community schools had come not from study of the ritual classics, but from the statutes of his immediate predecessors. The change in policy was an admission of failure. Unable to control officials, local authorities, or local subjects, Zhu Yuanzhang was forced to revise his original vision of a stable, tiered, society, managed by a bureaucracy carefully coordinated with a divine hierarchy, and undergirded by an immobile population educated in community schools. He was forced to replace mandatory,

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official elementary schools with voluntary schools under local civilian control. Yet such is the pull of the dominant, emperor-centered narrative that even failures only strengthen it. Edward Farmer, for instance, describes Zhu as "a shrewd and far-sighted legislator, a constitutional architect ... [who] proposed, reviewed, modified, and reissued [law codes] over a period of three decades:' 68 He describes the abolition of the community schools as a sign of voluntary state retreat from some spheres of local government in order to "check excesses by government agents." 69 Yet Zhu had hurriedly abolished the schools precisely because he was unable to control those agents or the people colluding with them to oppose his community school policy. It is hard to see the abolition as an example of far-sighted planning and measured revision.

Obeying the Law? In Hongwu 8 of the Ming, the authorities were ordered to establish community schools and invite teacher-scholars to teach the commoners' boys. This is seen in the standard history's "Basic Annals" and the Wenxian tongkao. The evidence is solid-they were all there. -1835 GD Nanhai xianzhi 11/5b After [the removal of community schools from official hands in the Great Warning], although the government did not abolish community schools, they were but an empty shell, existing in name only. - Yu Benfa, History of the Development of Chinese Education, 1995, 396

The conflicting texts of the Hongwu era mean that writers who base their picture of reality on the central sources can draw diametrically opposed conclJJsions about whether community schools existed. To find out, Wang Lanyin read the gazetteers in Beijing Library and tabulated how many community schools were reported in which prefectures, subprefectures, and counties. Gazetteers are not independent of other forms ofhistoriography, nor do they objectively record reality. As one later gazetteerist wrote, "There were no community schools [until the Qing], but the gazetteers are not reliable." 70 But in their variety gazetteers offer the best hope of figuring out how many schools actually existed, so I followed Wang's lead in counting schools in gazetteers, as one way of assessing the effectiveness of court edicts in setting up institutions. My survey of approximately 6oo local gazetteers, combined with Wang's work, superficially covers most of the Ming empire, all but about 100 of 1,500 prefectures, subprefectures, and counties. 7' According to these sources, 2,112 community schools were established in the Hongwu period, in fifty counties in twelve provinces (see Table 2.1).

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TABLE 2.1

Community Schools Established in the Hongwu Reign Period Province Beizhili Nanzhili Zhejiang Jiangxi Fujian Huguang Shandong Shanxi Henan Shaanxi Guangdong Yunnan Guizhou Total

No. of schools

No. of counties

3 1578 81

17 3

26 0

0

42 343

5 8

23 3

4 2

4 5

3 2112

2

so

These numbers are far from accurate, but they are the best indication we have. The real total may have been higher. The one hundred or so counties and subprefectures Wang and I have not covered may all have had schools; later gazetteerists may have lost or omitted information on Hongwu schools; and the information given is often imprecise: four of these fifty counties report a school in every village without giving a number, and about 6oo counties or subprefectures report a total of 5000 schools that cannot be dated. Conceivably, these all could be Hongwu-era schools, which would change the picture considerably.72 On the other hand, the real total may have been lower. In seven cases (43 schools), I have extrapolated a Hongwu date that was not explicitly stated in the gazetteers. The very high numbers of schools claimed for Suzhou and Huizhou are probably merely quotas based on population: the proportions of schools per county precisely match the proportion of population per county in the Hongwu-era Suzhou gazetteer, and Yangzhou explicitly reported quotas, not schools.73 Other gazetteers too may have listed quotes, attributed later schools to the Hongwu period, or fabricated numbers. These are the best figures available, given the inadequacies of the sources.74 By this count, some fifty counties, perhaps more, but by no means a majority, had community schools in the Hongwu era. But how many of these schools were established in obedience to imperial orders? The order to officials to establish schools stood only from 1375 to 1380. The ten counties that established community schools before 1375 and the five that claim schools established by officials after the 1380 abolition must be eliminated as evidence of obedience. Fifteen of the counties established schools between 1375 and 1380, that is, when

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they were supposed to, while another twenty do not specify when in the reign they established schools. So the fifty counties of the first count are reduced to between 15 and 35 obedient counties. In other words, it may be that resident administrators in as few as 1 percent ofMing counties obeyed Zhu Yuanzhang's order to establish community schools, while other administrators continued to establish them after they had been forbidden to do so. Both officials and local people set up elementary schools of various kinds to fulfill local educational needs. Ultimately, community schools depended not on imperial orders, but on local people and on the largely unregulated activities of resident administrators. The gazetteers give this impression despite their complicity in reinforcing the image of imperial initiative by recording and preserving imperial edicts and centering their accounts oflocal activity on those edicts. Apart from the numbers recorded in gazetteers, there is little trace of Hongwu-era community schools. None of the numerous later prefectural, county and town gazetteers for Suzhou or Huizhou presents any evidence of Hongwu schools, though they say much about other topics for the era. In fact, a commemorative record in one of the gazetteers reports that the community schools existed in name only, though the comment may refer to the time of writing, or may be quoting Ye Boju's memorial.75 In the copious Ming writings about the Suzhou area, I have found only one mention ofHongwu community schools, discussed below. An extensive recent study of education in Huizhou turned up no evidence ofHongwu community schools.76 The 360 community schools in Jiangyin county, Nanzhili, may have been established under Wu Liang before 1375 (see below), or may be a quota. In Yizhou county, Shandong, beyond the gazetteer's claim of 139 schools, there is no evidence about the schools whatsoever: no founder's name; no school names; no locations. The remaining 29 counties claim up to 42 Hongwu community schools apiece, with an average of about 7· These are more plausible numbers, and a few of the gazetteers actually give some other information about the schools, encouraging belief in their existenceP Very few gazetteers, even those that have ample information on other Hongwu -era institutions, report early Ming community schools; many cite the successive laws on community schools as if to fill in the blank.78 And some gazetteers state explicitly that the county never had community schools before the late 1400s or 15oos.l9 Only in Taihe county does the literary record of the early Ming yield a little evidence of community schools. There, Grand Secretary Yang Shiqi and another Taihe native wrote epitaphs for five community school teachers. The epitaph for filial son Ceng Yuanyou when he was reburied tells us that in 1375 the new magistrate established schools inside and outside the county seat to

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teach clever boys; Ceng was the head teacher (often) and many of his students afterwards achieved great fame. 80 Similarly, the epitaph for Mr. Song tells us that an edict came down for prefectures and counties to establish schools, and in a while it was also ordered to establish community schools, to spread teaching to all the people's children. Thereupon the vice-magistrate made Mr. Song into a community school teacher. At the time there were more than ten people being teachers, all of them elders of the districts and retired ru. In their gowns and caps all lined up, they surprised and awed the [people of] the walled villages who saw them. And the boys all had a way to support their early will [to study], complete their elementary studies, and dissipate their rude and cruel customs. 81 Another Taihe source notes that the early Ming, restoring antiquity, had set up community schools to be like the village schools of the flourishing Zhou. The authorities complied, but gradually the schools were neglected and became defunct. Then the families and great clans stepped in to establish their own schools with endowed fields. 82 Taihe's apparently unusual response to the community school edict may have contributed to the dominance of Taihe men in the mid-Ming period as documented by John Dardess, or it may have stemmed from similar causes. The general picture, for the early Ming, is of an initial burst of both real activity and paper-pushing, followed rapidly by neglect. Over most of the empire, even during the period from 1375 to 1380, the historical record suggests that most boys never saw the inside of a community school. Gazetteer writers sometimes commented on the schools of the empire as well as documenting their own local schools. Some believed in the efficacy of the policy even when the evidence of their own area cast doubt on it. A Qing gazetteer that records local community schools beginning only in 1571 nonetheless comments that as a result of the 1375 edict every poor district and backward place had a school; elsewhere, a commemorative record for a mid-15oos school puzzles over why none were established in the Hongwu period in that particular place, when they were built everywhere else. 83 Why did gazetteerists who could find no evidence ofHongwu schools in their own areas believe in their existence? I believe it is in part because of a passage in the most commonly read history of the Ming. In 1555, Chen Jian published a work of private historiography, an annals of the Ming up to about 1521, that was subsequently reissued at least 13 times with various different comments added and entries expunged. Despite being banned in the Longqing period and again in the Qing, it was, according to Benjamin

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Elman, the basic work examination candidates used to bone up on Ming history. For the year Hongwu 8 (1375), it includes the following passage: At that time, thinking that the empire had already been stabilized and yet the way of transforming the people and making customs good had not been completed, the emperor ordered that in the prefectures and counties every village (gongli) all start a school and set up a teacher. He ordered that from time to time they be inspected. Thereupon every poor district and backward place each had its school. The italicized sentence should sound familiar. This passage, referring to the community school edict, survived through several editions of Chen Jian's widely read work and was picked up and quoted by gazetteers as evidence that early Ming community schools had indeed existed. 84 Some sources echoed the last sentence but combined its wording with that of the 1375 edict. For instance, the encyclopedia Xu wenxian tongkao comments, after quoting the edict: "Thereupon, the rural communities (xiangshe) all set up schools." 85 Chen Jian's source for passage was the widely available works of Song Lian, a key advisor to Zhu Yuanzhang, who should indeed have had inside information on whether schools were actually built or not. The fact that Song claimed that even the poorest and most backward places in the empire had community schools could be strong evidence. But, in fact, Song Lian's passage may show the exact opposite. It occurs in a commemorative record for a charitable school built in 1378 by two brothers in Changzhou, the seat of Suzhou prefecture, who were distressed that their village did not have a community school. 86 If a village in central Suzhou, which supposedly had 737 schools, was lacking one, it seems unlikely that every poor village across the empire had one. Yet along with the initial edict, quotation and requotation of this passage is a second thread strengthening belief in early Ming community schools. Community schools as a test case thus pose a serious challenge to the idea that Zhu Yuanzhang had great power over society. Zhu was not the first to call for empire-wide community schools. The policy was not uniformly carried out; in fact, it was not carried out even in a majority of counties. After only five years, Zhu changed his policy on community schools because of resistance from local people. When schools were established it was not necessarily because of the central policy, since some predated and some postdated it. He executed tens of thousands, moved whole populations to distant places, created and destroyed an aristocracy, but the Ming founder's power over community schools is unimpressive. Thus, claims about his great impact on local social institutions and perhaps other aspects of state and society may also be oversimplified. In the case of community schools, orders read as accomplished facts, and sentences taken out of context, have painted an enduring, but false, picture.

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Preserving The Laws? Tracing the path of the Ming founder's changing policies is no easy task. It cannot be done simply by looking at one or two central sources. The 1375 edict and order establishing schools do not survive complete in centrally-produced sources such as the Ming Shilu (Veritable Records), the official Mingshi (Ming History) and the Da Ming huidian (Collected Statutes of the Great Min g). The Ming History, for instance, collapses the changes in community school policy, noting the 1375 edict but adding that teachers were to be hired to teach commoner boys, and that the curriculum was to include reading the laws of the dynasty and the Great Warning. 87 Since the latter text was not written until1380, this cannot be a faithful report of the 1375 edict. Because the edict and order were issued to lower administrative units that had their own archives, however, one can reconstruct them from gazetteers, some of which quote a much fuller version of the edict than is available in any central source. The 1380 abolition edict is even more elusive. Wang Lanyin had to reconstruct its date and provisions from a number of gazetteers, as I did the 1383 version. The repetitions of the abolition in the Great Warning and the People's Placard have survived, perhaps because these propaganda texts were widely distributed. Some counties apparently still had a copy of the Placard of the People's Instructions nearly 200 years later, and some gazetteerists obviously consulted it. 88 Why is it so hard to find out what Zhu Yuanzhang actually said about community schools? First, he and his close advisors may simply not have regarded elementary education as very important, contrary to all the claims oflater writers. After all, the emperor abandoned the community schools quickly, and Song Lian's Record ofHongwu Sagely Government, issued in 1376, says nothing about community schools. 89 Early Ming community schools may owe their prominence to the interests oflater officials, such as Tang Bin, the Qing scholar who compiled the Ming History's "Basic Annals" and himself established community schools. 90 Second, between the Hongwu reign and 1431, while community schools were not part of central policy, documents may have been discarded. Third, when court interest in the schools resumed, particulars of the first imperial edict and Ministerial orders may have been purposely suppressed because later imperial edicts diverged from them while claiming them as precedents (see Chapter 3). The written record was manipulated to enhance the court's prestige, hide uncomfortable facts, and make claims to authority. Manipulation encompassed not only individual edicts, but the later compilations of edicts and laws, compilations to which scholars turn for a first look at any institution, and whose assumptions and partisanship have therefore shaped understandings of the Ming

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state. For example, the widely used Da Ming huidian (Collected Statutes of the Great Ming) was compiled within a paradigm of imperial initiative, centered particularly on the Ming founder. The Hongzhi imperial preface notes while in the Han, Tang and Song periods, wise rulers managed to create "small prosperity," their systems did not fit completely with Heaven's principles. Only the Ming founder, with perfect sagely virtue, having defeated the barbarian Yuan and taken the empire, could set everything straight with one command. He instructed the assembled scholars to respect ancient methods and adapt them to the times, and he swept away the corruption of the accumulated practices of the recent dynasties with one stroke. His successors were all in agreement. Although they changed some things according to the times, they all followed in this Way, and will continue to do so for generations to come. 9 ' The Zhengde preface admits that in setting up laws and the six ministries to handle them, and in writing them all down, Zhu Yuanzhang was actually following the practices of the earlier dynasties, but it agrees that though his successors have adjusted the laws to their own times, they have not departed from his intentions. In accordance with an emperor-centered approach, the Huidian compilers presented an incomplete record of the history oflaws on community schools in the Min g. 92 First, the Huidian omits certain edicts that pertain only to particular places, enhancing the sense of the uniformity of the imperium when it comes to this "antique" institution. 93 Second, it omits the 1380 abolition, moving directly to the 1383 re-establishment of community schools in civilian hands, which minimizes Zhu Yuanzhang's waffling. Third, it does not include whole edicts, but only summaries, which means that important provisions are left out. For instance, the initial (1375) provision that boys must stick to their fathers' professions is omitted, concealing the degree to which later edicts departed from Zhu Yuanzhang's intentions, contrary to the protestations of the prefaces. Fourth, by design the Huidian often excludes the memorials that led to edicts, keeping the focus on imperial initiative. A similar bias is seen in the Ming huiyao. Compiled privately by Long Wenbin (1821-1893) and published in 1887, the Huiyao includes not only laws about social institutions, but also examples of implementation, and to enhance its credibility provides a source citation for each entry. It is convenient, and very informative about the kinds of local institutions interesting alike to late Qing reformers and to late-twentieth-century historians looking for a signs of a civil society in China. For community schools, it gives very brief summaries of some laws, and scattered amongst them excerpts from Ming History biographies of men who established community schools. Although the twelve entries contradict one another in various ways, hinting at shifts in policy and fortune, they appear

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to be in chronological order; they move reign by reign, and within the Hongwu reign the three dated entries appear in order, separated by two undated entries. 94 The reader is led to assume that the undated events occurred between the dated events. But the assumption is false. The first entry in the Huiyao is the 1375 edict: "In Hongwu 8, 1st moon, ordered the empire to establish community schools." The next entry reports: "When Fang Keqin was prefect of Jining, he established community schools in several hundred places." In fact, this probably happened before 1375, because of the timing of Fang's appointment and execution. Next, the abolition: "16th year, ordered the commoners to establish community schools, the authorities forbidden to interfere:' The first abolition was in the 13th year, 1380, but this fact had already dropped from the central record by Long's time. The following entry reads: "When Wu Liang was protecting Jiangyin, he invited Confucian students to discuss the classics and histories. He renovated the school building, and established community schools." Wu Liang, a prominent general in Zhu Yuanzhang's conquest of the empire, had held Jiangyin against Zhu's rivals not only by constant vigilance ("sleeping at night on the ramparts") but also by being a model administrator-"benevolent and merciful, frugal and restrained." Like Zhu Yuanzhang, he studied with scholars in his spare time, and he shared the early Ming faith in institutions, reviving the tuntian system whereby soldiers also farmed, and enforcing a code of good behavior ( tiaoyue) like a community compact. The phrases "renovated the [county] school building and established community schools" come originally from a stele praising Wu that dates to 1367. 95 Thus, Wu Liang's establishment of community schools in fact predated the 1375 order and even the establishment of the dynasty. Wu was not following Zhu Yuanzhang's orders, but was drawing on Yuan institutions. The original wording of the brief claim makes this point even clearer. "Dingxin xuegong, quan li shexue" (renovated the school building, encouraged the establishment of community schools) became xin xuegong, li shexue. The change in the first phrase from four to three characters does not change the meaning; in the second phrase it does. Following Yuan law, in which communities were responsible for choosing teachers for the community schools, Wu encouraged the establishment of community schools; the shortened version follows later writing practice to make him more directly responsible for the schools. Zhu Yuanzhang's call for empire-wide community schools may have followed Yuan precedent directly, or, as one scholar has suggested, may have been stimulated by the success ofWu Liang and Fang Keqin, who established community schools before 1375. 96 But the Huiyao deceptively puts the 1375 edict first, suggesting that these two honored men were following the sage directive of the emperor. Why? The author of the Huiyao was an unabashed monarchist

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in a time when that stance was being seriously challenged. According to the biography written by Xu Shichang (a Qing official who reluctantly served the Republic, eventually becoming President), when the Qing dynasty fell in 1911 Long Wenbin told his son: For years, I have been studying and nourishing my energy, and I have attained a mind free and vigorous. Prosperity and adversity, slander and praise, cannot move my heart. But from today onwards, I shall indeed know mourning.97 Long's monarchism is reflected in the organization of the Huiyao as a whole, as well as in the deceptive arrangement of the items on community schools. The governance of the empire, he writes in the preface, is controlled by one honorable presence, and hence the compilation begins with the imperial family. Next come rites and music and sumptuary regulations, then schools, which are important because jiaohua maintains the distinctions between people. Even the various localities of the empire appear in the compilation only because "the promulgation of official orders reaches to far and near."9 8 Long was aware of questions of chronology-he discusses, for instance, the problem of how to date events that occurred before the Hongwu reign period was declared-but his faith in monarchy led him to put the emperor first. The Huiyao's presentation influenced historiography into the twentieth century. For instance, a 1962 history of the Ming published in Hong Kong includes a section on community schools based entirely on that source. After giving the laws as in the Huiyao, author Li Jie notes: "from this we can see that the Ming court strongly promoted community schools:' He then comments that The community schools of those days were of the same kind as the system of ancient family and village schools (jia shu dang xiang). The content they taught, besides literacy education and the ritual forms for performing capping, marriage, burial and sacrifice, also included reading the Great Warning of Ming Taizu and the laws. Also, according to the Ming History biographies ofWu Liang, Wang Ao, Yang Jizong, Zhang Bi, Xu Jie, and Ma Jinglun, when they were serving as resident administrators, they also spared no effort to implement community schools in their jurisdictions. 99 Li Jie knew that the Huiyao's coverage of community schools was not complete: his list of officials who established them replaces Long Wenbin's choice of Lin Pei with another community school founder from the Ming History, Ma Jinglun. But he did not question the overall presentation. The claim that the community schools of the Ming were like the schools of antiquity echoes Zhu Yuanzhang's whitewash of their Yuan origins. And it links the glorious past with the present; Li concludes that "this really has the flavor of the contemporary national effort

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to promote education." 100 Li Jie read the Huiyao as Long Wenbin intended, thus misreading Ming history. Many have done likewise.

The Early Ming in the Historiography of Community Schools The manipulative, self-contradictory and incomplete documentary record on early Ming community schools has facilitated the development of three basic historiographical treatments of community schools. They may be called the rosy view, the fall narrative, and the gloomy view. Each is based on a selection of facts, some fancy, and a pinch of presentism; in other words, each is a myth. Not to speak of the later Ming materials, none of the treatments really reflects the confusing historical record even of the early Ming period: a historical record of apparent imperial initiative after local experiments following Yuan law; a policy put in place, revoked, revised; schools established in response to the 1375 edict in some places, at the behest of resident administrators even after the ban elsewhere, and in other places not at all; a curriculum for which the only certainty is that it changed; attendance policies differentiated by family size and wealth, and further confused by corruption and resistance. The rosy view is represented by Long Wenbin in his construction of the Huiyao, and following him Li Jie. They chose to stress the initial establishment of the community schools and to present that edict as effective in promoting schools throughout the dynasty. The view of the schools as successful at least in the early Ming, as I have shown, was often supported by Song Lian's comment in a commemorative record for a charitable school, which was picked up by the influential Chen Jian and others. A Qing historian is the source of another thread of"evidence" for early Ming community schools. Quan Zuwang (170555), a Kangxi-era private historian with a family background of Ming loyalism, wrote that as a result of the initial edict The rural villages thus all set up one school for every 35 families, and those who wished to study could all prepare there. And they called them community schools, but they were the same as the village schools [of antiquity] ... 101 Quan's "35 families" comes from the 1375 edict's call for a school "in every hamlet and village, even if there are only 35 families" and it assumes that the order was effective. Quan's account has been taken as authoritative by later historians. In 1996, a scholar at Beijing Normal University, Wu Ni, published a study of "private" schools in traditional China. Wu does begin the community school story with the Yuan order to establish schools, but like many writers describes Zhu Yuanzhang as being "unusually concerned" with education in the villages. Taking for granted

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that the 1375 edict was effective, he says it resulted in village schools that were widespread and continued into the Qing. He even goes so far as to calculate the number of schools that existed, following-and footnoting-Quan Zuwang's claim that there was one school for every thirty-five families. In Ming Hongwu 26 (1393), in the whole empire there were 16,052,860 households and 60,545,812 people. Figuring at one school for every 35 families, then ... there ought to be 458,653 community schools ... From this analysis, we can see that community schools in the Ming period were rather common. 102 Failing to mention the abolition of 1380, Wu nonetheless defines the community schools as "private schools" independent of government management, control, and financing, even as he stresses the imperial role in proposing and backing them. Wu's presentation of Ming community schools is part of a proud argument that China's "private education" influenced foreign countries, as he apparently hoped to do: the book includes a table of contents in English.103 More importantly, Wu wanted to influence educational reform within China in his own day. The series in which the book was published explicitly addresses contemporary reforms, and Wu himself wrote about educational reform and coauthored a comparison of ancient and contemporary private education that repeats his claims about Ming community schools. 104 Texts about the Ming founder's community schools were still echoing past propaganda to serve present purposes in the late twentieth century. Quan Zuwang's comments have also been fitted more appropriately into a fall narrative, a storyline in which the Ming community schools start off well, but then flounder. A history of Chinese education completed by 1964 but printed only posthumously in 1981 quotes the same passage from Quan's writings and comments: "This community school system was of an elementary educational nature, but it was not implemented for long, then was abolished." The author, Gu Shusen, a professor at a normal college, matched each dynastic period with a Marxist phase of history, and the judgment on community schools fits with his general view of the Ming and Qing, when feudalism declined and ended: "By and large [this period] continues the old Tang-Song system of schools, but the examinations begin to use the eight-legged essay, and schools exist only as empty shells and become nothing more than insubstantial decorations:'105 Community schools were indeed abolished in the early Ming, but large numbers were built by officials in all parts of China after about 1430, despite the Ming founder's prohibition. To stop with the abolition is as partial as to omit it. A Western scholar, Sally Borthwick, also presents a fall narrative. Borthwick argues that the late Qing had a reasonably good foundation on which to build effective modern education, but that political, social, and economic

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circumstances derailed the attempt. Her text comments briefly on the high Qing imperial sponsorship of free elementary education through community schools and charitable schools (yixue). A footnote remarks that The early Ming promoted community schools on a large scale. The court ordered the establishment of one community school for every 50 families in 1375 and again in 1383. The main text taught was the Great [Warning] of the Hongwu emperor. Both in its attempt at nationwide coverage and in the use of education for propaganda, the Ming plan for community schools recalls the development of modern education in Europe and Japan; it was, however, never fully realized by its founding dynasty, and by the nineteenth century the few community schools still functioning may have been merely 'staging points for admonishing the population to behave' (Grimm, ''Academies and Urban Systems;' p. 480) .106 This community school story parallels the author's main argument about the Qing. It suggests that early Ming "promotion" was highly effective, ignores the critical difference between the school policy of 1375 and of 1383 (the switch from official, mandatory schools to local, voluntary schools), and simplifies the complex question of curriculum. In other words, "traditional" China had already laid the foundation for "modern" education, but as in the late Qing, this idea could not yet be "fully realized." The suggestion that widespread education in the early Ming deteriorated steadily into the nineteenth century is not justified by Tileman Grimm's comment that community schools were "highly transitorythose listed in gazetteers more often carrying the laconic remark [ j] iu fei, 'long defunct:" Grimm describes this explicitly as a pattern of repeated establishment and failure, but steady deterioration fits better with Borthwick's general picture of the gradual deterioration of originally effective state institutions. The communist historian of the Ming WuHan, writing in 1948, is the proximate source for many late-twentieth-century authors of a third view: that the early Ming community school project, and hence Ming community schools overall, utterly failed. Wu Han chose to stress the "abolition" recorded in the Great Warning, and although he does not cite it or quote it word for word he may also have had in mind Ye Boju's frequently reprinted charge that many schools existed in name only. In an article about army and bureaucracy as the two wheels of the chariot of autocracy, Wu reports the 1375 edict establishing community schools, but then notes that all local schools existed "in form only:" no teaching or studying took place in them and the community schools were even used by officials and clerks to harm the people. Flying into a rage, the emperor had no choice but to abolish the schools, and he never again attempted to "guide the people to goodness." Wu omits the placing of the schools into local hands, and ignores evidence that some schools actually were set up. Perhaps as a comment on the faltering Nationalist government, Wu concludes that "Ming Taizu had

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ways to control the [county] schools, he had ways to massacre students and people, but he had no way to implement community schools ... "107 A 1998 history of Chinese education intended for normal colleges follows Wu Han to comment that the education of the early Ming community schools"guiding people to goodness"-was no more than indoctrination, and hence was not welcomed by the people. But the textbook authors also looked at a primary source: According to the Ming History biography of Ye Boju, "now today, some communities, market towns, and cities, only set up a plaque over a gate, and even more in distant villages and remote places, they exist just in name, ... above and below they are regarded as only empty words." This was the actual condition of community schools at that time. The Ming History also contains a number of biographies of later men who established schools. Yet, although they cite the Ming History, these authors, Marxists and Maoists hostile to traditional education, restrict their story of community schools to the early Ming failure. 108 Community schools, and writing about community schools, had a complicated history in the rest of the Ming to which none of these treatments does justice. In that history, the legacy of the Ming founder, rather than being the central, determining factor, is often heard only as a faint echo reinterpreted for new purposes, or is overturned completely. The richness and complexity oflater sources has been muted by the search for origins, by belief in Zhu Yuanzhang's power, by reliance on central sources that continue the emperor-centered early Ming presentation of institutional history, and by the continuing use of tropes about schools for present purposes.

CHAPTER THREE

Borders and Bureaucrats: the Middle Ming Our dynasty's successive sages have cultivated virtue [so] high Heaven takes special care [of the dynasty]. Whenever it happens that there is a crisis for the guojia (nation/dynasty), there must always appear a particular person to clear it up. Some examples: When the Zhengtong emperor campaigned northwards [and was captured at Tumu in 1449 by Mongol forces], there appeared a Yu Qian [to stabilize the situation in the capital]. When [the imperial favorite and eunuch dictator] Liu Jin traitorously plotted, there appeared a Yang Yiqing [who brought him down]. When the Prince of Ning rebelled, there appeared a Wang Yangming [who defeated him]. When the Zhengde emperor toured southwards [in a dangerous make-believe campaign], there appeared a Qiao Yu [to minimize the damage]. When the Zhengde emperor capsized [and was on his deathbed] and [imperial favorite and military commander] Jiang Bin secretly harbored rebellious thoughts, there appeared a Yang Tinghe and a Wang Qiong [who prevented a coup]. All these men "matched the medicine to the disease" and "cured the disease with a single touch." Truly, it is as though Heaven intentionally produced them. Because of this, the [imperial] ancestors above light up the heavens, and one can also foresee that the blessings of the efficacy of the guojia will last a thousand, ten thousand years. -He Liangjun, 1569'

Around the central figure of the emperor ranged the upper bureaucracy. Recovering from the buffets of the murderous early Ming emperors, in the mid-Ming (roughly 1430-1470 ), officials flexed their muscles, for instance by ending the great imperially-initiated maritime expeditions in 1433. The bureaucracy also took community schools under its wing again, in ways that departed from early Ming modes in both text and substance. Hongwu edicts on community schools had presented the emperor as initiator and the empire as uniform. Later edicts openly responded to memorials, giving the impression that officials initiated actions and the emperor merely accepted or rejected suggestions. Often, community schools were proposed and approved less as part of a core program of returning to the ways of the ancients than as solutions to local problems, especially on the borders, where they became part of the "civilizing mission." Changes in school management reversed early Ming policy in four related areas-official

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control, attendance, curriculum, and relation to the examination system-as the bureaucracy extended control over all the steps leading to office and helped the dynasty recover from a debacle brought on by imperial fecklessness. High officials in the mid-Ming established community schools and wrote about them in memorials, poems, prefaces to a textbook, and commemorative records. They used these texts about community schools to express support for the dynasty, writing in an optimistic tone about the possibilities for broadly educating boys, about the future, and about the dynasty itself and its mission as a civilizing force.

Memorials Scholar-officials saw themselves as full partners with the emperor in the work of the state. If in enacting the early Ming community school policy Zhu Yuanzhang had followed suggestions from officials, that paper trail has been covered, but later Ming edicts on schools clearly come in response to memorials. Some memorials were specifically about community schools, and others addressed broader problems to which community schools were part ofthe solution. The Huidian and Huiyao, as discussed in Chapter 2, systematically place initiative in the emperor's hands, yet memorials were also valued and collected. The prefaces to the enormous late Ming (1638) collection on statecraft, Huang Mingjingshi wenbian, compiled by Chen Zilong and others associated with the Restoration Society (Fu She), present the work of the state as a partnership between emperor and officials; while lamenting the lack of practical learning of the men of their own day, they are proud of the accomplishments of earlier statesmen. 2 Other Ming compilations reflect the sense of partnership by combining memorials and edicts. To private compilers, apparently either the imperial edicts were incomprehensible without the memorial record, or the memorials were important state documents in their own right. Indeed, like failed examination essays, even rejected memorials might bring their authors fame. 3 Ye Boju's "Ten Thousand Word Memorial;' discussed in the previous chapter, for instance, killed its author but won him a place in Chen ]ian's history of the dynasty and in the Ming History. 4 The text itselflives on in the Huang Mingjingshi wenbian. Emperors sometimes complained that memorialists were simply trying to make reputations for themselves. 5 Memorials ostensibly addressed the throne and aimed at changing policy, but they also found a literati audience who saw them as part of the work and tradition of governing and who could debate and appreciate them and their authors on their own merits. A form of state-generated communication, memorials formed a field for social endeavor and competition that affected both state and society. No two compilers chose the same set of edicts and memorials to

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report. For instance, the Huang Ming yonghua leibian supplements the 1375 community school edict with a comment that quotes from Chen Xianzhang's 1485 commemorative community school record (see Chapter 4). Bu Shichang's 1605 revision of Chen }ian's history omits the initial edict on community schools that elicited such a favorable comment from Chen Jian in the original version, but includes Ni Ji's memorial with its mention of community schools (see below). 6 And so on: Even a historian who praised the dynasty or centered his writings on imperial action selected edicts and memorials in his own particular way and incorporated the comments of his contemporaries and of earlier men alongside, even in judgment on, the emperors' actions? Within the variety of memorials and edicts reported in the various compilations there is enough overlap, including overlap with the incomplete and far from veritable Veritable Records, that we can believe most if not all of the reports of individual edicts. It is not clear what compilers would have gained by fabricating edicts on community schools, and, moreover, if the laws reported were totally at odds with what people knew, the author would have lost credibility with contemporaries. Compilers, when they were not simply careless, manipulated laws and memorials by selection, deletion, and arrangement; omission is a greater problem for the historian than fabrication. The edicts and memorials included in gazetteers to fill out the customary category "community schools" help bridge the gaps. This chapter weaves edicts and memorials reported in various sources into a narrative of how schools got back onto the state agenda and how they worked in the mid-Min g.

The Civilizing Mission After the Hongwu period, community schools vanished from central documents for three decades. Not that there was no discussion oflocal educationrather, such discussion does not include community schools. For instance, when in 1426 one memorialist suggested that upright, talented, and diligent boys go directly into county schools, neither he, nor the emperor and ministers in their responses, mentioned community schools. The omission suggests that the Hongwu ban on official "interference" was regarded as established policy. 8 Nonetheless, later gazetteers label as "community schools" approximately 48 schools in nine counties (seven provinces) from the Yongle period. Established by various people, including resident administrators, locals, and high officials, the schools bore in their day a variety of names. For instance, a provincial degree holder in Yong'an county, Fujian, built a "charitable studio" (yi zhai), to teach the boys of the rural district west of the county seat. The local gazetteer characterizes the "charitable studio" as a community school, standardizing the

Borders and Bureaucrats: the Middle Ming

name after the fact when "community schools" had returned to official hands and had become a common category in gazetteers. 9 When the issue of community schools was raised again at court, it was in connection with border problems. Using schools to enculturate border people was fully in line with views Zhu Yuanzhang had expressed. In 1389, a teacher in Guangxi province had memorialized that ... in Xincheng county the Yao barbarians live among mountains and caves. They do not have enough clothes, nor do they fully understand [Chinese] language ... Although [a county] school has now been built and teachers installed, the government students are just beginners ... Few were qualified for the National University, let alone for office. Zhu Yuanzhang responded: "The purpose of establishing schools at the borders among the barbarians is to guide them to goodness, and that is all." 10 In his view, schools on the borders were not to recruit talent for government service, but to transform ordinary native people. And similarly for Han people far from the centers of civilization: Zhu Yuanzhang supported (against objections) countylevel schools in the border area of Liaodong, to preserve the cultural identity of the sons of military men posted there. Their few opportunities for exposure to learning and ritual in daily life meant that they needed the Odes and Documents and ritual practice even more than people in the interior. That education might make them employable later was only a secondary benefit. 11 The idea of setting up community schools in border areas did not violate the founder's principles. The first surviving memorial to raise the topic was submitted in 1431. Sent to northwestern Sichuan to quell a tribal uprising, Wang Ao proposed both immediate military and logistical measures-personal supervision of the embattled garrison by regional commanders, more efficient provisioning of troops and miners-and long-term solutions to the social disorder he found, manifested equally by the rebellion and by rampant lawsuits. Litigiousness in the area signaled poor administration: the clerks' conduct had gone unexamined since the Hongwu period, and protected by corrupt Community Elders they stirred up lawsuits. But reforming or removing local clerks was only half the battle. Litigiousness also signaled a low level of civilization among the people themselves, due to a lack of education. The community schools of Sichuan, Wang reported, have long been defunct. The people have not been taught, so they compete in lawsuits a great deal and very seldom yield politely. If, in accord with the Hongwu regulations on the matter, all local administrators, whether bureaucratic or aboriginal, established community schools and had all the subject and nonHan youths learn how to read, then the rites and righteousness would be elevated and the people would go back to behaving honestly. 12

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In line with Zhu Yuanzhang's vision, community schools would civilize the border Sichuanese, so that aborigines would no longer revolt and Han subjects no longer disturb the peace with lawsuits. Wang's memorial simply ignores the abolition of community schools and presents the Hongwu era, only thirty years gone, as a vanished ideal. Wang's suggestions were mostly approved, including the community school provision. The memorial, a model of concise clarity, was reprinted in Chen Zilong's statecraft compilation and elsewhere, so although there is no evidence that it led to any schools being built in Sichuan, it did have an effect. It was Wang's reputation and that of this particular memorial that put community schools back on the agenda, making them a tool in the standard toolbox carried by memorialists and administrators. Once associated with the security and extension of the empire, community schools became part of a Chinese "civilizing project" that in broad outline was already very old by Ming times. Rather than simply conquering areas for material domination, in Stevan Harrell's words, "the civilizing center draws its ideological rationale from the belief that the process of domination is one of helping the dominated to attain or at least approach the superior cultural, religious, and moral qualities characteristic of the center itself:''3 The deployment of schools in the civilizing mission, although it seems natural, was apparently new with the Ming, or perhaps with the Yuan. According to Richard von Glahn, Song officials had believed that introducing agriculture, private property, taxation and government, and substituting secular exemplars for local cults, would suffice to transform ethnic minorities into stalwart peasants.'4 Elementary schools apparently played no role in the Song domestication of Sichuan, whereas they were frequently prescribed in the Ming, generally, as in Wang Ao's memorial, along with other military and administrative measures to pacify border or ethnic minority areas. Frederick Mote has characterized Ming state methods of managing unrest, especially among ethnic minorities, as occupying points on a spectrum, from "stern military suppression" or "sheer force" to "various forms of political and cultural tutelage:'' 5 Community schools played a role in proposals that ranged along much of the spectrum, as we can see from three different late Ming proposals for handling the Loi people on Hainan island. In 1539, Wang Honghui, formerly Nanjing Minister of Rites, recommended furthering Ming control of the island through strict surveillance, promotion of trade, community compacts to carry out "transformation through education," and community schools to train the Loi.' 6 In 1549, after more Loi violence, military metropolitan degree holder Yu Dayou took charge, with an imperially-approved approach farther toward the "sheer force" end of the spectrum. His troops, he reported, cleaned out the dens of the Loi bandits, killed the villagers, and scattered the remnants.

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Where Loi still lived, Yu moved Han subjects and soldiers to live among them, to imbue them with Han language and customs. His "Map and Explanation" recommended additional garrisons, the organization of lijia, the subjugation of the Loi people to the county authorities, and an assault on Loi culture and society: Loi should be forbidden to tattoo their faces and decorate their bodies, and the men should be forced to cover their legs and heads instead of pinning their hair up all topsy turvy. Every subprefecture and county should report annually how many villages of already "cooked" Loi they had totally "transformed;' and how many villages of "raw" Loi they had "cooked." They should keep the categories apart, and beware of "false cooked Loi" and "raw traitors." Yet despite the violence of this approach, Yu also thought that community schools should be set up in each village, to "cook" Loi boys, that is, to teach them to speak (Chinese) and read, testing them annually. 17 A soldier whose success against the Loi set him up to become one of the most prominent military officials of the mid-sixteenth century, Yu favored violence, surveillance, and rapid forced assimilation; yet community schools were part of his program for long-term security. The following year, Hai Jui, a new provincial graduate eager for attention, also submitted a memorial on how to pacify the Loi people. Along with building roads and other measures, he also proposed instituting lijia and community schools. 18 The memorial was turned down, but much later in his illustrious career, Hai Rui also wrote a "Map and Explanation of How to Pacify the Loi," a revision ofYu Dayou's "Map and Explanation." Hai Rui's tone differed considerably from Yu Dayou's, although he downplayed the difference by calling his revision a mere update. Pointing out that large quantities of money had been spent on campaigns against Loi rebels in 1501, 1541, and 1549 without securing their subservience, Hai Rui argued for transforming the Loi slowly and peacefully. Rather than forcing the Loi to change their customs, the Ming government should allow them to be gradually influenced by any soldiers and other Han who voluntarily chose to live among them. Improved roads would facilitate communication; lijia and mutual surveillance and security groupings known as baojia would garner taxes and corvee labor. The Loi should be treated with respect; those who were wise, able, and respected and commanded the obedience of villagers should be entrusted with governance. Schools should be set up and teachers hired in each fort and camp; there should be community schools in each Han and Loi village. After a few years of education, influence, and respectful treatment, the Loi would all become good subjects,-without the government spending large sums on warfare. 19 Positioned differently along Mote's spectrum, the military and civil officials suggested similar institutions to promote assimilation. So while community schools became part of the "civilizing mission," they remained

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closely linked with more brutal forms of suppression, and with security and budgetary concerns. Community schools can complicate our view of the civilizing project in other ways as well. It is certainly true, as William T. Rowe has written, that transformation or civilization (hua) was usually something elite men did to their subordinates. 20 Yet while Loi presumably submitted no more willingly than early Qing Han men to the imposition of new hair styles, education was a more ambiguous evil. Huang Mingguang, a twentieth-century scholar at the Guangxi Normal University, both condemns Ming education as a Han ruling class policy to control ethnic minorities and celebrates it as having nourished talent, promoted good social trends, and provided advancement for some men, who gained education and held office. 21 Although they were of Han ethnicity, Wang Honghui and Hai Rui were both from Hainan. 22 Their milder proposals for pacifying the island, focused on institution-building and economic development, appear as a proposal from the local side, perhaps not only as an alternative to war but because some locals wanted to pursue the opportunities the Ming state offered. Huang Guangming notes, for instance, that an Aboriginal Official (tu guan) in Hunan ordered all sons of such officials to attend schools to study. 23 Similarly, in 1439, an Aboriginal Official in Guangxi, Mo Zhen, proposed community schools as one of a set of measures to both defend good aboriginal people from marauding bandits and lessen their temptation to join the bandits. He recommended that rule by headmen like himselfbe continued and extended; that one fortified village, defended by local militiamen, be constructed every 10 miles or so; that fields be given to the landless; that families be registered into mutual responsibility groups; and that each village build a community school, to gradually transform customs (fenghua). The plan was approved. Reflecting a convergence of such local proposals with the central desire for control on the cheap, a military regional commander commented that Mo's plan would be worthwhile if it saved expenditures along the border. 24 A third aspect of the civilizing project that emerges from looking at community schools is that influence did not flow only one way, from center to periphery. Huang Mingguang argues that Guizhou locals who succeeded in gaining office changed the Ming ruling group's composition and improved policies toward minorities. 2 5 An intriguing example of reverse influence is Wang Yangming, the best-known philosopher of the Ming. While in exile as a lowly official in Guizhou in 1508, Wang supposedly penned this snippet, recorded in a local gazetteer: Every village has opened a community school; Everywhere is the sound of recitation. 26

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Wang's encounter with Guizhou village community schools came at a critical juncture, just when he experienced enlightenment and began to speak about the unity of knowledge and action. Tu Wei-Ming argues that Wang's experiences among the tribesmen-both learning to accommodate to their practices and receiving their help and admiration-strengthened his commitment to selfcultivation and teaching. As Wang wrote, "It was only with my three-year exile in [Guizhou], where I suffered every possible difficulty, that I received some insight.'W Although community schools were intended to convert border people into Chinese people and incorporate them into the empire, influence also ran the other way. Wang Yangming's interaction with the subjects of empire, who lived and celebrated differently and yet had an internal moral compass, was important in the development of his thought about human nature. A fourth complication is that Ming writers sometimes saw minority subjects as good and Han officials as bad. Whether proposed by native officials themselves or others, policies of pacifying the south and southwest through community schools showed a belief in native educability and potential goodness. In the second moon of 1481, Yunnan governor Wu Cheng memorialized that the legitimate heir of the aboriginal official of each yamen should be ordered to study at tlle neighboring prefectural school without paying tuition, and that the Board of Rites should again order that for youngsters in distant places community schools be opened and learned people from neighboring places be invited as teachers, with the education officials to oversee them. It was so ordered. 28 In 1538, the prefect of Qinzhou, Lin )Gyuan, reestablished a community school in the subprefectural seat, and set up 18 more in various districts. Lin wrote a commemorative record, and then wrote a gazetteer incorporating the record. The gazetteer explains that the barbarians wanted to change their impure customs. The record explains that just as the ancient kings created agriculture and sericulture to let people feed and clothe themselves, they also created schools to teach people about the moral bonds between lord and minister, parent and child, husband and wife, senior and junior, and friend and friend. 29 Education in morality, Li's record continues, rendered the ancient people obedient, and allowed the selection of the best as officials. Both good customs and good officials contributed to a harmonious society.3° While the border people themselves could be part of the solution, welcoming, even requesting, and being willingly "transformed" by schools, officials sent out from the center could be the problem. As even Wang Ao's memorial makes clear, border problems were caused as much by officials as by residents. In 1489, Zou Hong, overseeing military affairs in Guangdong and Guangxi, explained the large numbers of bandits around Canton first by indicting the officials in charge of the area for living high off the hog, engaging in corrupt relations

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with aboriginal officials, and neglecting public affairs to such an extent that murders were going unpunished. As a solution, however, Zou proposed not that surveillance of officials be revamped, but that "community schools should be set up and baojia formed, so as to cut off the source of the banditry:'3' This illogical solution shows that once community schools were in the toolbox they were applied to a variety of problems. A fifth point is that as both Wang Ao's memorial and Lin Xiyuan's views suggest, the civilizing mission applied to both ethnic minorities and ignorant Han peopleY As community schools were deployed in memorials to address problems of corruption and banditry, they came to seem relevant to controlling problems in the interior of China as well as on the borders. Community schools became a standard tool for controlling society in interior areas, especially in the high Ming. Wang Yangming famously used community schools and other local institutions to stabilize restless southern Jiangxi in about 1518, but there are earlier examples. For instance, the Jing-Xiang area had been depopulated and declared off-limits. In 1454, an experienced high official, Sun Yuanzhen, memorialized that people were suffering great hardships to provision the army. The granaries were depleted and famine was a danger. Referring to his experience as an official in Henan, he recommended that resident administrators take advantage of the year's good harvest to register households; give people land to till; teach about agriculture and sericulture; and set up community compacts, charitable granaries and community schools, so that people would continue farming, instead of turning bandit. Sun took the most fundamental approach to military problems: a settled population would both be able to supply the army on the borders and reduce tlle need for military action in the interior. 33 In the high Ming period, as we shall see, community schools were increasingly used to civilize not just border people or rebellious migrants, but even long-settled Han farmers within the cultural heartlands. Thus, while we can see community schools as a new Ming contribution to the old Chinese civilizing project, they also complicate the understanding of that project in several ways. First, the spread of civilization was attended by brutal domination. The very same document might call for wiping out whole villages and for establishing schools. Alastair Johnston has noted, "References to Confucian benevolence were found almost invariably near the start of memorials that then ... proceeded to argue exclusively for the application of force and violence." 34 Second, Ming-period minority and border people were not just victims. They sometimes participated in the civilizing process, attending schools and even actively requesting them as a way forward. Third, cultural influence went both ways, as knowledge about people on the peripheries affected Ming understandings of self and of humankind generally. Fourth, minorities were

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sometimes seen as better than the officials in charge of transforming them. Fifth, civilizers turned their eyes back to the metropolis, and saw many of the same deficiencies there as on the borders. 35

Restoration Spirit There is perhaps a final complication of the notion of the civilizing project emanating from the center in the Ming: the most central figure of the state could himselfbe its biggest stumbling block, especially when he refused to stay properly secluded at the symbolic heart of the empire. In 1449, the foolhardy Zhengtong emperor, Zhu Qizhen, ventured into the field himself against an invasion of Mongol forces near Beijing and was captured at Tu Mu. Panic struck the capital. Should the emperor be ransomed? What would the ransom be? Could he be rescued by force? Should the northern capital, only a few decades old, be abandoned entirely to the powerful enemy? The counsels of minister Yu Qian prevailed: Beijing was not vacated, and in an extraordinary move to render the Mongol army's prize useless, Zhu Qizhen's brother, Qiyu, was enthroned as the Jingtai emperor. Sent home, Qizhen fumed for several years before he reclaimed his throne as the Tianshun emperor, killing his brother and his supporters, including Yu Qian. In the Jingtai period, Yu Qian worked vigorously on many fronts to give the dynasty a new start, creating an era of"renewed stability, effective government by competent ministers, reasonable reforms, and adequate defensive policies for Peking and the northern frontiers:' 36 Among other reforms, Yu Qian oversaw the founding of community schools, possibly ordering them for all the border regionsY The sense of urgency involved in a dynastic restoration, particularlywhen the danger came from people perceived as non-Chinese, rallied some literati behind the dynasty and renewed their awareness of the richness of Chinese tradition and the value of teaching it to as many people as possible. One such literatus was Ye Sheng, a new jinshi (holder of the highest, metropolitan, civil service examination degree) who worked under Yu in the Office of Scrutiny ofWar, his insistence that the defenses in northern Shanxi were vital having marked him as a kindred spirit. In the early 1450s, Yu Qian posted Ye to the Xuanfu Defense Command, northwest of the capital, to carry out border reconstruction alongside regional commander Sun An. Ye and Sun resettled eight recently abandoned forts, promoted agriculture, improved transportation, and provided medical services. 38 Ye Sheng's writings about community schools have a positive tone and emphasize loyalty to the dynasty and the training of talent to serve it. High officials committed to making the dynasty work had to be concerned about recruitment in this period, because many men were refusing to serve a royal house that produced numskulls like the Zhengtong emperor.

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Ye wrote a set of verses to commemorate the community schools he had built, called "Poems on the Community Schools of Eight Forts:' 39 The poems are upbeat: they praise the forts themselves (despite their recent failure), giving them an air oflonely grandeur. At Diao' e the hills are deep, hill upon hill ... Yunzhou has since antiquity been called an illustrious land. Ye also praises the people of the forts, particularly the community school pupils. The sound of reading rises up from the foot of the high guard tower at Chang' an. At Longmen, the clever and good students study earnestly and can already write well. At Chicheng, they are studying the Odes and Documents. Ye goes so far as to say that "the learning of the border surpasses that of the interior" (poem 7). The poems also make much of the new Jingtai emperor, who "has the Way to unify our culture" (poem 6). They stress the theme of restoration and ofMing victory over its northern foes. For example: Dushi is lofty and eminent, guarding the royal palace. On the borders study halls have happily opened again. The emperor who is restoring the dynasty to its former glory reveres learning and virtue. We shall soon see the tribes all coming in to pay homage. With army, emperor, and people working together to promote Chinese culture and military strength, the border tribes will submit, introducing a new era of peace and strength. The local schools are both a sign and an integral part of peace through strength. The people living in the border areas can put aside their stores of armaments (poem 4) and exchange works on military strategy for studies of Confucius and his disciples (poem 6). Ye's poems promote education that easily combined ethical development and broad learning, and even military training. As well as learning, the pupils' morals should become as good as those of the sage-kings (poem 5). In fact, as Ye argues in a separate poem appealing for funds for a community school in an unspecified garrison town, the two are inseparable. Moral bonds cannot be secured by force even in a military area, but must rely on ritual and study of the classics and works by the "honorable talents"-the generations of scholars. Providing Books for a Community School A military Guard promotes civil teaching, collecting money to provide books. The ancient Odes sets forth models and warnings;

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the great Changes speaks of waxing and waning. If one wishes to give the three constant bonds weight, how can one allow the neglect of rites and law? Honorable talents are like pure jade we need to buy a whole storehouse full.4° The aims of literary education, morality and security converge not only in national policy, but also in each individual pupil. In future days, the dynasty will obtain worthy men whose talents in both war and letters are matchless. 4' Military strength was obviously needed for the post-Tu Mu restoration, but so were good customs on the border and successful recruitment of talent from all parts of the empire. Ye Sheng and other high officials involved with the restoration promoted cooperation with and belief in the dynasty they were rescuing. Adam Schorr attributes this optimistic attitude precisely to the loss of the feckless Zhengtong emperor and his eunuch companion Wang Zhen, who seemed the very personification of immorality at the political center.42 Mid-Ming officials also steadily pushed for bureaucratization of the community schools, initially torecruit talent at a moment when official slots were not oversubscribed. Unlike the establishment of community schools on the borders, bureaucratic control of the schools and the movement of community school pupils into the examination system were policies absolutely opposed to the intentions of the Ming founder.

Revising the Founder's Vision The most unrepentant violators of the founding emperor's prescriptions ... were probably his own descendants. -Joseph P. McDermott43 In 1375, Zhu had instructed resident administrators to set up the schools in accordance with (lost) regulations issued by the Ministry of Rites. They were even supposed to keep lists of teachers and students. But after 1380, Zhu had repeatedly forbidden officials, and even lijia leaders, to intervene in the schools at all. Instead, community schools were to be run by local volunteers as they saw fit. In the mid-Ming, however, officials regained control of community schools. In 1436, a new provincial assignment for censors was created to inspect prefectural, subprefectural, and county schools, supervise and certify students, and oversee examinations and all educational affairs. These were tasks that belonged to the line officials (provincial administration commissioners and resident

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administrators), who sometimes resented the usurpation of their authority and the vague lines of jurisdiction.44 As one later writer explained, Community schools are the means by which to nourish the ignorant [i.e. educate children] ... But this building of community schools is something that the resident administrators cannot complete. When our dynasty first came to power, it took schools as the first priority, ordering every prefecture, subprefecture and county to build them ... Moreover, thinking that the authorities would not pay attention to this, the dynasty especially appointed education intendants to oversee the matter and proclaimed that it is recorded that 'in antiquity every village had a school!45 The initial edict creating these education intendants (tixue yushi) did not mention community schools, which were not at that point required by law except on the Sichuan border. But later the same year, the emperor responded to another memorial by decreeing that: "education intendants of every place and the prefectural, subprefectural and county officials shall strictly oversee community schools and may not neglect them." The decree came in response to a memorial from Henan Provincial Administration Commissioner Li Changqi, suggesting that resident administrators provide enough community schools in their jurisdictions, hire teachers, and select community school pupils with spotless records to fill any vacancies in the ranks of government students in the county schools. (Li Changqi had served briefly in Guangxi, and may have been thinking of conditions there in proposing widespread community schools.) 46 Three years later community schools were put back on the books empire-wide: the Ministry of Rites responded to a memorial in 1439 urging that boys from blameless commoner families be educated in community schools by ordering every village in every county to build one. 47 In the Jingtai reign, after the Tu Mu crisis, education intendants were abolished, but they were appointed again beginning in 1462, after Zhu Qizhen reclaimed his throne as the Tianshun emperor. 48 The edict reviving the system also reiterated the call for community schools. In ancient times, villages, hamlets and alleys all had schools. They were the same as today's community schools. All education intendants when they go to their posts shall order the authorities to build community schools in every district (xiang) and every village (li), choose and place teachers, and establish clear teaching regulations, to teach people's sons and younger brothers ... 49 The law represented an intense bureaucratization of the community schools: they were now subject to micro-management by resident administrators and provincial-level intendants. And teachers were now to be hired by magistrates, rather than being local volunteers. The change fitted with the bureaucratization

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of the examination system as a whole. 5° Perhaps to cover up the revision of the founder's vision, the 1462 edict referred to the antique model, rather than referring as Wang Ao had done to the early Ming regulations. Most education intendants did little to take advantage of this new field of responsibility. Others did sponsor community schools (see Chapter 4), or promulgated teaching regulations that, as Tileman Grimm has noted, were merely amplifications of the court's commands or moral exhortations, "since the intendants could not be expected to go beyond the regulatory patterns established by the central government." 5' For instance, in 1474, Guangdong Education Intendant Tu Fei ordered the subprefectures and counties to choose land to build schoolsY Showing a bit more enthusiasm, in about 1562, Nanzhili Education Intendant Geng Dingxiang wrote instructions that were to be reprinted for every school, planned to systematically oversee community schools to prevent perfunctory attention to the schools by resident administrators, and required yearly examinations of community school pupils.53 Most education intendants preferred to use their posts to gather disciples among men who would move up in the system. Jiangxi Education Intendant Li Mengyang, for instance, was accused in about 1514 of trying to totally control the government students of Jiangxi, among whom both he and Shao Bao, who served in the same post about a decade earlier, were tremendously popular.s4 But community schools, rather than a distraction, could be a tool in the gathering of personal followers; both Shao and Li required that government students in the prefectural, subprefectural, and county schools be chosen only from among community school pupils.SS In at least one case, personal connections forged between students and education intendants strengthened the latter's hand. In 1520, a new metropolitan degree holder, Zhu Chang, suggested ordering education intendants to attend to community schools again. Zhu Chang had benefitted from the personal attention of Education Intendant Gu Qian, who also helped community school pupils move up, as we shall see in Chapter 6. The Ministry of Rites agreed with this suggestion, and it was so ordered. 56 This edict, proposed by a personal supporter of an education intendant, set the stage for the activism of Education Intendant Wei Jiao in Guangdong and Henan, which will be discussed in later chapters. By the time this edict came down in 1520, official control of the schools-contrary to Zhu Yuanzhang's intentions-was a well-established principle. Nor did attendance remain voluntary. Zhu's 1380 abolition of official community schools had been fueled precisely by the abuses made possible by mandating attendance. In 1465, in line with the concern that families who could not afford to lose their sons' labor were being forced to send them to community school,

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the Chenghua emperor permitted poor commoners to choose whether or not to attend. But in 1504, the Hongzhi emperor again ordered the establishment of community schools, this time with mandatory attendance for commoners' children less than 15 years old, and stipulated that pupils were to study ritual.5 7 Similarly, Zhu Yuanzhang had specified that community school pupils had to return to their fathers' professions, and were not to proceed to the county schools. He had reiterated this stand in 1391 when a low-ranking official in Huguang, Ni Ji, proposed solving recruitment problems by reinstating the community schools, with a proper curriculum, and allowing pupils to advance and leave their family professions. Schools are the dynasty's prime responsibility. When Your Majesty first took his place, he ordered the prefectures and counties to build schools in order to create wise men and nourish talent, in order to plan the methods of ruling. Thus the rural communities (xiang she) have their schools (xiao) and the prefectures and counties have their schools (xue). Now, the prefectural and county schools are supported, but schools of the districts and communities are neglected. This is not the way to broaden "transformation through education" (jiaohua). Kneeling, I wish that Your Majesty would order the districts and communities to promote the hiring by every hundred families of one scholar who understands the classics or one elderly retired person, to teach the classics and histories to the commoners' sons. Day by day and month by month, they will gradually be influenced and perfected. Talent will naturally arise and be transformed, and there will be manpower to fill official and clerkly posts. 58 Zhu Yuanzhang had rejected this proposal, yet despite his reiteration of opposition to allowing community school pupils to enter the examination system, this principle was overturned. The 1436 edict putting education intendants in charge specified that community school pupils could qualify to take the civil service examinations: "Those who are intelligent and inclined toward study may fill vacancies in the ru schools as government students:'59 In 1439, Investigating Censor Yang Chun, a native of the border area Dali, not only asked that boys from blameless commoner families be educated in community schools, but wanted them considered for admittance into county schools. 60 In 1462, the edict reinstating the post of education intendant specified that community school pupils "shall be tested once a year to select the diligent:' 6' This trend went so far that in the Jiajing period Magistrate He Tingren complained (perhaps unjustly) that the community schools were now completely focused on memorizing, writing essays, and angling to be chosen by the court. 62 Zhu Yuanzhang's views on this point were not only overturned, they were completely obscured as social and economic conditions changed. Several

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community school records preserved in gazetteers say that the purpose of community schools was to prepare pupils for higher education (daxue) and one gazetteerist wrote that the Ming founder had "first established community schools ... to nourish the roots of uprightness at the beginning, in order to store up talent for the world for another day." 63 In 1633, the Chongzhen emperor deplored the neglect of schools. Referring to the "old systems" (jiu zhi) in the Huidian, he lumped community schools together with other government schools, told the Ministry of Rites to cooperate with the Ministry of Personnel to improve supervision, ordered that all children attend elementary school, and talked about the schools' mission to improve the customs of the gentry and provide talent to the state. 64 Qing historian Qian Zuwang wrote that in the early Ming there had been two tiers of government students, those at the prefectural, subprefectural, and county level and those in the village schools, also called community schools. Unsuccessful lower level government students were permitted to return to their professions, but those who were talented could move up to the next level, so that "from the countryside one could become chief minister!" Lazy administrators and bad government students, Quan said, had let the system fall apart, but one could still read Taizu's proclamations on the matter. 65 Quan's short essay, published in 1776, was read by the great Qing scholar-official Ruan Yuan, who praised Quan for his solid historical research. The silence of later Ming edicts on their revision of the founder's laws, the insistence of imperial prefaces to the Huidian that later laws still carried out Zhu Yuanzhang's intentions, and the social and ideological context of an all-encompassing examination system, meant that Zhu Yuanzhang's ideal, immobile society in which farm boys sought education without ambition was not only gone by the late Ming and Qing: it was almost unimaginable. Not only were the community schools run by officials; not only were the pupils tested and allowed to move into the examination track; not only was attendance nominally mandatory, but also in line with the change in purpose, the curriculum was changed. Zhu had assigned the community schools the job of teaching the Great Warning and morality, but now the curriculum resembled that of the prefectural, subprefectural, and county schools for which pupils were ostensibly preparing. 66 The education intendants and other high officials who were promoting community schools in the mid-Ming generally preferred a broad, liberal curriculum to either the law-based obedience school of the later Hongwu era or the ritual-based obedience school oflater activists. They were not bound by a narrow orthodoxy in selecting texts for the community schools. Both Ye Sheng and another founder proposed replacing Zhu Xi's Elementary Learning (Xiaoxue) with a compilation by a wandering Yuan bibliophile named Xiong

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Danian, of Jinxian county, Jiangxi. Xiong's Great Instruction for Nourishing the Ignorant( Yangmeng daxun) included newly composed songs and poems ranging from three to seven syllables per line; eight existing primers; and the Classic of Filial Piety edited by Zhu Xi. The Great Instruction was reprinted in the Ming by a magistrate of Xiong's native Jinxian county, Lii Sheng, who also established six community schools. 67 Ye Sheng's two prefaces and postface and Li Ling's postface to the Great Instruction express views characteristic of the mid-Ming on curriculum, the purpose of education, and the dynasty itself. First, Ye and Li were not shy about criticizing Zhu Xi's Elementary Learning as a primer, proposing the Great Instruction as necessary stepping stone to or even a substitute for the more difficult text. 68 Li writes The book Elementary Learning by Zhu Xi certainly attains the ancients' method of teaching the young and ignorant, and with the Five Classics and Four Books it has been used for a long time. But of the words and sayings in it, some are easy, some difficult; some are short, some long. Even a teacher who is an old scholar and has often read it cannot parse it. How can children study it? 69 Ye also thinks that Xiong is better than Zhu Xi at getting to the heart of the matter and expressing it succinctly, and that Xiong's compilation is rich enough to be used in home schooling, in community schools, and in other elementary schools. Ye asks why Zhu Xi's text should be canonical, when ancient sages and Song masters had their own texts and methods. The matter-of-fact approach to Zhu Xi shows the open-mindedness of mid-Ming educators. Second, Ye emphasizes textual learning over morality. In discussing the ancient sages' teaching, Ye assumes that they used books, although the books have now been lost. The result of their teaching was, he says, that people were good at books and good at ruling-not that their ethical behavior improved. And when Ye praises the results of the Hongwu -era community schools, he says that there was an upsurge in "literary learning" (wen jiao ), instead of using the more common term for moral transformation, jiaohua.l0 Later curricula included large doses of ritual training and practice and simple ethical teachings, and tended to stress the transformation of customs over literary accomplishment (see Chapters 5 and 6). Third, the prefaces show "restoration spirit" in their praise of the dynasty and the current emperor. In his first preface, included in a collection Ye prepared "to honor the court;' 7 ' Ye praises Zhu Yuanzhang for establishing community schools, the Yongle emperor for promulgating a standard edition of the classics, and the current emperor for using the office of education intendant to revive and spread community schools and encourage teachers. These activities all carried

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out the intentions of the sage-kings of antiquity. Ye admits that the community schools were also abolished in the Hongwu period, but, whereas he credits to Zhu Yuanzhang a sudden upswing in education the schools brought, he blames their abolition on incompetent officials. Ye's later preface is less sycophantic, but still says that "today, bright virtue is at the center and jiaohua is spreading to the sides." In general, later writings on community schools are less fulsome in their praise of the dynasty. The vision of a broad-based liberal education even for boys in community schools, which contrasts with the approach both of Zhu Yuanzhang and of later community school founders, is characteristic of a confident generation of community school sponsors in the upper levels of the bureaucracy. Writing before the universal imposition in the 1470s and 1480s of the "eight-legged essay" often accused of replacing real learning with form, they saw no contradiction between learning for advancement and for personal development, and morality was not their main concern. As John Dardess has argued, the continuity in grand secretaries from 1402 to 1457 meant that mid-Ming high officials who had served the usurping Yongle emperor "could never seize the moral high ground;' but instead tried to stay in the good graces of the dynasts/2 Adam Schorr, tracing attitudes toward language and its efficacy, similarly argues that the mid-Ming was a period in which concern with the transmission of the ethical Way was eclipsed by interest in literary pursuits that were revived and led by the grand secretaries. Their sponsorship ofliterature reflected their possession of culture, their manifestation of the wisdom of the sages, and the present majesty of the empire (which they self-consciously asserted was the rival of past glorious dynasties).73 Both they and the generations that followed them were able to use community schools to express their quite different outlooks. Alexander Woodside has pointed out that literati adhered to emperors because the throne and the unified empire represented an opportunity for "great political and cultural achievements." 74 The high officials who sponsored community schools while saving China from a return to rule by Mongols praised their rulers as paragons of virtue and culture to assert the superiority of the Ming state and Chinese civilization as a whole. In doing so, they made themselves great even in the eyes of later men who had a less sanguine view of the dynasty. In He Liangjun's later catalogue of crisis and rescue, the epigraph to this chapter, there is indeed little idealization of Ming emperors. Each crisis is caused not by external circumstances, but by the foolishness of a member of the royal family, in all but one case of the reigning emperor himself. The illustrious officials who served the dynasty were as much a part of the guojia as were the emperors they rescued. The state was the means through which they achieved their ends and the field on which they displayed their talents.

Borders and Bureaucrats: the Middle Ming

51

Testing the Impact of Edicts Ming Taizu Hongwu ... 8th year [1375] ordered the empire to establish community schools ... Thereupon the rural communities all established schools . .. Yingzong Zhengtong 1st year [1436] ordered that those [community school pupils] who were clever and inclined to study might become government students. Xiaozong Hongzhi 17th year [1504] ordered each prefecture, subprefecture and county to seek out and nourish enlightened teachers. The children of the people fifteen and under should be sent to the community [school] to read books and practice the rituals of capping, marriage, funerals and ancestor worship. The laws gradually fell into neglect and were not carried out. -Xu wenxian tongkao 50/3244, emphasis added

From the 1430s onward, community schools were back on the books; officials were required to establish them in all villages. What relation did imperial orders have to the building of schools? The Xu wenxian tongkao accords with a common perception that the Zhengde reign was the beginning of the end, presenting a TABLE

3.1

Ming Imperial Edicts Relating to Community Schools 1375· 1380. 1383. 1402. 1431. 1436. 1439· 1439· 1451. 1454· 1462.

1481. 1489. 1504. 1520. 1527 or 1531. 1531. 1539 and 1549. 1575· 1588. 1633·

Hongwu (Ming Taizu) orders a community school established in every village. Hongwu abolishes community schools, replacing them with "winter schools:' Hongwu orders community schools established by villagers themselves, voluntarily.75 Yongle reestablishes community schools for study of Great Warning.7 6 Xuande orders schools in Sichuan (approving Wang Ao's memorial).77 Zhengtong (Yingzong) puts newly-created education intendants in charge of schools.7 8 Zhengtong orders a school established in every village.79 Zhengtong orders schools established in Guangxi ethnic minority villages. 80 Jingtai declines to change community schoollaws. 8' Jingtai declines to order community schools for HG Jing-Xiang region. 82 Tianshun (Yingzong again) orders schools established, exempts teachers from corvee, and permits community school pupils to become government students. 83 Chenghua permits poor commoners to choose whether or not to attend. 84 Chenghua permits erstwhile community school in Zhejiang to become academy. Chenghua orders community schools in distant areas. 85 Hongzhi orders schools in Guangdong and Guangxi. 86 Hongzhi orders schools, mandatory attendance, study of ritual. 87 Zhengde orders education intendants to pay attention to schools. 88 Jiajing orders xiaoxue, approving Gui E's memorial. 89 Jiajing orders community schools.9° Jiajing orders schools in Hainan.9 1 Wanli orders test of all school teachers and pupils to justify corvee exemption. 92 Wanli orders schools in Guangxi.9J Chongzhen orders schools established empire-wide, mandatory attendence. 94

52

Borders and Bureaucrats: the Middle Ming TABLE 3.2

Prefectures, Subprefectures, and Counties that Established Community Schools, by Reign Reign Hongwu Jianwen Yongle Hongxi Xuande Zhengtong Jingtai Tianshun Chenghua Hongzhi Zhengde Jiajing Longqing Wanli Taichang Tianqi Chongzhen TOTALS

No. counties reporting schools established in reign

Approx. percent of counties with schools

50 0

9

11

2

0 0

6 3 28 91 65 47 183 10 48 0

17 12 9 33 2

9 0

7 551

fall narrative, in which schools gradually declined after the Hongzhi reign. The late-twentieth-century scholar Chi Xiaofang, by contrast, argues that there was an empire-wide up-and-down pattern determined by imperial attention, the peaks being the Hongwu, Zhengtong, Tianshun, Jiajing, and Wanli periods.95 To test the correlation between imperial edicts and the actual building of schools, a list of the edicts (Table 3.1) can be compared with how many counties built schools when. For counties establishing schools for which a reign can be known or reasonably guessed (Table 3.2), the highest percentages were established in the Jiajing, Chenghua, and Hongzhi reigns. In the next tier come the Hongwu, Zhengde, and Wanli reigns and perhaps Tianshun. The Zhengtong reign, which Chi considers a peak, accounts for only about 1 percent of establishments in my data. 96 There are additional difficulties with Chi's argument. First, she considers edicts the only evidence of "attention" to schools from the central government, although one might with difficulty trace other factors, such as promotions or commendations of community school founders. But there were also imperial edicts on schools in the Chenghua, Hongzhi, and Chongzhen periods, which Chi does not consider "peaks" of activity. Out of 17 reign periods (16 emperors), n "paid attention" to schools, although the Jingtai order merely confirmed the status quo. It is not clear, therefore, how to correlate "attention" and "peaks."97

Borders and Bureaucrats: the Middle Ming

53

Second, Chi both argues that imperial attention was a critical factor in determining the number of schools established, and in an approach both common and understandable arranges her numerical data according to reign periods, as if assuming that to be the case. Furthermore, since some reign periods are long and others very short, to compare the number of schools in each seems wrong, unless the assumption is that response to the edicts was immediate. Was this true? Let us look, for example, at the timing of schools in the Chenghua and Hongzhi periods in relation to the orders cited above. (All the caveats about these numbers mentioned in Chapter 2 of course apply here as well.) In the Chenghua period, if imperial edicts were the main force behind schools, the restoration and establishment of schools should be highest in and just after 1465, when an edict was issued. In fact, the peak years were 1472, when 13 counties restored or established a total of 46 schools, and 1481, when 7 counties restored or established 102 schools. In the Hongzhi period, if school building directly depended on edicts, empire-wide activity would have been greatest in 1504 and shortly thereafter. The reign ended in 1505. Those last two years show the lowest rates of school building: only 1 and 2 counties apiece compared with 5 in 1495 and 1500, 6 in 1497, and 7 in 1502. If instead of dating schools by reign period we date them by decade, the peaks look different. (See Table 3·3· Fewer schools can be dated to a decade, since in many cases gazetteers only report the reign period of establishment.) The 1370s, immediately after the first order to establish community schools, and the 1520s and 1530s, when there was no order about schools, are the peak decades of community school establishment. The linkage of large numbers of community schools with "imperial attention" is tenuous. As well as the orders applying to the whole empire, there were orders specific to particular areas. How successful were they? In 1431, community schools were mandated in a border area of Sichuan; community schools in 14 counties of Sichuan that can be dated only vaguely, to before the publication of gazetteers recording their existence in the sixteenth century, may possibly have been established as a result. In 1439 schools were ordered in Guangxi; that region, with few gazetteers, records two community schools that were built at an unspecified time before 1531. In 1489, schools were ordered in four prefectures in Guangdong and Guangxi; a few undated schools may have been established in response, though three of the four prefectures had had schools established earlier. In 1535, schools were mandated for a Hainan island county; n undated schools on which the gazetteer admits to having no further information may have resulted. It is difficult to say from surviving evidence that these specific orders had much effect.

54

Borders and Bureaucrats: the Middle Ming 3·3

TABLE

Number of Prefectures, Subprefectures, and Counties that Established Schools, by Decade Decade beginning 1360 1370 1380 1390 1400 1410 1420 1430 1440 1450 1460 1470 1480 1490 1500 1510 1520 1530 1540 1550 1560 1570 1580 1590 1600 1610 1620 1630 1640

TOTALS

No. counties reporting schools

45 2 2 6 0 0 4 2 5 35 24 29 28 26 26

Approx. percent ZJ Xinchang), 228n48

Index Zhang Zhidong, 132-3 Zheng Luoshu iil\ii>fl} (1496-1534, FJ Putian), 82, 83, 122, 140, 145> 154 zhengshu (record of administration), by Gui E, 103; by Wei Jiao, 104, 155, 159; signficance of genre 94, 99-100, 108-9; in Song, 99 Zhou Yu Jiil~, (NZ Kunshan), 84-5, 147, 233n147, 237nl77 Zhu Chang*'"' (js 1515, BZ Shahe), 46 Zhu Di (Yongle emperor), 35, 50, 49, 99; on gazetteers, 140; Perfect Warrior and, 79, 82, 160 (jr YL, Tangxi), 202n26 Zhu Sheng Zhu Xi, 66, 99, 101, 102, 117, 208n74; Elementary Learning by, 12, 48, 98, 102, 106, 198m8; Family Rituals by, 97, 98, ns; inventor of

*ii1I

community schools, 158-9; on religion, 83; preface to Daxue by, n, 113, 203n27; shrines to, see shrines, Confucian Zhu Yuanzhang, 1, 2, chapter 2; assessment of, 8, 19-20, 24, 32, 56-7, chapter 8; authoritarian personality and, no; disobedience to, 6, 24, 44-50, 56-7, 76, 77, 113; obedience to, 21-2, 30, 70, 73, 76, 106, 121, 136, 155; omitted, 66; mania for control surpassed, 108; Ming views of 15, 49, 79; support for schools of, 8, 18, 25, 66, 127, 133; used to comment on present rulers, 31, 54; Yuan dynasty and, 9, 12, 26, 185n29, 186n34. See also historiography Zhuge Liang, 147, 242n47 Zou Hong ~oili~ 40 Zou Yunlong ~3[\fd:!it (js 1441, FJ Taining), 198n67