Number of Degrees.--Aged Bachelors.--Up for Examination.--Necessary Qualifications.--Crowding.--Scarcity of Posts.--Chinese Dress.
Far more formidable than the soldiery are the literati of China. Soldiering is despised in China; learning is esteemed. The literati also are far more numerous; they arrive in great armies, nominally ten thousand strong or more, and each young man of any standing has his pipe-bearer and three or more servants, possibly in the case of military students a horse or two and attendant grooms as well. In the summer of 1897 at Chengtu there were fourteen thousand candidates, who had already passed the first of the five examinations necessary before entering the highest body in China, the Hanlin College. They were all what is commonly Englished into B.A.'s; that is, Shiu Tsai, or Budding Talent. _And there were ninety-six degrees to be conferred!_ Picture the disappointment in a land where for twelve centuries no official post of any kind has been conferred without preliminary examination. Men go up year after year, year after year, in many cases collecting contributions from friends and patrons towards travelling expenses. Sometimes these contributions are given under promise that, if the needy student do not pass this year, he will not try again. But this is a promise made to be broken. And I believe it is really true, if a man go on competing for his B.A. and failing, at the age of eighty he is considered to have passed.
In 1891 the Governor of Yunnan said that it was also permissible under certain circumstances to bring to the notice of the Throne cases of scholars well advanced in years who have failed to pass their examinations for the degree of _chüjen_, and begged to recommend for favourable consideration the case of Lien Hsiang-yang, a Bachelor of over eighty years of age, who had failed to pass at the last examination. He had obtained his degree of Bachelor only nine years before, and in the eyes of the memorialist his praiseworthy endeavours to scale the heights of Parnassus ought to meet with some recognition.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF GOD OF LITERATURE. _By Rev. E. J. Piper._]
It is a curious method, that of a Chinese examination. The Literary Chancellor of the province travels round from city to city. Suddenly there is an influx of new faces, and the streets are full of strangers looking about them. Missionaries always say, "The students are swaggering about." When the Consul does not send out a request for Europeans to keep within-doors or to be careful, I straightway order my sedan-chair, and pretend I want to buy something near the examination-hall. Any one, who knows the monotony of always blue gowns and a slouch, would understand that the idea of "some one swaggering" is irresistible. But so far I have never succeeded in seeing even one military student swagger. I know the mandarin swagger, and the Tientsin swagger, which is the most audacious of all, and would make every one in Bond Street turn round to look; and I know the young merchant swagger, which is amusing, and not very unlike a very young London clubman's swagger, when he does swagger. I am afraid it a little went out when high collars came in. But the students I have seen have mostly been pale, very anxious-looking young men, who drop in at our luncheon-time, and look with great interest at our foreign things, sitting on for ever, when they find we have actually specimens of the books of that most useful Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge. Then they turn them over and are happy, till they suddenly wake up sadly to the fact we have no more. "And I wanted to take back copies to all my friends in the town of ----," said one student that I know. But then he did not pass. He is a reformer, a dreamer, as the Secretaries of Legation at Peking dub all of the party of progress in China; for that city seems to deaden the very souls of the Diplomatic Corps, walled up inside it, away from all their own nationals, and full of their parties and theatricals and petty jealousies, unaware apparently that there is a great Chinese nation throbbing across some two thousand miles of country south and west.