Ebrey Long Review Dynamics of Elite Domination Bob Hymes

Harvard-Yenching Institute

The Dynamics of Elite Domination in Sung ChinaCourt and Family in Sung China, 960-1279: Bureaucratic Success and Kinship Fortunes for TheShih of Ming-chou by Richard L. Davis; Government Education and Examinations in SungChina by Thomas H. C. Lee; Sōdai kanryō seido kenkyū by Umehara Kaoru; Statesmen andGentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung by Robert P.Hymes; The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History ...Review by: Patricia EbreyHarvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Dec., 1988), pp. 493-519Published by: Harvard-Yenching InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2719319 .Accessed: 12/04/2012 22:27

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REVIEW ARTICLE

The Dynamics of Elite Domination in Sung China

PATRICIA EBREY University of Illinois, Urbana

Court and Family in Sung China, 960-1279: Bureaucratic Suc- cess and Kinship Fortunes for the Shih of Ming-chou by Richard L. Davis. Durham: Duke University Press, 1986. Pp. xvi + 353. $37.50.

Government Education and Examinations in Sung China by Thomas H. C. Lee. Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 327. $32.50.

Sodai kanryo seido kenkyui by Umehara Kaoru f4aY*. Kyoto: Doho, 1985. Pp. xxiv + 643. Y12,500.

Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung by Robert P. Hymes. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1986. Pp. xv + 379. $44.50.

The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History of Examinations by John W. Chaffee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. xxii + 279. $39.50.

During 1985 and 1986 five books were published that deal in one way or another with the connections between the civil service recruitment system and the structure of local and national elites during the Sung period. In 1985 there appeared John W. Chaffee's The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History of Examinations,

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Thomas H. C. Lee's Government Education and Examinations in Sung China, and Umehara Kaoru's Sodai kanryo seido kenkyu. In 1986 came Richard L. Davis' Court and Family in Sung China, 960-1279: Bureaucratic Success and Kinship Fortunes for the Shih of Ming-chou and Robert P. Hymes' Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung.

The common issues addressed by these books are best introduced by referring back to two articles that appeared in this journal thirty- five years apart. The first, published in 1947, is E. A. Kracke's "Family Vs. Merit in Chinese Civil Service Examinations Under the Empire."'' Using the information in two lists of successful chin- shih, Kracke takes exception to K. A. Wittfogel's contention that "the ruling officialdom reproduced itself socially more or less from its own ranks." Each of Kracke's lists mentions the office held, if any, by the new degree-holder's father, grandfather, and great- grandfather. Of the 330 men on the 1148 list, 24 percent came from lines with unbroken official service, 20 percent from lines with one or two officials, and 56 percent did not have an official among their three most recent ancestors. The 601 men on the 1256 list were similar; 13 percent were from lines with unbroken service, 29 percent from lines with some service, and 58 percent from lines with no officials among their three ascendant ancestors. Kracke calculates that chin-shih supplied from 37 to 44 percent of the entire civil service and an even higher proportion of the more influential posts, leading to his conclusion that "a very large share of the higher governmental positions would be in the hands of the novi homines" (p. 122). Kracke admits that a reading of dynastic history biographies gives a different picture, but points out that only about 1 percent of the men in the civil service ever became prominent enough to be given biographies, and that these prominent men may well have come disproportionately from prominent families.

The second article is Robert M. Hartwell's "Demographic, Po- litical, and Social Transformations of China, 750-1550." 2 Twen- ty pages of this broad-ranging article describe "The Transforma- tion of the Political Elite" based on an analysis of the information given in biographies of 5,500 officials (p. 405). Hartwell distin-

' HJAS 10.2 (1947): 103-23. 2 HJAS 42.2 (1982): 365-442.

THE DYNAMICS OF ELITE DOMINATION 495

guishes a "founding elite," a "professional elite," and a "local gentry elite." The founding elite were military families important primarily in the early years of the dynasty. The "professional elite" was comprised of prominent families, mostly living in the cap- itals, who tended to marry with each other regardless of regional origin, and who placed most of their sons in the higher offices of the bureaucracy generation after generation until about 1100 (p. 406). The thirty-five most important of these professional elite families, Hartwell reports, supplied 23 percent of policy-making posts between 998 and 1085, and the higher the post, the greater their re- presentation. The local elite were gentry families that from T'ang times or even earlier "provided a significant proportion of the men who filled the offices of the lower bureaucracy as well as individuals who engaged in non-governmental occupations-estate manage- ment, teaching, commerce, etc." (p. 416). These men began to enter the bureaucracy through the expanded civil service system, but Hartwell does not see such local gentry as "new men," and explicitly criticizes Kracke's analysis of the examination lists for ignoring uncles and other collateral kin in assessing social mobility. Hartwell sees the examination system as a tool for perpetuating status rather than attaining it, and argues that marriage with established families nearly always came first (p. 419). In tracing the history of China's political elite from T'ang to Ming, Hartwell gives greater weight to the change from Northern Sung to Southern Sung than to the earlier T'ang-Sung transition. In the aftermath of late eleventh-century factional politics, the professional elite of the early Sung disappeared and their families became indistinguishable from those of the local gentry. The primary evidence he cites for this change is a decline in interregional marriages. Of 255 Northern Sung marriages, 147, or 58 percent, were to people originally from other counties. Of 126 Southern Sung marriages, only 9 (7 percent) were to people from other counties (pp. 422-23).

Between the time of Kracke's and Hartwell's articles much had changed in scholarly study of Chinese elites and of Sung society. Ping-ti Ho made use of examination lists to assess social mobility in the Ming and Ch'ing periods,3 and his work in turn led to con-

' The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368-1911 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).

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siderable debate on the social consequences of the examination system. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the English-writing academic world, emphasis had come to be placed on the continuity and local resources of elites rather than on their mobility.' Moreover, given all of the studies of Chinese family and kinship,5 few scholars would any longer be willing to identify a single strand of ancestors with "family" as Kracke had done. Thus, by 1980 the scholarly community in general had shifted much more in the direc- tion of Hartwell's conception of the Chinese elite than Kracke's.

These five new books show, however, that the issues are by no means settled. Richard Davis gives a spirited defense of the idea of the Sung civil service as a meritocracy, and explicitly rejects Hart- well's contention that the examination system served to perpetuate elite status rather than facilitate social mobility. Davis also questions the idea of a major Northern Sung-Southern Sung shift in elite behavior. Thomas Lee also argues for high social mobility in the Sung, stressing the importance of schooling and examinations in the formation of the Sung elite. In much the spirit of Kracke's Civil Ser- vice in Early Sung China, 960-1067,6 his emphasis is on the government's efforts to attain impartiality and equity in its recruitment system and to expand access to education. Umehara Kaoru and John Chaffee (a student of Kracke's) do not come out clearly for either high mobility or an entrenched elite. What they contribute are sophisticated studies of the workings of the civil service recruitment system, with due attention to all the ways it could be manipulated by those in authority, though Chaffee explicitly rejects Hartwell's contention that the local elite controlled access to the examinations. Robert Hymes (a student of Hartwell's) comes to Hart-

4 See especially Hiliary J. Beattie, Land and Lineage in China: A Study of T'ung-ch 'eng County, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch'ing Dynasties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). See also Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1791-1864 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970) and Jerry Dennerline, The Chia-ting Loyalists: Confucian Leadership and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

5 Such as Maurice Freedman, Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (London: Athlone, 1958), Denis Twitchett, "The Fan Clan's Charitable Estate, 1050-1760," in Confucianism in Action, ed. David S. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), and David Johnson, "The Last Years of a Great Clan: The Li Family of Chao Chiin in Late T'ang and Early Sung," HJAS 37.1 (1977): 5-102.

6 Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953.


well's defense on the issue of local elite influence on the examination system and documents the transformation of the elite from the Northern to the Southern Sung in one prefecture, but questions the social reality of the distinction between professional elite and local gentry.

The authors of these books had for the most part read each other's dissertations (and Umehara's earlier articles), and so not infrequently argue with each other in their texts or notes, as well as with Kracke and Hartwell. Kracke's calculations of "new men" are most fully refuted by Hymes (pp. 34-41), though even Davis (pp. 172-73) acknowledges that "new men" could never have constituted a large proportion of the bureaucracy, given the numbers entering through "protection." Only Lee sees any value in providing statistics on the proportion of prominent men without officials among their recent ancestors (pp. 211-14). Hymes and Davis differ considerably in their assessment of the importance of the chin-shih degree and office to social status. Davis draws his distinctions between low, middle, and high office, treating those without office as largely without status. Hymes, by contrast, stresses all sorts of other ways a family could gain local status, such as passing the prefectural qualifying examination, arranging a marriage with a family that had an official either in the present or the past, joining in charitable, literary, or educational activities with such families, and so on. What to Davis would constitute extreme ob- scurity, to Hymes could be well-established local elite standing.

Hymes and Chaffee differ on another major issue: whether the local elite could effectively limit access to the prefectural qualifying examination, as Hartwell asserted. Chaffee notes that proof of "character" and ancestry were regularly required of candidates who wished to take the prefectural examinations, but finds no evidence that these procedures were used in an exclusionary way. Hymes, however, cites the case of a man near the end of the Sung who regularly gave guarantees to several hundred candidates at each examination, and almost always had some from his list pass. This, Hymes argues, shows that candidates needed connections to a leading member of the local elite (pp. 43-46). Chaffee counters, however, that if a single scholar could recommend several hundred candidates, the requirement of a family guarantee certificate could

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not have been much of an impediment. He argues, moreover, that the huge numbers of men who took the first level examinations in the late Sung (up to about 400,000 at a time) indicate openness at this stage of the recruitment process.

It is not my task here to arbitrate these differences in interpreta- tion. Nor can I bring out all of the implications of these books for other fields of study such as intellectual history. Rather, I will draw from each of these books to present a dynamic view of the connections between elite status and the civil service system. In the broadest sense, my view resembles Hartwell's and Hymes' in stressing continuity in the elite, but it comes closer to Chaffee's and Umehara's in giving a central place to the civil service system. Rather than try to assess the degree of openness of the Sung elite, I think there is more to gain by examining the processes by which members of the elite attained, maintained, or lost power. Even when change appears to be constant-as it seems to have been in the rules for recruitment-one may detect recurrent processes at work. In trying to reinterpret Sung evidence in this way I am probably influenced in part by general intellectual trends.7 But what most immediately sparked my rethinking was Chaffee's subtle analysis of the dynamic process by which the social consequences of each policy change led to a new political configuration and further changes in policy or practice. In this essay I will try to extend this ap- proach to the phenomena reported by Lee, Umehara, Davis, and Hymes.

Before dealing with the specifics of the Sung case, let me outline my argument in general terms. The basic proposition is that established families at both the national and local levels regularly felt pressed to "change the rules" for distribution of prestige and power to give more advantages to people like themselves. Because elite families grew very rapidly, they could not be content simply to hold on to their existing share of the social and political rewards and privileges, but had to expand their share in order to keep their sons at the level of their fathers. In other words, the rules that had

7 For reviews of these trends, see Sherry B. Ortner, "Theory in Anthropology since the Six- ties, " Comparative Studies in Society and History 26.1 (1984): 126-66 and Joan Vincent, "System and Process, 1974-1985," Annual Reviews of Anthropology 15 (1986): 99-119.


worked fine for their fathers would not always work well enough for their sons.

The evidence now seems conclusive that elite families routinely had two, three, four, or more sons. One sees this in genealogies of the pre-T'ang, T'ang, and Sung periods,8 in Sung lists of the brothers of degree-holders,9 and even more conclusively in Ming and Ch'ing genealogies."' Men in the elite could have large

8 The best source for pre-T'ang genealogies are the dynastic histories of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, which regularly give biographies in genealogical order, strongly sug- gesting that the historians had access to genealogies. Most of these elite families or lineages grew rapidly. The Chin shu, for instance, gives biographies of seventy-six Lang-yeh Wangs who were fourth cousins or closer, and the Wei shu (covering the period to 550) gives biographies of sixty-one Lung-hsi Lis descended from a common ancestor early in the fifth century. These "families" often increased steadily: Wang T'ao had six sons, eleven grandsons, sixteen great-grandsons, twenty-six great-great-grandsons, and forty fifth generation descendants. Similarly, Ts'ui I, of the Po-ling Ts'uis, had seven sons, nine grandsons, twelve great-grandsons, twenty-eight great-great-grandsons, and forty-eight fifth generation descendants.

For the T'ang, there are genealogies in the Hsin T'ang shu for the families that produced chief ministers. The eight genealogies that seem most clearly to have been based on private family genealogies all give fairly high average numbers of sons per father, ranging from 1.9 to 2.6 (Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Aristocratic Families of Early Imperial China: A Case Study of the Po-ling Ts'ai Family [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978] p. 159). These figures are of course minimums, since it is much more likely that records have been lost than sons in- vented where they did not exist. For the Sung, one can use the Sung portion of genealogies printed in Ming or Ch'ing times. See, for instance, the genealogy given by Richard Davis for the Shih family of Ning-po in Court and Family, pp. 198-224.

9 Chaffee, Thorny Gates, p. 41, found that the new chin-shih in 1148 had an average of 3.2 brothers and in 1256 1.8 brothers. In other words, the families had three or four surviving sons, perhaps seven or eight surviving children.

10 See Ted A. Telford, "Fertility and Population Growth in the Lineages of Tongcheng County, 1520-1661," (paper presented at the conference on Chinese Lineage Demography, January 7-11, 1987). Using thirty-nine genealogies from a single county, Telford compared the number of sons recorded for three types of men. "Gentry" were officials and those with examination degrees down to sheng-yuian. "Near Gentry" included the sons and grandsons of "gentry," students in official schools, scholars, and those who gave evidence of wealth by making contributions of property, having concubines, purchasing office, and so on. Telford found that non-gentry had an average of 1.82 sons per father, "near gentry" 2.09, and "gentry" 2.80. The rate of increase over generations was much more skewed than this, however, since much larger numbers of sons did not marry among non-gentry (probably about 1 percent among gentry, 8 percent among near gentry, and 19 percent among non-gentry). Thus near gentry families grew three times as fast as non-gentry ones, and gentry families over twice as fast as near gentry. See also Steven Harrell, "The Rich Get Children: Segmenta- tion, Stratification, and Population in Three Chekiang Lineages, 1550-1850," in Family and Population in East Asian History, ed. Susan B. Hanley and Arthur P. Wolf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), pp. 81-109.

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numbers of sons because they could have legitimate children by concubines as well as wives, and had the resources to take a second wife if the first died.

Having several sons would not have had the consequences it did for the elite had it not been for the Chinese system of multiple succes- sion and partible inheritance. Added to this, the elders in a family felt a strong responsibility for seeing to it that the family's descendants had the wherewithal to continue the line; "preserving the family" through preserving or enhancing its assets was seen as a moral duty rather than as an act of selfishness." In areas of Europe where all legitimate sons inherited their father's status, elites grew much larger than areas where only one son succeeded, and the character of such elites also differed as a consequence.12 In China, where concubines' sons were not illegitimate, the forces for growth of the elite stratum were even greater than in any area of mono- gamous Europe. The difficulty of providing for several sons was, moreover, exacerbated by the desire of those at the top of the social and political hierarchy in China to see their sons gain official posts. Office is not easily transmitted to descendants, and in imperial China men could not divide, give away, or bequeath their offices.

The consequences of the rapid growth in the size of elite families and the inherent difficulties involved in assuring offices for sons is that the class system was never at equilibrium. Pierre Bourdieu has asserted that once a structure of education, degrees, titles, and so on is established, "the dominant class have only to let the system they dominate take its own course in order to exercise their domination. " 13 By contrast, I am arguing that the elite could not leave the system alone if they wished to continue to dominate it in the terms meaningful to them (i.e. by preserving their families as members of the top elite). Even if no one ever rose to a status higher than his father's (patently untrue), there would always be pressures for alterations in the recruitment system and the standards for honor because those with the most power to change things wanted their own share to increase.

" See Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Family and Property in Sung China: Yuan Ts'ai's Precepts for Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 37-51.

12 Cf. See Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton: Princeton

University Press), pp. 11-12, 24-26. 13 Pierre Bourdieu, An Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1977), p. 90 (emphasis in the original).


These processes were already at work before the Sung, but gained a new urgency with the growth of the educated class (the stratum that considered themselves shih-ta-fu). The development of printing, the government's expansion of the school system, the general prosperity of the time, and the examination system itself, all played major roles in fostering the growth of the educated class.14 The best sign of the increase in the size of the this class is the increase in those par- ticipating in the examinations. According to Chaffee's research, ap- proximately 20,000 to 30,000 candidates took the prefectural qualifying examinations in the early eleventh century. By the end of the century this number had risen to 79,000. In the early twelfth century, when a chin-shih degree was acquired by promotion through the government school system, about 200,000 students were en- rolled in the county and prefectural schools. In the Southern Sung, after the examination system had been reinstated but the state only controlled about two-thirds of its previous territory, the number of candidates at the prefectural examinations rose to about 400,000 or more.'5 Thus in the thirteenth century about 2.5 percent of the adult males had the education and ambition to be taking the examinations.16 For the Sung period, Hymes shows convincingly that social (as opposed to political) distinctions were relatively unimportant within the educated class as a whole, which was commonly referred to by the collapsed category of shih-ta-fu (that is, shih, educated men, and ta-fu, officials). Marriages, friendships, and local projects all linked men from official families to educated men from families without recent officials.17

Increased competition for offices might lead an individual to ad- just his strategies. For instance, he might decide to seek entry to the Imperial University or marriage into a wealthy family as he tried to negotiate around the existing rules. But competition also evoked group responses and led to numerous adjustments to the rules gov- erning the Sung personnel system. These institutional changes are the major concerns of Lee, Umehara, and Chaffee.

14 See Chaffee, Thorny Gates, pp. 13-17; Lee, Education and Examinations, pp. 19-30. 5 Cha]Jee, Thorny Gates, pp. 34-35.

16 This is based on a total population of sixty million, 20 percent of whom (twelve million) were adult males.

17 Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen, pp. 48-52.

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The early Sung rulers do not seem to have worried about the dangers inherent in creating a privileged stratum of official families. If anything, they seem to have wanted to foster such a group to serve as a counterweight to the warlords. This can be seen best in the extraordinarily generous provisions of theyin a ("protection") privilege that these Sung rulers granted officials, going way beyond T'ang precedent. Umehara has studied this system in some detail, and my account here is based primarily on his work."8 Throughout the Sung some officials were granted the right to nominate sons, grandsons, brothers, brothers' sons, sisters' sons, and other relatives to office on successive occasions, including emperors' birthdays, imperial suburban sacrifices (generally held at three year in- tervals), their own retirement, or at their deaths according to their testamentary requests. Becauseyin was a type of imperial largess, the emperor always reserved the right to give it to whomever he pleased. For instance, on his birthday in 996 T'ai-tsung declared that all Hanlin Academicians, all officials ranked five or higher in the Secretariat-Chancellery, and all officials ranked four or higher in the Department of State Affairs could nominate a son, grandson, or brother to office. This was described as a curtailment of previous practice."9 In these early years it was not uncommon for men nominated throughyin to be given examination degrees. In 996 the emperor complained that the children of officials ranked five or higher were treated too well and often four or five of them would gain office; he ordered that from then on they should be granted only the degree of "associate master scholar" (PWIE) of the ming- ching M examinations.20 Nevertheless, in 1004 the chief councilor Li Hang f iML was rewarded by having the degree of "associate chin- shih" granted to three younger brothers, one sister's son, and the son of his wife's elder brother.21

During the eleventh century there were repeated efforts to regularize and institutionalize theyin system. In 1012 a memorialist complained that allowing officials to nominate relatives at imperial

18 Umehara, Kanryo seido, pp. 423-500. 19 Li T'ao, Hsu tzu-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien (Shih-chieh shu-chu reprint) 40. 10b. 20 Ibid. 39.4b. 21 Ibid. 56.17a. "Associate chin-shih" was given to candidates who passed the metropolitan

examination but not in the top grades.


sacrifices and birthdays meant that their sons and younger brothers could hold office as youngsters, while scholars who had mastered the classics stagnated in low positions.22 There were also complaints about the number of nominations each official could make on any single occasion and the cumulative total this could reach during his career. In 1041, Sun Mien TC-G complained that officials down to rank seven could nominate relatives at successive sacrifices and birthdays, their total number of nominees seldom less than five and sometimes reaching twenty, all of whom would get posts no matter how young or ignorant they might be. He proposed what seemed to him severe limits: rank one officials could nominate a maximum of five men, rank two four men, rank three three men, rank four and five, two men, and rank six and seven, one man.23 Yet two years later Fan Chung-yen 16-.I was still complaining about higher officials nominating relatives every year, as was Chang Fang-p'ing W7KA five years after him.24

Another complaint about theyin system was that there were no limits on the distance of the kinship that could provide the basis for a nomination. Ho Yen NU% in 1051 said that on the average over a thousand men entered office throughyin in a three-year period, and proposed reducing this by restricting rights to nominate more distant relatives. He proposed that officials could nominate as many sons and grandsons as they had slots, but no more than one other relative with a one-year mourning obligation (i.e. brother or uncle) at each suburban sacrifice, and only one more distant relative (such as nephew or cousin) at every other suburban sacrifice.25 Yet even with this system, after fifteen years in high posts an official could find places for two or three nephews, not to mention up to five brothers and uncles.

Despite repeated efforts to control the mushrooming of the yin system, in 1137 Chao Ssu-ch'eng &TUX complained that scholars with no connections (literally: solitary, cold scholars) had to wait several years for an assignment, getting only about one post per decade, whereas at the sacrifices about four thousand men would be

22 Ibid. 78.11b. 23 Ibid. 132.3b-5a. 24 Ibid. 142.4a-5b; 158.6b-7a. 25 Ibid. 169. I b-4a.

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nominated, amounting to twelve thousand in a decade, greatly reducing the opportunities for examination degree holders.26 In 1181 theyin privileges were said to have been reduced by one-third. Yet it would be hard to call the new provisions anything but generous; ten nominees for the highest officials, down by steps to three nominees for rank six officials.27

Theyin system does seem to have supplied a good share of the oc- cupants of bureaucratic posts. As Chaffee shows, in 1213, of officials in rank six through nine (the bulk of the bureaucracy), 39.3 percent had entered throughyin, 27.4 percent by passing the chin-shih examination, and another 26.4 percent by receiving a facilitated degree granted chu-jen who had failed the chin-shih examination in the capital several times.28

It has been common for scholars to point out the disadvantages of entering office throughyin. Starting posts were usually lower, and promotion was slower unless speeded up by sponsors. Moreover, the top posts in the bureaucracy were reserved for those with chin- shih degrees. Brian McKnight found that 92 percent of the Ad- ministrators of Hangchow from 998 to 1126 had examination degrees.29 Robert Hartwell found that of eighty-five finance commis- sioners in the period 960-1085, sixty-four had degrees, primarily chin-shih, and only six had entered throughyin.30 Yet it was not impossible for a man who entered throughyin to rise to the top, even to the position of chief councilor. According to Sudo Yoshiyuki's 19 ?5 study, 28 percent of the chief councilors and assistant councilors in the twelfth century (1100-1195) did not have chin-shih degrees.31 In the Shih E family studied by Richard Davis, many men who entered throughyin rose to rank five, four, three, or even two posts.

A different way to look atyin is to consider the odds of rising to a high court post. Although the bureaucracy had between 10,000 and

26 Sung sh/h 159.3733. 27 Ibid., 159.3734. 28 Chaffee, Thorny Gates, p. 25. 29 Brian McKnight, "Administrators of Hangchow under the Northern Sung: A Case

Study," HJAS 30 (1970): 205. 30 Robert M. Hartwell, "Financial Expertise, Examinations, and the Formulation of

Economic Policy in Northern Sung China," JAS 30 (1971): 290. 31 Sudo Yoshiyuki, Sddai kanryosei to daitochi shoyti (Shakai koseishi taikei 8, 1950), pp. 20-

25. (Cited in Chaffee, Thorny Gates, p. 29.)


20,000 office-holders, its ranks were highly pyramidal in shape, with the majority of posts in rank eight and nine or below, and only a few hundred in the top three ranks. Even those with chin-shih, therefore, had only slight chances of rising to any of the top posts. One could spend a couple of decades in office without rising higher than county magistrate, even with a chin-shih degree.32

There was also a significant advantage to entering through yin. The average age for receiving a chin-shih was thirty-six,33 while a nominee could get a post at twenty-five. Even if starting posts were lower, ten years would probably be long enough to compensate. Not only might one be promoted several times during that decade, but one was drawing salary and gaining all of the diffuse benefits of official status.

Sung officials testified to the value they placed on theyin system by the decisions they made for their sons and grandsons. Umehara found that the sons of chief councilors in the Northern Sung over- whelmingly entered through yin.34 Less than 10 percent entered through the exams. Aoyama Sadao =fWt* found, at a much lower level in the bureaucracy, that once a family had produced a chin-shih it could usually maintain its official status for two or three more generations throughyin.35 Umehara (p. 470) is probably correct in concluding thatyin was very important in maintaining a family's status as an official family until someone again passed the examinations. After all, the advantages of "official household" (I7Ei) did not depend on method of entry into office.36

Despite the very generous provisions of theyin system, the Sung government was not completely dominated by sons, grandsons, and

32 Such was the case of Yuan Ts'ai V., who received his chin-shih in 1163 and was still a magistrate in 1192. See Ebrey, Family and Property, pp. 18-19.

33 Chaffee, Thorny Gates, p. 171. 34 Umehara, Kanryoseido, p. 476. He found nearly two hundred sons of fifty-five chief coun-

cilors who were given biographies in the Sung shih. Excluding those described as ill or who died young, over 90 percent entered throughyin.

3 Aoyama Sadao, "The Newly-Risen Bureaucrats in Fukien at the Five Dynasties-Sung Period, With Special Reference to their Genealogies," Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 21 (1962): 1-48, esp. 37-48.

36 On fiscal privileges of kuan-hu, see Brian E. McKnight, "Fiscal Privileges and the Social Order in Sung China," in Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China, ed. John Winthrop Haeger (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975), pp. 79-99.

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nephews of officials. The early Sung rulers, especially T'ai-tsung, wished to recruit some of their officials from "poor" families and looked on the examination system as the means of accomplishing this. As Lee, Davis, and Chaffee all show, the examination system did provide an avenue through which men whose families had not yet produced officials could enter the bureaucracy and in time secure privileges for their families. This occurred not only in the first few decades of the Sung, when there were not yet many established official families, but throughout the dynasty. The men who were the first in their families to gain examination degrees were, of course, not necessarily from families new to the local elite or the educated class. As Hymes shows (pp. 41-42), it was common for a family producing its first chin-shih to have a history of prior at- tempts at the examinations, and marriage connections and social relations with families of officials. Moreover, only a fraction of chin- shih were the first degree-holders in their families-nearly half on Kracke's lists had fathers, grandfathers, or great-grandfathers who had served in office, and many others must have had office-holders among their brothers, uncles, great uncles, or other relatives.

The Sung examination system is famous for the provision made to ensure objectivity in grading, such as the recopying of tests so that handwriting could not be recognized.37 This measure certainly contrasts with the T'ang practice of candidates visiting the examiners in advance to present samples of their literary works. What has received less notice, at least until the publication of John Chaffee's Thorny Gates of Learning, is the way that sons of officials who wanted degrees could improve their odds. As the utility of examination degrees rose, officials found ways to help their family members gain them. They did this in part through means considered fully honorable by their contemporaries, such as getting them good tutors, motivating them to study, giving them insiders' knowledge of the government, and so on. But they also used methods that drew criticism as unfair. During the Northern Sung, a major way families helped their sons get degrees was to move them to Kaifeng, where 40 to 50 percent of the chin-shih were selected, either through its prefectural examination or the Directorate of

37 Kracke, Civil Service, pp. 58-68.


Education.38 The diverse benefits of Kaifeng residence were most ac- cessible to officials: central government officials had valid reasons to reside there; their sons and grandsons had privileged access to the Directorate, especially before 1042; and they would find it the easiest to get the guarantors that temporary residents needed to take the prefectural examinations there.

During the Southern Sung, sons and other close relatives of officials had different advantages: they could often take avoidance examinations. Avoidance examinations were originally intended for the relatives of examiners, but by the mid-twelfth century they had been expanded so much that a memorialist could claim that they were being used not merely by relatives of incumbent officials, but also by those awaiting assignment and by relatives of an official through his mother, sister, wife, or daughter.39 The major reason the relatives of officials made every effort to take these examinations is that a higher percentage of people were passed. The quota ratios were variously set at one in twenty, forty, or fifty in the Southern Sung, compared to the one in a hundred or worse in the prefectural examination. In addition, the relatives of many officials were allowed to take the examination to enter the University without first taking the prefectural qualifying examination. Once in the Univer- sity a man had a 20 to 25 percent chance of becoming a chu-jen, that is, eligible to take the departmental examination. Then, in the thirteenth century, the very highest officials had another advantage: they could nominate from one to forty kinsmen to take a relatively easy (one in five passing) special examination for the chin-shih. As Chaffee remarks (pp. 101-5), these various types of privileged en- tries into the examination system drew lines within the bureaucracy itself. Those in higher office could find ways for their sons to escape the full brunt of competition, whereas those in the lowest ranks could not. In prefectures that had previously produced many officials, it was possible for the bulk of those who eventually became chin-shih to have bypassed the highly competitive prefectural examinations .

38 Chaffee, Thorny Gates, p. 62. 39 Sung hui-yao chi-pen (Taipei: Shih-chieh shu-chui reprint ed.), hsilan-chiu 16:13a-b. 40 Chaffee, Thorny Gates, p. 110 finds that only about 20 percent of Soochow chzn-shzh had

been prefectural chu-jen.

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Complaints about the examination system were just as common as complaints about yin, and similarly led to revisions, sometimes drastic ones, such as the reforms initated by Fan Chung-yen and Han Ch'i 04 in 1043, and those of Wang An-shih TEtZ; in 1071. The most common complaints about the exams were that they did not evaluate character and gave too much weight to skills such as poetry writing over reasoning abilities or knowledge of history and the classics. Revisions included not merely changes in the sorts of questions on the exams, but in the early eleventh century led to the substitution of a school-based system, by which a chin-shih degree could be obtained after promotion through all the levels of the national school system, a subject that Thomas Lee analyses in detail

(pp. 231-60). Lee views the expansion of the state school system as a major

boost to the fortunes of men from unimportant families who could have their education subsidized. Certainly many of those who ad- vocated state schools consciously had this goal in mind, and enroll- ment in state schools did expand very rapidly in the early twelfth century. If the school-based recruitment system had survived more than a couple of decades, it might well have brought thousands of new families into the office-holding stratum (and perhaps made it more difficult for them to stay there). Still, the school-based system did not entirely eliminate the advantages of the well connected. Even during its short tenure, there were complaints that promotion based in part on evaluation of character provided opportunities for favoritism and biased judgment.

Critics of the recruitment system were probably not consciously self-serving in objecting to selection procedures. Recruitment to office was supposed to serve imperial purposes, so changes in the rules benefiting those at the top had to be cloaked in a rhetoric of vir- tue and ability that kept both advocates and critics less than fully aware of the social consequences of the changes. Yet I suspect that the nearly continuous efforts to revise the school and examination system during the Sung came from an uneasy feeling that something was amiss. As competition increased, every official must have known young men he considered intelligent, well educated, and of high character who nonetheless repeatedly failed the exams. Be- cause men who seemed to them to be eminently qualified to hold


office failed, they concluded that there was something wrong in the examination process. And the kinds of people they thought ought to be faring better in the system were probably ones from families like their own.

Easier access to entry-level office was not the sole advantage of the families of officials. The placement system through which offices were assigned was also crucial, since privileges both in yin and avoidance examinations generally depended on rising to rank six.41 The placement system has been studied by both Kracke and Umehara, Kracke limiting his research to the first century of Sung rule. The T'ang practice of interviewing candidates and rating them on their appearance, deportment, speech, writing, and reasoning was not continued, but in their stead an elaborate system of sponsorship was developed. Kracke's study focused on all the efforts made to ensure that sponsors only recommended men who deserved promotions. He showed how they were threatened with punishments if their proteges proved corrupt or incompetent, told to recommend only those who had served under them, ordered not to sponsor their own relatives, and so on. Kracke is undoubtedly right that these regulations were written in an effort to make the system work as intended: to discover capable lower officials and place them where they were needed. Recommendations from senior officials who knew them seemed the eminently sensible procedure. Yet the system was not without problems. Officials in the capital were often required to recommend local officials without necessarily having had any experience supervising them, therefore having to rely on hearsay or social acquaintanceship. Sycophancy on the part of those needing sponsors to help them rise became a major prob- lem.42 It was recognized as early as 1010 that "solitary, poor scholars" would be the ones most easily overlooked by the sponsorship system, and complaints only increased over the course of time.43 After all, the very severity of the punishments for recommendations gone awry would lead a cautious official to nominate only those he knew well. He would probably feel more confident that he

41 The privilege of nominating a son on retirement extended down to rank seven, at least during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Umehara, Kanryo seido, pp. 433-35.

42 Kracke, Civil Service, p. 127 n. 37. 43 Umehara, Kanryo seido, pp. 252-66.

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knew the character of a young man he had watched grow up, whose father and father-in-law he knew. Prudence would lead him to hesitate to stake his own career on someone from another part of the country who seemed clever in his official capacity but about whom little else was known with certainty.

Sponsorship, as an institution, favored those known to higher officials, as sponsors came largely from the upper one-tenth to one- fifth of the whole civil service.44 Thus the group that benefited most from sponsorship would overlap extensively with those who benefited most from yin and avoidance examinations. This also seems to be the case with another institution designed to limit nepotism. A recent article by Chang Pang-wei 4K#t[5 argues that the rules listing the relatives under whom a man could not serve could be turned into an advantage by those with powerful relatives. When men received appointments they preferred not to accept, they happi- ly cited the avoidance rules and generally were given more desirable posts, higher in rank or closer to the capital.45

Not every change in the personnel system favored the families of officials; the state did, indeed, regularly work at curbing privileges. Yet reductions in yin, for instance, were repeatedly recorded, only to be followed by accounts of how widely the privilege had been extended. Similarly, the Southern Sung prevented the qualifying exam in the capital from becoming an easier route to a degree, as it had been in the Northern Sung, but new loopholes through avoidance examinations were found or created.46

Given the advantages enjoyed by relatives of officials, Hartwell's finding that thirty-five families supplied 23 percent of the policy-

44 Kracke, Civil Service, p. 144. 45 "Sung-tai pi-ch'in pi-chi chih-tu shu-p'ing" ; Ssu-ch'uan shih-ta

hsuieh-pao 1986.1:16-23. 46 The efforts of the state to keep officials from "changing the rules" seem to have been

more successful in the Ming and Ch'ing periods. Theyin system was greatly curtailed and high officials were not able to manipulate it to secure their own families' futures. Nor were they able to set up avoidance examinations that would function as means of facilitated entry into office for their relatives. Even the placement system seems to have relied less on patronage, and therefore to have been less susceptible to manipulation by those with the most power within the bureaucracy. The ideal of impartiality or fairness may well have been better achieved in later dynasties, not because high officials were any less concerned with the fate of their families, but because the state was better able to function as an entity separate from the officials who filled its upper slots.


making offices is not so surprising. Leafing through any collection of epitaphs will show how common it was for families to have had officials in all or most of the generations of ancestors and descendants listed (from great-great-grandfather to son or grandson). A rather extreme case is given in an epitaph for Li Yen-chen f (d. 1214). All his ancestors back to the famous chief councilor Li Fang 4t (925-996) are given, and members of all of the intervening six generations held official posts. Only one is said to have earned a chin-shih degree.47 Hartwell cites the case of the Chang XK family of Yii-chang X During the Northern Sung all thirty-six identifiable members of the family held office, as did twenty-one of the sixty such members in the Southern Sung.48 Hymes' most impressive case is the Tungs X of Lo-an *? county. Four brothers passed the prefectural examination in 1014, one also getting the chin-shih the next year. In 1034 two more of the brothers, two of their sons, and two nephews attained the chin-shih. By 1271 members of this descent group had produced twenty-four chin-shih and about a hundred prefectural chu-Jen. ̀

As the sons, nephews, and grandsons of high and mid-rank officials took their places in the lower ranks of the bureaucracy, there was less room for the sons of lower-rank officials, not to mention men from other families. This created pressure to expand the bureaucracy, leading to a proliferation of posts without duties. It probably also fostered greater social and political recognition for chuijen. As Chaffee shows, the state gradually granted these men quasi-official status. During the Sung their total number came to ap- proximate the total number of officials.50 The state fostered the no- tion of chui-jen as a special status by granting them legal rights (the right to convert some punishments into fines) and minor fiscal privileges.5" And by granting about as many facilitated chin-shih as regular ones, the state in a sense allowed chui-jen from less advanced

47 Wei Liao-weng AT , Ho-shan chi tLL (Ssu-k'u ch'iuan-shu edition) 71.14a-b. 48 Hartwell, "Transformations," pp. 423-24. 49 Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen, p. 64. 50 Chaffee, Thorny Gates, pp. 33-34. 51 Chaffee, Thorny Gates, p. 31; Thomas Hung-chi Lee, "The Social Significance of the

Quota System in Sung Civil Service Examinations," Chung-kuo wen-huayen-chiu-so hsuieh-pao 13 (1982): 307.

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areas (who could rarely succeed in national competition) to become officials. The prestige of the chii-jen was also enhanced by such state- initiated acts as the construction of examination halls in every prefecture and the elaboration of ceremonies to mark the steps in the examination process.52

The books by Robert Hymes and Richard Davis deal only in- cidently with the institutions whose recurrent changes are discussed above. Their topics are the activities and social fortunes of delimited sets of people, in Davis's case the descendants of Shih Ts'ai Et1?, in Hymes' case, the local elite of Fu-chou 1-1i, Chiang-hsi. Yet the experiences they describe can be interpreted in the framework out- lined above.

During the Southern Sung dynasty, the Shih family of Ming- chou 9)+I (modern Ningpo) produced four high court officials, including three chief councilors. The first was Shih Ts'ai (d.1162), who served as assistant councilor under Ch'in K'uei * for less than a year. The second was his nephew Shih Hao A (1106-1194), who had been the tutor of Hsiao-tsung before he became emperor, and after Hsiao-tsung ascended the throne was twice appointed chief councilor, each time for less than a year. Shih Hao was able to place his four brothers, his four sons, and his two sons-in-law in office through yin. One of these sons, Shih Mi-yuan 03 (1164- 1233), also earned a chin-shih degree, and eventually rose to be chief councilor, holding the post for a quarter century from 1208 to 1233. Because of the favor he received, two of his sons were granted chin- shih degrees, two other young relatives were granted higher starting posts than usual, and fifteen grandsons and grandnephews were able to enter through yin. In addition, ten or more members of his family received chin-shih degrees (whether through the prefectural tests or more privileged means is unclear). The fourth important official in the family was Shih Sung-chih XL (1189-1156), a son of Shih Mi-yuan's second cousin. Shih Sung-chih served as chief councilor for almost six years. As a consequence of these various privileges, over eighty men in the Shih descent group held office in the thirteenth century. Davis also shows that use of yin was not much of a barrier for those with the right connections: despite usingyin,

52 Chaffee, Thorny Gates, p. 167.


Shih Shou-chih rose to rank 5a, Shih Mi-cheng to 4b, Shih Hsi- ch'ing and Shih An-chih to 5a, Shih Ting-chih to 5b, Shih Chai- chih to 2a, Shih Yii-chih to 3a, Shih Mi-chien to 2b, Shih Ch'ang- sun to 5b, Shih Pin-chih to 3b, and so on. In the generations of Shih Mi-yuan and his sons, thirteen men rose to fill the important ad- ministrative post of prefect; only four of them had chin-shih degrees.53

Davis argues that the Shih family 'was of very humble origins,and he attributes the eminence of the family almost entirely to the individual merit of those who passed the examinations and gained promotions in office (pp. 225-31). Nine of the forty-six men in generation six, Shih Mi-yuan's brothers and cousins, received the chin-shih degree, and a total of thirty-four gained official posts. Of the thirty- four office-holders, the most politically successful were the chin-shih, and Davis concludes: "The only advantage held by members of the Shih community that is clearly tied to their political success was an inexplicable adeptness at the official examinations" (p.126). Davis does not explicitly argue that other men who failed to progress in the system were less able or worthy, but he seems to assume that such was the case.

A better explanation seems to be the advantages that accrued to the children, grandchildren, and other relatives of officials. Not only did many of these Shih enter throughyin, but through sponsorship or other means they were able to rise to mid-level posts such as prefect. An extraordinary number received chin-shih degrees (con- sidering that nationally well under 1 percent of those starting the examination process could ever expect to become chin-shih), which seems unlikely to be simply the effect of their merit. As discussed above, during the Southern Sung, relatives of officials had a much easier time becoming chin-shih than anyone else. They had relatively easy entry into the Imperial University, which made it possible to skip the prefectural examinations and go directly to the departmental exams. Many of them could take "avoidance" examinations, where the percentage passing was double or triple that of the prefectural level, or the special departmental level examination, with even more favorable odds. Chaffee found that once a region had

53 Davis, Court and Family, pp. 225-31.

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produced large numbers of officials, the proportions of "new men" declined correspondingly. This was especially true along the southeastern coast. For instance, in thirteenth century Ming-chou (the Shihs' home), more than three out of four of the chin-shih had not gone through the standard route of the prefectural examinations but had availed themselves of one or the other of the easier routes.54

The connection between Hymes' case study and the tendency to "change the rules" is not so simple. Hymes' study is not focused on office-holding, but on much more diffuse local standing. At the local level the means of elite domination show remarkable continuities over the course of Chinese history. Ownership of land was undoubtedly the main avenue to wealth and influence. Not only could land be bequeathed, but it could also be expanded through reinvest- ment of profits. For the rich to get richer, they did not need to "change the rules"; what they needed was an understanding of the practicalities of taxation, methods for selecting and managing tenants and agents, and the consequences of family decisions such as adoption, marriage, and the timing of division of family property.

Yet local elites could also face demographic pressures, depending on the stage of the local economy. That is, when the local economy was expanding through exploitation of previously uncultivated land or through development of trade or industry, the sons of well-to-do families could maintain their standard of living, and others could join their ranks. But when the economy was stagnant or contract- ing, there would not be enough of a surplus to support an expanding elite. Some men would move elsewhere (often in the Sung to where their affinal relatives lived), and those who remained would turn to a variety of strategies to improve their relative positions. Complicating these local economic cycles would be changing opportunities due to alterations in government recruitment policies. Although elite status at the local level did not require continuous officeholding, an occasional official could be enormously useful, motivating local elites to invest considerable effort in the pursuit of office for at least a few of their members.

As local or national opportunities changed, local elite families

54 Chaffee, Thorny Gates, pp.154-55


would revise their strategies. From my reading of Hymes' evidence, this was the case for the elite of Fu-chou. The area seems to have been relatively sparsely settled until the late T'ang, for from then through the early Sung it accommodated many migrants who were able to flourish. Fu-chou appears thus to have been experiencing economic growth in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Hymes traces the history of seventy-three elite families of the prefecture (roughly those with the education to take the examinations and those who in- teracted with them socially). In the beginning of the Sung there was no entrenched elite. Very few of the families that later became prominent made convincing claims to an educated ancestor before the Sung. Through the first century of the Sung, new families were regularly added to the local elite, including both those that had migrated into the area and long-term residents who had only recently acquired the wealth to invest in education (pp. 65-75). In the Northern Sung, these two types of families intermarried, and those that produced officials also married with official families in other parts of China, linking the local elite to local elites elsewhere and a national elite of officeholding families. Some new families also appeared in the early decades of the Southern Sung, apparently gaining prominence because of the leadership roles they played in local defense during the period of warfare. Otherwise, even before the end of the Northern Sung, the local elite seems to have already begun to feel pressure from its own expansion (p. 73). Its members turned inward, finding ways to protect themselves from outside competition. They spent less time in the capital,55 and devoted more of their time to their community, founding charitable estates, schools, and temples, organizing local defense and famine relief, picking up the slack when the state proved inadequate to the task (pp. 82-209). It is probably significant in this regard that during the Southern Sung Fu-chou did not produce any chief councilors or other highly influential officials. With less access to the benefits of high office, the local elite had to rely more on other means of preserving their standing.

One strategy local elite families used in the Southern Sung was to restrict the range of their marriages (or, perhaps, to impose a new

55 This was undoubtedly also a function of the change in the political role of the capital.

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"rule" on local elite membership). In Southern Sung Fu-chou it became nearly impossible for a migrant family, even one with high status, to become fully accepted within the local elite and to inter- marry with it. The local elite were thus asserting (through actions if not through words) that in the local context a family of long- standing local prominence ranked higher than a newcomer with titles from the national government. Even families with officials married only with other established local elite families, indeed usually ones from their own county (pp. 82-123). They may well also have kept out local "new" families (i.e. families that had only recently invested in education) by refusing to marry them, for re- markably few new families appear in the late twelfth or thirteenth centuries, a time when the numbers of candidates for examinations was growing rapidly in most parts of the country. 56

Hartwell sees the shift in the marriage strategies of officials' families starting at the end of the Northern Sung as an indication of a major transformation in Chinese history: the end of the domination of the bureaucracy by a relatively small number of families whose men specialized in government service. From then on the broader "gentry" of families that occasionally supplied officials was the highest distinguishable elite stratum. Hymes, who notes a similar shift in marriage practices in Fu-chou, leaves open the question of whether a permanent change was taking place (p. 217). I suspect that part of what they both observe is a cyclical pattern, caused by the tendency to close in when resources become scarcer.57

Certainly literati had turned away from national concerns to local ones in earlier periods. For the Han and also the T'ang, surviving sources differ for the early and the later periods. In each case,

56 It is, of course, also possible that the handful of migrant families of official standing, refugees from the Jurchen, saw themselves as perpetuating the practices of the Northern Sung leading families. They may have sought marriages to families they had been tied to in the past, and made no effort to develop close ties to the local elite in what they considered at first only a temporary home. If that is the case, one would expect a gradual shift toward local marriages by the thirteenth century. In fact, Hymes' Southern Sung marriages outside Fu-chou are predominately twelfth century (thirteen of eighteen datable ones) and his marriages inside Fu-chou predominately thirteenth century (twenty-three of twenty-eight datable ones) (see map legends, pp. 93, 98-99).

57 Cf. G. William Skinner's discussion in "Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case," Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971): 270-81.


sources are much more focused on the central government for the earlier period, when it appears that all men of ambition, whether scholars, writers, or active politicians, thought in national terms. The governments seem to have been very active in integrating social, political, economic, and even intellectual life. By contrast, in the later period the role of the center appears much diminished, and partly as a consequence new sources survive that portray the local and private activities of scholars and gentlemen.58 Perhaps part of the change from Northern to Southern Sung is similarly historiog- raphical: Leading figures wrote more about their local elite relatives and neighbors in the Southern Sung than they had in the Northern Sung, when they were preoccupied with other concerns. We do not know enough about the marriages of local elite families before the Sung (especially the Southern Sung) to say whether these went through open and closed cycles or not. If there is a cyclical compo- nent to the Northern Sung-Southern Sung differences in marriage patterns, the crucial question then becomes why a national elite of officeholding families did not reemerge in the first century of the Ming.59

Let me end this essay with a question. If those at the top (nationally or locally) were able to make almost any institution work to their own advantage, why is it that the Sung elite has seemed to almost all observers very different from that of the T'ang? In the T'ang a restricted circle of "aristocratic families" very visibly held onto a dominant place in social life and the higher ranks of the bureaucracy. Moreover, the pedigrees and relative eminence of these families were much discussed. In the Sung neither the bureaucracy

58 For the Han these sources include stone inscriptions, which survive in much greater quantity for the second century A.D. than any earlier period. For the T'ang they include the collected works of scholars with many more "private" types of writings such as epitaphs, elegies, letters, inscriptions, and so on.

59 I might add that at the local level, cyclical shifts in strategies seem to have continued through the Ming and Ch'ing period. As an area developed, established families seem to have tried to find new ways to distinguish themselves from newcomers and to make it more difficult for newcomers to join their ranks. Strategies could include social exclusiveness, restrictive marriage practices, organizing descent groups, setting up academies, and so on. Descent groups may have held special attractions because they did three things at once: they provided positions of local leadership, they provided a socially acceptable way of glorifying birth, and when they had common properties or schools, they provided some slight insurance against later generations losing the means to maintain their status as men of culture.

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nor social life seems in any comparable way to have been the special preserve of a clearly identifiable group. Yet I am arguing that the families of officials had great advantages in getting their children into office. Why was their special status not more visible?

One answer concerns timing and numbers. The T'ang was brought to power by a small circle of families that considered themselves aristocrats, and many important posts were taken by men whose families had been eminent for centuries. The Sung was brought to power by militarists, and few families eminent in the T'ang survived the transition into the Sung. In the early Sung a socially diverse group was able to gain office and attempt to pave the way for their descendants. This group was too large to be clearly recognizable.

The second answer lies in the difference between pedigree and office as resources. Even with all the advantages office-holders had, perpetuating unbroken lines of mid-rank officials was not easy. Some men had no sons, and some sons died in their twenties or thirties without gaining office or rising very high. Some sons were undoubtedly insufficiently talented to gain posts, even with every possible advantage. When economic and cultural changes such as printing facilitated great growth in the size of the educated class, it naturally became even more difficult to ensure that "advantages" were enough. A good local base, as Hymes argues, was needed for survival over centuries (albeit as local elite, not necessarily as officials). Thus even when one recognizes the mechanisms by which those in power could help members of their own group, most of the common generalizations about the differences between the T'ang and Sung elites still hold true.

Four of the books discussed here are revised versions of dissertations completed at American universities (Chicago, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale). It is surely a sign of progress in the study of premodern China in the U. S. that so many scholars are completing dissertations on complementary topics and seeing them through to publication. Reading these books together shows how much can be gained by bringing different minds (and different mind-sets) to a common set of problems.

Taken together, these books will help set the agenda for the next round of studies of Sung society, not only by advancing the debate


on the Sung elite, but also by providing models of thorough research, creative use of sources, and meticulous specification of time and place. The institutional studies all go well beyond tradi- tional institutional histories such as Sung hui-yao and Wen-hsien t 'ung- k'ao. Umehara shows how much can be learned by a careful comb- ing of the Hsu tzu-chih t'ung-chien ch'ang-pien for memorials and edicts. Chaffee bases important parts of his arguments on statistics derived from local histories, and continually keeps in mind regional and temporal differences, a trait he shares with Hymes. Hymes, in addition, shows how writers' collected works can be mined for evidence of the social activities of relatively minor elite families, a social stratum that has hitherto been assumed to be beyond the reach of historians. Even social historians who move to questions less directly tied to elites-questions such as kinship organization, education, law enforcement, popular religion, popular culture, and so on-will want to emulate the thoroughness, specificity, and attention to detail these authors display.

Documents

Ebrey Long Review Dynamics of Elite Domination Bob Hymes