Eight-Legged Essay Bāgǔwén 八股文
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◀ Eight Revolutionary Model Dramas Comprehensive index starts in volume 5, page 2667. Eight-Legged Essay Bāgǔwén 八股文 Starting during the Ming dynasty (1368– 1644) (literature that is an end in itself and not merely informa- and continuing for hundreds of years, the tive) to the classical essay (jingyi) championed by Wang “Eight-Legged Essay” was the required eight- Anshi (1021– 1086) in the eleventh century. The classical essay, however, was not firmly in place empire-wide in part response to civil service examination civil examinations as the key literary form until the early questions based on Confucian thought. The ex- Ming dynasty (1368–1644). When the Eight-Legged Essay tremely formulaic essay, which had both critics was still the rage, before 1850, many efforts were made to and defenders over the years, evolved as a way trace a history of ideas about its literary pedigree. In fact, for official examiners to impartially evaluate when it was still fashionable to do so, champions of both the work of tens of thousands of candidates. parallel-prose and ancient-style prose essays each claimed the Eight-Legged Essay as a kindred genre to legitimate their competing literary traditions in the late nineteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The eight “legs” ku,( ost accounts of the development of the late bones) of the classical essay referred to the parallel and imperial examination essay begin with mod- balanced lines that made up its structure. ernist apologies. The twentieth-century cul- The examination essay style that was specifically tural assault on the infamous Eight-Legged Essay (bagu called the “Eight-Legged” style appeared for the first time w e n)—as the classical essay on the Confucian texts, the in the early years of the Chenghua reign, 1465–1487. Con- Four Books and Five Classics, was called since the fif- sequently, the tendency to construct the historical geneal- teenth century—has included accusations that the essay ogy of the Eight-Legged Essay from the earlier dynasties became a byword for petrifaction in Chinese literature tends to elide its sudden appearance in the 1480s as the or that the essay itself was one of the reasons for China’s accepted form for an examination essay. Later claims that cultural stagnation and economic backwardness in the the form derived from earlier styles served to legitimate nineteenth century. the Eight-Legged Essay as the harvest of past literature and classical learning. As in earlier such cases the literati themselves, not the imperial court, initially produced this Origins of the Eight- new trend in classical writing. Legged Essay “Grid” Although detractors of the Eight-Legged Essay genre have received a more sympathetic hearing in the twenti- Whatever the literary verdict, the late imperial exami- eth century, its late imperial advocates were numerous nation essay had its most immediate roots conceptually and came from a broad spectrum of literati. Li Zhi (1527– in the epochal transition from medieval belles-lettres 1602), a late Ming iconoclast on so many issues, saw in 695 © 2009 by Berkshire Publishing Group LLC M 696 Berkshire Encyclopedia of China 宝 库 山 中 华 全 书 the evolution of classical essay genres a cultural dynamic second by ranking Wang’s final policy answer third over- that was commentary to the ongoing literati search for all after other readers had initially ranked it first. Shang values in antiquity. The Eight-Legged Essay represented a Lu could identify Wang Ao’s paper because the palace “contemporary-style essay” for Li and was a genuine genre examination, unlike the provincial and metropolitan ex- that had proven its worth by producing famous officials. aminations, was not graded anonymously. Their moral achievements, he thought, were because of Despite this downclassing, Wang Ao’s classical essays the use of an orthodox genre for the classical essay in civil won the day outside the examination compound and be- examinations. yond the reach of the imperial court. Although official The Hanlin academician Liang Zhangju’s (1775–1849) rankings could be tampered with by jealous men such as early nineteenth-century work entitled Zhiyi conghua Shang Lu, the latter’s writings never measured up to Wang (Collected Comments on the Crafting of Eight-Legged Ao’s in the evolution of the genre that would become the Civil Examination Essays), while mentioning the accru- Eight-Legged Essay grid. Wang Ao served frequently as ing flaws in the selection process, praised the artistic and a metropolitan examiner in the late fifteenth century, cultural levels that the examination essays fostered in during which his classical essays occasionally served as Chinese life. Liang noted that no one to date had come up models for thousands of candidates in the compounds with an acceptable alternative. Qing dynasty (1644–1912) he supervised. Accordingly, the first glimpse we have of literati who prepared prefaces for the work, which was the early emergence of the Eight- Legged form of the clas- designed to place the examination essay in full cultural sical essay, before its explicit declaration as the official relief, wrote in praise of their dynasty’s contributions to examination style in 1487, can be traced to Wang Ao’s the further evolution of the Ming genre. 1475 essay on a passage from the Mencius: “The Duke of In the late seventeenth century Gu Yanwu (1613–1682) Zhou subjugated the northern and southern barbarians, dated the Eight-Legged Essay with more historical preci- drove away the wild animals, and brought security to the sion to the mid-fifteenth century, when essays began to people” (Elman 2000, 387). appear in a clear sequence of eight parts: 1 breaking open the topic (poti), Cognitive Issues in 2 receiving the topic (chengti), Eight- Legged Essays 3 beginning discussion (qijiang), 4 initial leg (qigu), Many of Wang Ao’s Eight-Legged Essays were later cited in Ming and Qing examination essay collections as mod- 5 transition leg (xugu), els for the form. One was based on a passage in the Ana- 6 middle leg (zhonggu), lects: “When the people have enough, how can the ruler 7 later leg (hougu), alone have too little?” (Elman 2000, 389). It became per- 8 conclusion (dajie) haps Wang’s most famous essay. It dealt with the ruler’s responsibilities to provide a livelihood for his people and One of the most renowned early composers of was copied, printed, and studied by generations of civil Eight-Legged Essays was the scholar-official Wang Ao examination candidates. (1450– 1524), who passed the 1474 Nanjing provincial ex- What is immediately striking about Wang Ao’s essays amination ranked number one out of 2,300 candidates is their exaggerated structural commitment to formal and 135 graduates. Wang then passed the 1477 metropol- parallelism and thinking by analogy. Strict adherence to itan examination in Beijing, also ranking number one. balanced clauses (duiju) and balanced pairs of characters In the palace examination, however, Wang Ao had the (shudui) was required, but this feature becomes particu- misfortune of having as his chief reader Shang Lu (1414– larly rule-like in Wang’s framing of his arguments. As the 1486), who was at that point the only Ming literatus who classical essay’s length requirement increased from the had achieved “three firsts” sanyuan( ) on the Ming civil five hundred characters common in late Ming times to examinations. He made sure that Wang would not be the more than seven hundred during the eighteenth century, © 2009 by Berkshire Publishing Group LLC Eight-Legged Essay n Bāgǔwén n 八股文 697 the basic structure of the essay remained unchanged. a literati discourse built around the Chinese philosopher However, a dispute in the 1543 Shandong provincial ex- Confucius’s (551– 479 bce)vision of a polity pegged to amination over the veiled criticism of the throne in the the interests of the people. “conclusion” of an Eight-Legged Essay led to a decline in Based on the specific Eight-Legged grid, examin- the practice of ending the essay with rhetorical flourish. ers and tutors literally followed the number of legs and The form of chain arguments used in such essays counted the number of characters in an essay based was built around pairs of complementary propositions, on the requirements of balanced clauses, phrases, and which derived their cogency from rich literary traditions characters. In marked-up examination essays that have that over the centuries had drawn on both the parallel- survived, scholars always find numerous small circles prose and ancient-style prose traditions of early and marking exactly the balanced and antithetical clauses in medieval China. Balanced prose presupposed that an each of the legs of the essay. Examiners used a set pattern argument should advance via pairs of complementary of markings to distinguish the main points. This classical clauses and sections that, when formalized and disci- grid provided examiners with a simple, impartial stan- plined by analogies, avoided an unfocused narrative. dard for ranking essays, which has rightly been labeled “a Accordingly, the Eight-Legged Essay represented an ef- kind of stylistically formalized classicism” (Elman 2000, fort to confirm the vision of the sages in the Four Books 395). The grid also included rules for presentation of the and Five Classics from a “double angle of vision,” which essay form on paper that necessitated proper spacing of strictly correlated with the parallel syntax of the legs of characters from top to bottom and left to right. Refer- the examination essay. ences to the reigning emperor, for instance, had to be In the first leg of Wang Ao’s essay on the prince’s re- highlighted by raising that column of characters higher sponsibilities, mentioned earlier, the ruler’s actions were and avoiding taboo names, while the body of the essay directly related to a series of positive economic conse- began at a lower level in each column.