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THE Appointment of OFFICIALS by DRAWING LOTS, 1594-17001

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THE Appointment of OFFICIALS by DRAWING LOTS, 1594-17001 Pierre-Etienne Will CREATION, CONFLICT, AND ROUTINIZATION: THE ApPOINTMENT OF OFFICIALS BY DRAWING LOTS, 1594-17001 The origins and history of the selection system for official appointments by drawing lots may seem at fIrst sight a somewhat marginal topic. On closer scrutiny, however, it turns out to be more than a mere footnote to institutional history. One reason for taking the issue seriously is that taking care of 'ap­ pointment and selection' (quanxuan ~i~)-in other words, fInding the right men to administer the empire, or de ren 1~ A -was always considered the most crucial task of the most important ministry in the central government­ the Ministry of Personnel. As the eminent Southern Song scholar and politi­ cian, Ye Shi ~~ (1150-1223), put it: "Making orderly distinctions [among men], making no mistakes in demotions and promotions, this is the important task of the Court" (~~.53U~J¥, !lli~~/f'~~, ~~ffz~ JjJt!2); and further on: "The Ministry of Personnel is where the throat and tongue of the Court are!" (:se:fffi~, ~~ff~%Z.B&t!2). These words are quoted by Gu Yanwu in a section of his Knowledge acquired day by day entitled "What is wrong with 1 A first version of this text was presented at the Workshop on Seventeenth-Century China, Fairbank Center, Harvard University, 27-28 May 2000. A revised version has been published in Chinese as Wei 2001. The present version includes a few additional revisions. I wish to thank Dr. Pan Xinghui 7i£tl for his careful reading of the original manuscript and his help in cor­ recting some mistakes. Dr. Pan also drew my attention to some material that had escaped me, and later wrote a commentary on the article (see Pan 2002). I owe my thanks to Angela Arm­ strong, of College de France, for editing the present version for English. Downloaded from Brill.com10/06/2021 02:22:00PM via free access Pierre-Etienne Will appointment and selection" (Quanxuan zhi hai ~i~Z~), which discusses issues which I will have occasion to return to again in this essay.2 So, nothing concerning the selection and appointment procedure could possibly have been considered trivial by anyone in Late Imperial times. The drawing of lots was certainly not a trivial matter. As we shall see, the proce­ dure was initiated in 1594 amidst much political furore and was subject to harsh criticism almost from the outset. Yet it survived the violent political confrontations of the last half-century of the Ming, and was maintained by the Qing despite further criticism throughout the founding decades of the dynasty. Indeed, its consolidation, routinization and ultimately universal acceptance provide an interesting case study of the institutional and political changes that took place during the seventeenth-century transition. Creation and conflict The decision to make officials draw lots (cheqian ~tl) publicly and in person in order to determine the post where they would be appointed was made by Sun Peiyang i%=1'm, recently appointed President of the Ministry of Personnel; all the sources save one give the date as 1594? The standard ac­ count as found in Sun's Mingshi biography reads as follows: Since Peiyang was rigid and inflexible, ordinary offi­ cials never dared interfere in order to advance their pri- 2 Gu Yanwu, Rizhi [ujishi, 8:32a. The phrase "throat and tongue" is found in ancient texts: it means that the prime minister forwards to the country the words of the sovereign and informs the sovereign of what is being said in the country. ~ For example, the Wanli dichao (see below), which one would tend to trust first of all for chronological accuracy, dates the decision to the eighth month, 1594, almost immediately after Sun's appointment as president of the Ministry at the end of the seventh month. The sole dis­ senting source is Tan Qian's Guoque, 77/4745, which dates it to the fifth month of 1595; the Guoque's chronology of the entire episode is in fact somewhat muddled. Another discrepancy occurs in the "Treatise on examinations" of the Mingshi, 71 :1716: according to this passage, the drawing-lot procedure was proposed not by Sun Peiyang in 1594, but by one Ni Sihui ~WTlt then head of the Department of Appointments (Wenxuan qing[isi 3t~m~l'i]), in 1601, and then approved by the President of the Ministry of Officials, Li Dai *It, so that Sun Peiyang only "followed his footsteps" (f*,~:m~ffiilTZ.). This is plainly an error from the Mingshi compilers, as already pointed out in the Xu wenxian tongkao, 36:3169; see also Zhang Ronglin 1978,pp.II-12. 74 Downloaded from Brill.com10/06/2021 02:22:00PM via free access Creation, Conflict, and Routinization: The Appointment ofOfficials by Drawing Lots, /594-/700 vate interests; he was only annoyed by the demands of powerful courtiers. Therefore he instituted the method of drawing lots. Both for "general selections" and "pri­ ority selections",4 candidates were allowed to draw a lot in person; it was forbidden to ask for a replacement. At once the selection of officials enjoyed a considerable reputation for impartiality; but from this point the man­ agement of appointments changed considerably. S ~mmVJ/l'm,B~~ilH),~~~, ~,~~.~~o n~ ••m~,*.A.,~~~A~., ~.~m ?lfo -~.A~jlHJ!}~fb, rMiifj[ ~:;!i!:-*~~o The first question one may ask is how much of an innovation in actual fact was resorting to the drawing of lots. The idea itself should not have stunned Sun's contemporaries. Apart from the fact that drawing lots for a va­ riety of purposes has always been part of popular culture in China, the litera­ ture mentions several instances of administrative posts being allotted this way. As early as the Yuan dynasty we hear that local officials in Zhejiang province used to be appointed by drawing lots (nianjiu :ttillil, a term more or less syn­ onymous with cheqian) in order to avoid rigging by the clerks: the source de­ scribes how soldiers would use bamboo chopsticks to pick up the "wads of paper" (zhiqiu *JX,~) on which the names of the candidates had been inscribed, then show them to the clerk as he was reading out the list of vacant posts. 6 4 Respectively daxuan *~ andjixuan ~~. The former took place in even months and con­ cerned most first candidacies as well as promotions; the latter, on odd months, were more espe­ cially for candidates who re-entered the career after a leave, or other categories entitled to a pri­ ority appointment. On these notions under the Ming, see for instance Mingshi, 71: 1716, or Ming Huiyao, p. 894; and Pan Xinghui 2001, pp. 77-85. The system continued under the Qing: see e.g. the relatively clear description in Kond6 Hideki 1958, pp. 36-39. (During the course of the Qing dynasty there were some changes in the categories, or ban f}I, that were designated for either the daxuan or thejixuan.) 5 See Mingshi, 224:5901; also see Sun's biography by Angela Hsi and Chaoying Fang in Goodrich and Fang 1976, pp. 1219-20. For the text of Sun Peiyang's original memorial propos­ ing the reform, see Zhang Ronglin, '''Cheqian fa' kao", p. 11, quoting from Zengxiu tiaoli bei­ kao ~~$f~f9~V;~,juan 2. 6 See Kong Qi's Zhizheng zhiji, pp. 123-124. The anecdote here relates the story ofa director of studies (jiaoyu ~~tu) who gets the same posting after a period of mourning. suggesting that 75 Downloaded from Brill.com10/06/2021 02:22:00PM via free access Pierre-Etienne Will Likewise, it is said that in 1371 Zhu Yuanzhang had thejinshi selected at the first palace examination of the new Ming dynasty subjected to a similar proc­ ess of drawing lots (here called wan n) on which the names of the unfilled offices had been inscribed. 7 On two occasions, in 1556 and 1628 respectively, the Ming emperor is reported to have resorted to lot-drawing to select the grand secretaries with the explicit intent of relying on Heaven's will to make otherwise difficult choices. More importantly, however-because we are dealing here with a regular bureaucratic process recorded in bureaucratic sources, not ad hoc measures mentioned in secondary non-official works-the drawing of lots appears to have been the method adopted at some point during the Ming to allocate Imperial University students the various metropolitan yamen where they would do their internships (boli mm) until the better graded became eli­ gible for substantial appointments; likewise, the same method of "drawing lots" (nianjiu) publicly appears to have been used to select and promote clerks in the various ministries. In other words, relying on chance to allocate positions among equally qualified candidates was to some extent part of the bureaucratic culture of the Ming. Without doubt, however, Sun Peiyang's decision to systematically sub­ ject the appointment of ranking magistrates to lot-drawing, first at the "prior­ ity selections" and later at the "general selections",8 was a momentous deci­ sion in the history of the Chinese civil service, and indeed was felt to be so by his contemporaries. Most historical sources concur with Sun's Mingshi biography that "at once" everybody welcomed the new procedure as a means of reintroducing fairness into the selection of provincial officials; but at the same time, most do not fail to mention that it was soon exposed to criticism. The Guoque, for his fate was to serve in this particular county. My thanks to Dr. Guo Runtao ;tlif'J'~~ of Beijing University for pointing this source out to me.
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