Forty-eight years of Qianlong

Chapter 680 New imperial examination cram school
Lin Qizong was one of the first dozen test takers who arrived in Beihai Town.You must know that those who can rush to participate in the Beihai Town Imperial Examination are the kind who have no hope of becoming a scholar after many years of examination, and their family life is difficult.

After coming to Beihai Town for two months, three meals a day of fresh fish and fat pigs with enough oil and water on top of plain flour, Lin Tongsheng's body shape was as if he had blown up a balloon, and his skinny face had become rounder. Not a lot.

For these candidates who are actively moving closer to the new regime, Beihai Town has given a lot of care.In addition to the 30 silver dollar stipends mentioned at the beginning, they were free of board and lodging in Beihai Town, and each of them was given two sets of new clothes, shoes and socks, and a living allowance of [-] yuan.

During the half month of waiting for other candidates to arrive one after another, the examination committee also organized Lin Tongsheng and the others to go to the demonstration farm in Xingkai Lake No. [-] Village, and then to Boli to visit the steel factory and railway station, and to visit the products in Boli Town market place.

Before the start of the tour, Yu Deli made a request to all the candidates, asking them to write an "exposition" on the things they are most interested in based on what they saw and heard during the visit, regardless of the subject matter.He planned to find out about these people first, so that he could arrange targeted training sessions later.

"Shen Lun" is naturally no stranger to people who take the civil service examination in another time and space. Its function is to examine whether a person's analytical ability in dealing with problems and whether he discusses the problem clearly.Its source is not "Zi Yue", but from Qianlong's words - "A gentleman then retreats from a villain, and he needs each other to bring out the best in each other. Cai Chuan cited it but did not publish it, so he discussed it."

During the ten-day tour, what shocked everyone the most was the steel plant that was still under construction and the trains that were put into operation.Of course, whether it's a tractor or a motorboat running on the Heilongjiang River, or the tens of thousands of acres of wheat fields on the shore of Xingkai Lake, people's jaws drop and their eyes drop.

The construction period of the Khabarovsk Iron and Steel Plant is four years. Although it is planned to be officially put into operation in 1795, the 3200-cubic volume iron-making blast furnace has already been erected, and trial production has also begun.

As the taphole was slowly opened, fiery red molten iron spewed out, drawing a dazzling stream of light, which made everyone who came to visit feel extremely shocked.When they learned that the annual output of this iron and steel plant would be as high as 60 billion jin after it was fully completed, Lin Qizong and the other students immediately rolled their eyes.

Not to mention them, Yuan Mei and Zhao Yi didn't look much better when they came to visit; the 70-meter-high blast furnace alone made them feel dizzy.

It is said that since the blast furnace was erected, those Hezhe and Oroqen fishermen who were boating in the middle reaches of Heilongjiang would pay homage to the ironmaking blast furnace before the fishing season, praying for a good harvest.

In fact, from the moment the ship arrived at Whale Harbor, Lin Qizong felt that Beihai Town was a mess. He felt that the books he had read could not explain everything in front of him.Many things in Beihai Town are different from those in Jiaodong, but when he heard various accents with southern accents and northern accents, he understood that this place is indeed a real world.

After the tour, all the test takers began to rack their brains to "write their homework".Unlike other people who wrote about trains, steamboats, tractors, and wheat fields, Lin Qizong decided to find another way after repeated consideration, using the big market in Boli Town as the topic.

The reason why they chose this direction was mainly because this product is a glutton, and all kinds of mountain delicacies sold in the big market in Boli Town are delicious and cheap.Another thing is that his father-in-law opened a grocery store in Muping City, specializing in north and south goods.

The big market in Khabarovsk originated from the "Gong Diao Shang Wulin Conference" in the Qing Dynasty. The original annual festival has evolved into a normalized market since three years ago.Except for the six months of winter and early spring, the rest of the year is very lively here.

Every year after the spring fishing season, the Hezhe people, Feiyaka people and Xibe people who have harvested a lot bring their big and small bags, either driving their own fast horse boats, or sitting on the flat-bottomed passenger and cargo boats in Beihai Town Here comes the deal.

After they arrive, they first need to register with the market management department with their ID cards, and then get a receipt, and then they can go in and set up a stall to sell goods.

There was once a clerk who wanted to make a fortune in the registration process, and took the opportunity to ask for a card.In order not to be discovered, that person even specially found an honest man who couldn't kick a fart to blackmail him, and the other party also swallowed his anger and gave him a mink fur.

However, what the clerk didn't know was that surveillance cameras had been installed inside and outside the house of the Marketing Management Department; after he collected the things, people from the Public Security Police Station came to find him.What I received before was returned without mentioning it, and I was fined two months' salary, and the loudspeakers installed inside and outside the market announced the whole process in Mandarin and Manchu.

Since then, the border residents have said that King Zhao put the three-eyed Lord Ma in the big market to see good and evil.Whoever dares to do bad things will be arrested by the security police.Zhao Xin just smiled when he learned about it, and he didn't want to explain it. It was just right to keep a little mystery, so that those who tried to make money out of the fire were even more afraid.

Lin Qizong noticed that the frontier residents who traded in the big market were very trustworthy and treated people very kindly, which wiped away the "barbarian" impression in his impression.Not to mention the dazzling array of rare goods in the market, all the stall owners will take the initiative to pay taxes at the tax office after selling their goods, not bad, and some even pay more.This made him very puzzled.

However, when he inquired with a stall owner from Hezhe who was proficient in Mandarin, he learned that this amount of tax money was really insignificant compared with the tribute that he had to pay for participating in the "Wulin Appreciation" before.

In the Manchu and Qing Dynasties, it was said that each family paid a piece of mink fur, but in addition to the mink fur, one village and one surname also paid tributes such as sea dongqing, salmon, wood change stone, etc., which had to be shared among the frontier residents.Furthermore, apart from food, cloth and needles and threads, among the things rewarded by the imperial court in the past, there were very few iron objects.If anyone's family has a small iron pot, it will definitely make the people around them envious.

Lin Qizong asked the Hezhe people at that time: "What about now?"

The stall owner said with a smile: "Now you can buy whatever you want, one big one and one silver dollar. Let alone my family, every family in our village has a big iron pot weighing eight catties."

Lin Qizong was shocked when he heard this.A person like him who has devoted himself to fame and fame all year round should have no idea about prices; but because of the business his father-in-law is engaged in, this guy often comes to the house to fight the autumn breeze, and he knows a little about the sales price of ironware.

The folk smelting and casting industry in the Qianlong era was mainly concentrated in the south of the Yangtze River, especially in Fujian, Guangdong and Jiangxi.Taking Jiangxi Xingguo as an example, the wholesale price of wrought iron in the source area is 3 cent of silver per catty, and it is at least 4 to 3 cents per catty when shipped to the north.If blacksmith shops and grocery stores earn a little more, they will cost five or six renminbi in the hands of the common people. If converted into money, it will be about 550-700 renminbi, which is not cheap.

The "compositions" of more than a dozen candidates were sent to Yu Deli's desk three days later, and Lin Qizong's essays quickly attracted his attention.

When this guy was at home, he wrote letters for others to make a living. First of all, he wrote very well.Furthermore, through the fact that the marketing management personnel were blackmailed and investigated, he explained what it means to be "one who is upright, if he is not ordered; if he is not upright, he will not follow orders." Then he pointed out the theme and praised Zhao Xin .

Lin Qizong thought that his writing was very innovative, but in Wang Zhong's eyes, all the examinees' essays, including him, were nonsense, and they couldn't flatter them.

Well, by this time, there were already 40 test-taking children who had arrived in Beihai Town, so the examination committee had already prepared a long-term training class.

The course of the training class lasted for ten days, and the location was set at Beihai Town Administration College.From [-]:[-] am to [-]:[-] pm every day, in addition to the lectures of Wang Zhong, Duan Yucai, and Jiao Xun's Four Books and Shenlun courses, the School of Administration also sent several teachers to specialize in the various departments of Beihai Town. The corresponding disciplines, as well as administration, industry and commerce, justice, military affairs, industry and mining, science and technology, finance and taxation, and trade are explained separately.

Lin Qizong received a thick tutorial textbook ignorantly. After listening to the first introductory class, he realized that Beihai Town was not only a hero in stereotyped literary theory, but also had to go to the administrative school for a period of time even if he passed the imperial examination. One year of study, master one or several professional knowledge.Then start from the bottom official, and work for at least three years before you can become an official.And to become a parent official in a county, don't even think about it without more than five years of experience as an official at the bottom and multiple trainings.

The curriculum of the training class is very tight, one class after another from morning to night, making Lin Qizong's eyes straight when he eats every day.Fortunately, the food for the three meals in the morning, lunch and evening of the training class is still good. The dishes for lunch and dinner are either fish and shrimp or pork and mutton, which finally saved him from the trouble of "replenishing the brain".

In fact, the imperial examinations in the Qing Dynasty also had pre-examination training and tutoring institutions, and they were far more prosperous than other dynasties, including government-run and private-run academies of various levels throughout the country's villages and cities, with a total of more than [-].Among them are the earliest in Chinese history—the Lizheng Academy opened since the time of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, as well as the world-famous Four Academies, in addition to the Zhengyin Academy opened for scholars from Fujian and Guangdong.

These academies generally have four days of classes a month, two days of official classes and two days of teachers' classes, and the rest of the time is for fun, bah, for self-study.

In addition, well-known academies all give preferential policies in the imperial examination, and the academic administration will only give a few places for admission, otherwise no one will go to it.At least four students are admitted for each subject, and the examination shed is set up separately.

In addition to tutoring, government-run and private academies will also issue "tuition money" based on students' performance.

Tuition, originally refers to lamp oil.Since the rise of academies in the Song and Yuan Dynasties, they have become synonymous with student subsidies.Reading is a matter of course, day and night, and of course there is no time to engage in side jobs to make a living.The ancients had a long way to go to school, without the support of this support fee, I don’t know how many students, let alone those from poor families, would stop.

However, tuition, fire and silver are not so good.Good academies are not only difficult to enter, but there is also a survival of the fittest when entering the academies, and rankings are made every month.

Take the Bailudong Academy in Jiangxi as an example. In addition to eight courses, including poetry, classics, policy theory, and career courses, there are also "internal main courses" and "outer main courses"; the top [-] " The children who are in the "inner main class" can get one or two yuan of tuition silver per month, and those who are twenty to forty outside are the "outer main class", and the tuition silver is six qian per month.

Lin Qizong also went to the academy in Ninghai Prefecture to attend lectures before, and at the best time he received a subsidy of four qian.However, for a boy to try this kind of thing, he needs to test his talent and learn, but also depends on his luck. If you are not lucky, it is useless to let you write flowers.What's more, the enrollment ratio of students in Terengganu was already low, and there were many people who could write better stereotyped essays than him, so he simply didn't go there afterwards.

Returning to the pre-examination cram school in Beihai Town, the scholars and students who participated in the new imperial examination for the first time are undoubtedly lucky. Whether it is Wang Zhong, Duan Yucai or Jiao Xun, they are all well-known masters of Confucianism in Jiangnan and even the world , Even Liu Taigong and Hong Liangji were invited back by Yu Deli for two classes.

Therefore, in Lin Qizong's view, being able to get personal guidance from these people, even if he fails to pass the exam, it will be a good face to tell others about his experience in the future.But it is a pity that until the end of the training class, Wang Zhong's criticism of Lin Tongsheng's article was still "shit doesn't make sense".

It is said that on the third day after Zhao Xin returned to Beihai Town, he came to the newly built examination institute early in the morning.When I arrived at the place, I got out of the carriage and saw that Nuo Da’s empty field was surrounded by a circle of two-meter-high gray tiles and white walls. On the north side, there were two lonely three-story buildings standing side by side, although the exterior was painted white. , but the style is exactly the same as the Tongzilou teaching building that Zhao Xin saw when he was a child.

On the east side of the building, a red wall more than two meters high was built, covering an area of ​​three or four mu by visual estimation.Looking from the outside, you can only see the gray tiles on the roof ridge in the yard, and you don't know what the inside is for.In addition, there is a white bark pine planted every five meters under the courtyard wall, which is still a little green at last.

"Old Chen, why did you make the examination house look like this?"

Zhao Xin frowned, and unconsciously looked back to the south.Next door to the white wall is the planned Beihai Higher Institute of Technology. Because of careful construction, it will be the most beautiful and advanced university in East Asia. The foundation has just been dug there.

Different from the Tongzi Building of the Examination Institute, all the buildings of the Higher Institute of Technology were specially drawn drawings, using the Chinese design of Zanjiao Xieshan. A large amount of raw lacquer, tung oil, white marble and green glazed tiles were purchased from Guannei.

Perhaps aware of Zhao Xin's dissatisfaction, Chen Qingsong, who rushed back from Fuldan City the day before, took advantage of Wang Zhong and others not paying attention, and whispered to Zhao Xin: "You can be satisfied if you can build this in six months. Time is short. I specially dispatched three construction teams and worked overtime to finish it. Besides, there are broadcasting, heating, fans, and electric lights in this building. Have the ancients seen it? Don’t look at the inconspicuous appearance. This is called Neixiu. Tomorrow The slogans and so on are ready, and when the time comes, hang them up, put some colorful flags, and work together!"

Zhao Xin said helplessly: "Have you installed all the monitoring?"

"Of course! There are no dead ends in all directions."

Zhao Xin nodded, pointed to the separate courtyard and asked, "What is that courtyard used for?"

"The main examination room and the examination room! The monitoring room is also inside."

"I'll wipe it! Go and have a look."

After Zhao Xin finished speaking, he raised his foot and walked over there.

　The Qing government stipulated from the Yongzheng era that if a student gongjian cannot master Mandarin within eight years, his eligibility for the provincial examination will be suspended;Later, in the early years of Qianlong, it was extended by three years on the basis of eight years. If three years is not enough, then you should not take the exam.However, in the late Qianlong period, as the government became increasingly corrupt, Zhengyin Academy was abolished one after another.In the Jiaqing Daoguang period, there was only one school in Shaowu, Fujian.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)