How China's emperors selected their civil servants

Senior civil servants in the United Kingdom (and possibly elsewhere) are often referred to as Mandarins, and Mandarin is the most widely-spoken dialect of Chinese. Is there a connection? There certainly is!

The Qin emperors of China, who ruled from 221 BC to 206 BC, were the first to establish a civil service to enable the emperors to administer their territories. Subsequent Chinese dynasties refined the process of selecting the people who would take up positions in the civil service, and by the time that the Song dynasty was in power (AD 960-1279) a system of competitive examinations was well established. The Song emperors refined the process to make sure that successful candidates were selected without fear or favour and entirely on merit.

A candidate would begin by taking a local test which would qualify them for progressing to the second stage in the provincial capital. Only those who cleared this hurdle would be allowed to travel to the imperial capital to sit the final exam, after which the best candidates would be awarded the “Jinshi” that signified their admission to the civil service. Only about one in a hundred candidates would get all the way through, and there was a three-year wait before one was able to try again, which many people did.

The Song emperors instituted a marking system according to which three examiners would mark each paper independently and the name of the candidate would not be made known to the markers, thus ensuring that nobody could win the Jinshi through favouritism or corruption. 

A later development, under the Ming emperors who ruled from 1368 to 1644, was to make the candidates write an essay of limited length that was split into eight sections, each with a specific function. 

The Song tradition of competitive examination was so successful in getting the best people into high office that it was still in use up to the end of imperial China in 1912. That was why it was copied by western governments, including that of the United Kingdom.

However, the subject of the examinations was very different when the system was taken up by Europeans. Chinese civil servants had to be extremely well versed in the philosophy of Confucius, who flourished in the 5^th century BC, and his later interpreters.

© John Welford

The bizarre origin of the Tour de France

The Tour de France is surely the World’s best-known and most celebrated cycle race. It takes 23 days to stage, with the competitors, who come from many countries, completing a series of grueling stages that take them all round France and usually across borders to visit neighbouring countries en route. 

Most people are not aware that the race began as a competition between two daily sporting newspapers, and was linked to the notorious Dreyfus case and the death of one of France’s most famous writers.

Alfred Dreyfus was a captain in the French army who was tried and convicted of spying for Germany in 1894. The problem was that Dreyfus was completely innocent. The evidence against him was weak in the extreme, but he was not only a native of Alsace – which was then part of Germany – but he was also Jewish. It did not take much for an anti-Semitic and anti-German military court to find Dreyfus guilty and pack him off to the penal colony of Devil’s Island.

Many people in France were far from satisfied that justice had been done, and one of these was the writer Emile Zola, who in 1898 wrote a piece that condemned the French establishment over the Dreyfus case. This was splashed across the front page of L’Aurore newspaper under the heading “J`Accuse” (I accuse). 

This made Zola extremely unpopular with the anti-Dreyfus faction in France, and Zola was forced to flee to London until the situation calmed down.

Zola was still a marked man in the eyes of some extreme anti-Semites, and his support for Dreyfus – who in 1899 had been allowed to return to France but without a full pardon – was not forgotten. 

In 1902 Emile Zola died as the result of what appeared to be a tragic accident, when he and his wife were overcome by carbon monoxide fumes after lighting a fire in their Paris apartment. It was not until 1928 that it emerged that their chimney had been blocked deliberately by a right-wing fanatic and that Zola’s death (his wife survived) had been murder.

However, this was far from clear at the time, especially as tests carried out the day after Zola’s death showed that there was nothing wrong with the chimney. Of course there wasn’t – the killer had by then removed the obstruction.

The fact that there was still a huge amount of controversy in France about the whole Dreyfus affair led to accusations flying in all directions. In particular, two sporting daily newspapers, Le Velo and L’Auto, took opposite sides on the question of whether Emile Zola’s death was related to the Dreyfus case. The arguments went on right through the winter of 1902-3, but eventually tempers died down and the two newspapers decided to settle their differences in a way that might have been expected of publications devoted mainly to sport – a bicycle race!

And so the first Tour de France took place in July 1903 and it has been run ever since, apart from during the two World Wars. The event soon caught the attention of the French public and sales of L’Auto (the original main sponsor) went through the roof.

A particular feature of the Tour de France is the wearing of coloured jerseys by certain competitors. A yellow jersey is worn by the overall leader. The colour is no accident, being a recognition of the fact that L’Auto was printed on yellow paper. In the early days the rider with the lowest standing wore a green jersey, although from 1953 this became a mark of pride rather than shame, because it is worn by the leader of the various sprint stages on the Tour. Green was the colour of paper used by Le Velo!

© John Welford

The seven kingdoms of old England

If you have ever wondered about the names of the English counties Essex and Sussex, not to mention the region of Wessex as beloved by the novelist Thomas Hardy, you might be interested to know that they are not as “sexy” as might be imagined. They were all ruled by their own kings many centuries ago, and the names are relics of those times.

The seven kingdoms were established by the Germanic tribes that moved into what is now England as the Roman Empire faded away and left a power vacuum. In 410 AD the last Roman troops departed and left the “Romano-British” to fend for themselves. 

One account states that in about 450 a chieftain named Vortigern invited two brothers named Hengist and Horsa to bring an army to Britain to defend the British against the Picts who were invading from the far north. However, once this threat had been seen off the invited mercenaries decided not to go home but to settle in what became the Kingdom of Kent in the south-east corner of Britain.

Not long after, settlers from Saxony (modern Germany) arrived on the south coast and spread across a wide area, eventually creating the kingdoms of the East Saxons (Essex) South Saxons (Sussex) and West Saxons (Wessex). 

Other settlers, who are generally referred to as Angles, arrived in what is now Norfolk and Suffolk, leading to the founding of the Kingdom of East Anglia. Despite their relative unimportance in the overall history of the country, it was the Angles who would eventually give their name to the whole country south of Scotland and east of Wales, namely England.

The last kingdoms to be established were those of Mercia (the Midlands) and Northumbria (north of the River Humber).

The seven kingdoms that emerged in the 5^th to 7^th centuries are generally known as the Heptarchy. They would remain in place for about 200 years until Danish invaders put an end to the eastern kingdoms and were only kept from taking over the whole of England by the obduracy of Wessex.

During the period of the Heptarchy the kings spent much of their time warring against each other. Their aim was not so much to absorb each others’ territory as to establish themselves as ‘senior king’. The king who achieved temporary domination was known as the Bretwalda which translated as ‘ruler of Britain’ but it did not signify anything other than that the holder was more powerful than the other kings and could make demands on them. The title was not hereditary, and any other king might become Bretwalda when the holder died or was defeated in battle.

During the period of the Heptarchy only Essex failed to produce a Bretwalda at some time or another. The only Bretwalda of the 8^th century who came close to being ruler of all England in any meaningful sense was Offa of Mercia (757-96), who used the title ‘King of the English’ but was never completely dominant.

The last Bretwalda was Egbert of Wessex (802-39), who can be titled the first true ‘King of the English’, in that he united Wessex and Kent (Sussex, Essex and East Anglia had already been absorbed by their neighbours) and then conquered Mercia and received the formal submission of Northumbria. However, he could not hold on to his gains for long and Mercia again became independent.

The end of the Heptarchy came with the Danish invasions of the 9^th century that left Wessex, led by Egbert’s grandson Alfred, as the sole bastion of the English in resisting the onslaught.

© John Welford