The next day, we start off with a Yechuan-style breakfast with the party member aunt. I'm not quite sure how to differentiate it from other styles; the food is starting to blur together. Too much new stuff all at once. I don't even crave Western food exactly; what I miss is the Western-style meal structure where I pick personal choices and eat them all myself. This might be less the case if I were more able to participate in conversations. The Chinese style is way more conducive to talking while eating, which is why meals last for at least an hour.
Every meal is a kind of frantic context-switching between grabbing food off the lazy Susan, responding to toasts, and talking with neighbors or the whole group. Somehow, aunties universally find time in this frenzy to insist you eat more, invariably when what's available to grab is jellied duck tongue or intestines. I power through, though. They mean well, and it's more a lack of hunger after spending six hours a day at a meal table than the food being unpalatable. My wife is understandably pretty exhausted, and the translations come less frequently. My sister-in-law is picking up some of the slack.
Next, we stop by the Nanjing Museum. Not too much to say about the museum itself. If you've been to a museum, then you can guess what to expect. My sister-in-law and I got the English digital audio tour, everyone else Chinese. The voice is text-to-speech and quiet but good enough. I use this time to relax a bit; it's been nonstop all week. One thing I'll mention is that mainland Chinese people are comfortable bumping into each other and having very little personal space. The museum is packed, and you'd never get near any exhibit if you weren't comfortable with boxing people in or being boxed in.
After the museum, it's lunch again. This time, the baijiu is a green bean variety. We're seated next to a cousin who was at MIL's grandpa's ceremony. I didn't have an opportunity to talk to him much then. He's a few years older than us. He reportedly was TikTok famous for workout videos and now sells used cars through TikTok. According to him, the Chinese used car market is only about 20 years old, and there are big counterfeit and fraud issues.
After lunch, we head to the Confucius Temple. One shouldn't confuse this with a Confucius temple, which may have something to do with Confucianism. This is a very large shopping and amusement district. Supposedly, at one point, it also contained the red light district. My wife spent the first eight years of her life before moving to the US a few blocks from here. MIL claims she took her through the shopping district every evening to calm her down before bed.
We take a quick detour to Laodongmen, or the Old East Gate, at her parents' insistence. It's much the same market-type district as the Confucius Temple, but the architecture is from the Ming and Qing dynasties, and they go to great lengths to keep it that way. Everything is ornate dark wood or carved stone. The storefronts are impressive, but the merchandise is not very compelling. It's all the same baubles from Yu Gardens, and this is much the same as we get back to the Confucius Temple area.
We run into kids in the same uniform as the top school in China again at the market, furthering doubt that this isn't some universal high school uniform. The party member aunt independently confirms their identity as the number one school. It starts to rain, and there is some confusion about what our actual plan is. The party member aunt has some connections, and it's not clear we've actually paid for any of the attractions we've been to since arriving in Nanjing. We take separate lines, plausibly for lack of Chinese ID.
After the sun sets and some confusion, we end up in a museum dedicated to keju, or the merit-based test originally established during the Sui Dynasty circa 600 AD, which spiritually survives today in the form of the gaokao that consumes the childhoods of many Chinese people. There was a small section dedicated to the military version established a century later, where a man would need to pass several tests, including archery and the ability to deadlift a stone. They had some stone examples available, but to my disappointment, there were no opportunities to try or even a standardized weight listed.
The test apparently was originally a series of essays written over three days. I only got vague answers as to what the actual questions were—something about understanding Confucius' ideas or writing about proper government structures. But when asked how cheating and corruption were combated, answers came readily. Your essay was to be transcribed by an official before being judged to prevent handwriting from being used to allow bribes. It was administered every three years in tiers, starting locally and then finishing in the imperial exam, in which only 300 people got top marks.
FIL answered a question I'm sure many have had: What's up with those weird hats with wings on either side? He claims it's to keep officials from being able to whisper to each other in secret, making it one of the earliest pieces of anti-encryption technology. The Chinese surveillance state has deep roots.
After we finish the exhibit, we go straight to another. This one is a lantern festival at the actual Confucius Temple. My wife's feet are hurting, so she sits down, and I wander about without translation aid. There's not much to say about the lanterns; they're impressive in large numbers but really just paper or cloth over lights—very similar vibes to a Christmas light display.
We don't stay long, and next up is a boat tour on the river. It's nice, and there are some displays about a drunken poet that normally I'd be amused by. There were huge advertisements for some baijiu that nearly entirely obscured one statue of him. But we're a little burnt out on sightseeing at this point. My wife recounts a quote by her mother that after a proper trip, one should collapse in misery at the end of the day, and I'm starting to think she wasn't exaggerating.
The boat tour ends at 10 p.m., and we were told to expect a light dinner. So we spend a mere two hours in a nearby restaurant. No baijiu, fortunately. The next day, her parents are going back to visit both grandmas, giving our generation a free day.
We plan to hike Zijin Mountain, the same one with those mausoleums, with Syracuse and his technically-not-girlfriend. She pulls up in a green Jeep analogue with "TANK" written on the back in block letters. She brought her dog Dan-Dan, or Egg-Egg, a one-year-old English Sheepdog. Despite all these signs, she seems to get along well with our nerdy cousin. The two gifts he got her were makeup, which was a mistake. It's an understandable mistake—girls use a lot of makeup, and it can be expensive. Boys, buying a girl makeup is like her trying to buy you a video game without consulting you or having any idea what makes a game good or in your tastes. Just don't do it. She's merely annoyed with him.
The hike up is relatively uneventful; the path is nearly deserted. Hiking doesn't seem as popular in China as other activities. At the top, we stop for KFC. They have hamburgers and grilled chicken but no actual fried chicken—a sad state of affairs that may have cost them their lives in the States, but it is still crowded. The burgers were... weird, kind of loose and almost wet.
On the hike down, we talk about what to do for the evening. I suggest goinf to a Chinese bar, pub, or basically any Chinese drinking establishment that isn't a club. These are probably not the right people to ask but the suggestion turns into a plan. Syracuse has never seen the inside of a bar anywhere, and his girl acquaintance doesn't seem to understand the question. But nothing else is suggested and no one comes up with anything better.
Dinner is another lazy Susan with Cantonese-style roast duck and a birthday cake for Syracuse, as he'll turn 29 American and 30 Chinese the next day. In China, you come out at one year old. He makes a wish, and the girl says she already knows what it is: to finish his PhD. He comes back with, "That is one of my three wishes." From the reaction, he won the exchange. Chinese people generally think everything in America is too sweet, and their cakes tend to be lighter and covered in fruit.
After dinner, we reiterate anything but a club. We make our way to a place they found online. It's up an elevator, and as soon as we arrive, we confirm that it is indeed a club. Without a reservation, they only have a back table with a 1,500 yuan cover. I might have been willing to eat the cover even though we only planned to be out an hour or two, but even the waitstaff is giving me the stink eye.
We make our exit, and part of me wants to just cut and hang out at the hotel, but they're committed. We end up finding our way to a James Bond-inspired cocktail bar with a vibe that I would describe as schizophrenic. The lights are dim with what seems to be essentially a random playlist of Western songs that go from upbeat country to emo while The Big Bang Theory, subtitled in Chinese, plays on the back wall. Despite the relative clown-show nature of the bar, the bartenders could not be more serious, adopting severe expressions and using exclusively the English names of the cocktails. I don't think it was representative of the Nanjing drinking scene, but I approve of it nonetheless.
After we get into our first round, the mood improves. My wife tells stories of her patients. We find out Chinese working people get practically no paid time off—five days a year to start—but are able to take unpaid time off without too much hassle and have longer holidays.
We have to be up early for our train back to Shanghai the next morning, so we head back to the hotel at midnight. The parents have retrieved a few more gifts for us while we were out. We now have a thick silk quilt with a long list of prohibitions that are surprisingly similar to how one should treat a Mogwai in order to avoid creating a gremlin, along with a number of trinkets and a pair of little red books. I'd have preferred to find them myself but accept the help.
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Notes -
The types of questions I know of (not sure which dynasty or level of exam) were something like "Imagine you are the magistrate of [province] during [recent natural disaster]. Describe how you would respond to this crisis and justify your priorities with appropriate quotations from the Five Classics" or "[Oblique reference to a particular geopolitical incident during the Warring States period]. Please discuss."
This sounds like questions that would be asked perhaps since Wang Anshi's reforms from the 11th century up to the end of the examinations in 1904. I believe the late imperial exams had three sections -- on the interpretation of classics, commentary on history, and commentary/analysis of current events and policy suggestions thereof.
The earlier examinations had a greater focus on pure rote memorisation and poetic ability, IIRC, though there would still be analytical questions on politics and policy. Some of the classics questions during the Tang dynasty had the first examples of fill-in-the-blank questions in history. (This is not to mention the other early examinations that were easier -- there was a pure classics examination that was easier, as well as a law exam (I believe there were a few more but cannot recall immediately).
All recorded imperial examination questions and top answers are available/have been published, I think.
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Do you know if there was anything like object grading criteria?
I believe the exams were scored by officials who had previously passed, except for the highest levels, where essays would be personally judged by the emperor. So for the weed-out stages there was some sort of rubric that over time accumulated increasingly arbitrary standards for how to compose a properly formatted "eight-legged essay," but there was always a bit of randomness based on the emperor's personal whims.
To add onto this, the lack of an objective grading criteria meant that -- even moreso than in modern times -- whether people passed or not would be at the whims of the examiners, and being able to cotton onto the latest trends in political thought could be quite important lest an otherwise excellently argued answer be marked down for being against the prevailing opinion (...or the examiner's opinion). There are also opportunities for unfair discrimination -- Lu You famously finished first in his regional examinations in his second try ~1154, but was disqualified (along with all other regional examination...valedictorians?) for threatening the progression of Qin Hui's grandson.
Unfortunately can't recall my sources, but interestingly the imperial exams also had a sort of affirmative action -- different districts and provinces would have quotas for how many people could advance to the next stage of examinations, and generally the less well-off districts and provinces would get a higher per-capita quota to fill. This lead to situations where families would try to (at least in paper) go to bumfuck nowhere, bribe a local with the same surname to lie that they are some sort of long-lost family (so that their son would be able to be registered as a resident there), and try to game the system that way.
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Not a universal uniform, but in recent years the government has been encouraging top schools to set up branches elsewhere. Some have set up quite a lot and they generally aren't on the same academic level as the original campus. So even if the uniforms say RenDaFuZhong or whatever, it might not be the "real" RDFZ.
Thanks for the info, stolen striver valor.
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It would be difficult to answer succinctly, as there were initially several sorts of examinations during the Tang which (IIRC?) coalesced into the one examination stream that we associate with the imperial exams; as you note, there are different levels of exams, so there would be different types of questions for each; and the contents and style of the exams themselves vary over time.
If the mainland is anything like Hong Kong, McDonalds might have better chicken than KFC.
We actually had the golden arches for lunch today. The spiced breaded wings were of surprisingly high quality
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Running out of things to say really, may write up the last few days just for completing but we're basically just riding out the tourist bits in shanghai.
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