CONFUCIAN STATECRAFT 33to supporters to retain their loyalty. Another method used to confer prestigious
titles without overloading the exchequer was to grant large numbers of san 'g-
wan positions, sinecures without salaries or prebendal grants. 17
According to Confucian ideals the king should have been able to appoint any
person of merit in the kingdom to office without respect to artificial distinctions,
but once the new bureaucrats had gained power, they succeeded in drawing a
new line between the regular bureaucrats and the clerks to block clerks who had
not passed the highest level civil service examinations from competing with them
for important posts. As a result the local hyangni were prevented from holding
posts as district magistrates, the clerks could not be promoted to the ranks of
the regular officials, and the state even ceased to pay salaries or grant prebends
for the hyangni and clerks, leaving them to depend upon the collection of fees,
gratuities, and bribes. This group of people were dubbed "the middle people"
(chung'in) which became more restrictive and limited by birth as the dynasty
progressed. This division between regular officials versus clerks and technical
specialists allowed to stand for the miscellaneous technical examinations (chap-
kwa) (or yangban and chung'in) was reinforced by the Confucian preference for
generalists educated in the lofty moral principles of Confucian ethical texts and
disdain for technical knowledge and the technicians (scribes, accountants, legal
professionals, astronomists, language specialists, geomancers, etc.).18
Finally, the new dynasty continued the civil service examinations as the main
means for recruiting men into the regular bureaucracy without ever question-
ing the adequacy of that institution as a vehicle for obtaining the best possible
candidates. The examination system was, of course, not one of the institutions
of ancient China and had first been adopted in the late sixth century in the Sui
dynasty. It had also come under attack by a number of Sung dynasty scholars,
including Chu Hsi himself, and yet these reservations were not taken into account.
Furthermore, the Koreans added a touch of their own and made access to the
examinations even narrower than in China by prohibiting the nothoi (sons of
yangban by their concubines), merchants, and artisans from taking the exami-
nations.^19 In China there was no bar to the nothoi and merchants were able to
take the examinations despite the legal ban against it in the Sung dynasty. Restric-
tions on merchants and artisans taking examinations were lifted in the Ming and
Ch'ing dynasties, and what was even more important, the sale of degrees and
offices became widespread in the middle of the seventeenth century, and again
during the Taiping rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century.20
As John Duncan has recently discovered, the percentage of the highest two
ranks of central government officials recruited by the examination system in the
early fifteenth century was somewhat less than the percentage for the late four-
teenth-century Kory6 dynasty (40 percent versus 60 percent) probably because
of the influx of the northeastern military group into the high ranks of office after
1392, but by the end of the fifteenth century and for the rest of the dynasty over
90 percent of officials of high rank had passed the civil service examinations.^21