Chapter 390 What Makes a Good Official?

Chapter 390: What Makes a Good Official?

Two hours later—

The sun rose to its peak, then slowly began its slide toward the west. There wasn't a breath of wind, and the air carried no hint of coolness—only the muggy, stifling heat that only spring can bring.

The candidates who'd been shouting their lungs out moments before now had throats raw and hoarse, a thin layer of sweat on their foreheads. Their heads drooped, their backs no longer straight as a board. Quite a few had collapsed onto the stone steps of the Ministry of Rites, too worn out to even keep cursing.

Inside, the officials carried on as if nothing was wrong, hosting the Qionglin Banquet for the newly appointed jinshi. Music from strings and flutes filled the air, dancers performed, and the new jinshi wore honorary flowers in their caps. Officials gathered to celebrate, singing the praises of the talented graduates.

The Qionglin Banquet might be the closest these jinshi ever got to the center of power in the capital. The metropolitan exam only came around once every three years, and while the Yu Dynasty wasn't actually short of low-ranking officials, climbing out of the ranks of minor officials was no easy feat. Many spent their whole careers as seventh-rank county magistrates in their assigned posts, never moving up.

At this banquet, they were full of ambition and high hopes. But would the harsh realities of the years ahead grind away their original ambitions, turning them into the very mediocrities the next batch of jinshi would mock?

Forget what was happening inside the Ministry of Rites. The candidates waiting outside—those who couldn't accept their failure—were physically exhausted but no calmer emotionally. Sure, they had powerful families behind them, but their talents were just as real. If they'd failed because they were simply outmatched, fine. But to lose to people they'd always looked down on? That was unbearable.

After the metropolitan exam, they'd been all but guaranteed their jinshi status. To have it stripped away in one stroke—how could they possibly accept that!

Jiang Yan, who'd placed first in the metropolitan exam, had bloodshot eyes from fury. He braced his aching legs and stubbornly refused to get in his family's carriage to rest. When his household servants and maids came to persuade him, he snapped at them and sent them all away.

He was holding on to one thing—a breath of defiance. If the Ministry of Rites didn't give them a proper explanation, he'd petition the emperor directly, even if it cost him his head. He refused to crawl back to his academy in disgrace.

They were young and full of energy, these men, driven by fierce conviction. Not a single one was willing to leave. They stayed camped outside the Ministry of Rites' main gate, waiting for someone to come out.

Sure, the Ministry had several gates, but the officials all had their dignity to maintain—they wouldn't slip out through a side door. When the Qionglin Banquet ended, they'd have no choice but to come out the front gate and face the rejected candidates.

As the sun sank toward the west, the music and dancing inside came to a stop. The candidates waiting outside felt their hearts leap into their throats. They'd prepared a bellyful of grand speeches, ready to let them all out...

"Ding... ding ding... ding... ding ding ding."

Suddenly, the sound of something hard tapping against porcelain came from the street. Jiang Yan frowned and looked over. It was a filthy old beggar with graying hair—hard to tell his exact age, but clearly ancient. His wrinkled hands clutched a grime-caked broken bowl, and in his right hand he held a crooked, knotted wooden stick. He tapped it as he walked, and when he saw the crowd outside the Ministry of Rites, he paused, thinking slowly, before shuffling closer.

Calling him a stinking beggar wasn't an insult—it was just a fact. He wore tattered rags that barely covered his body, so filthy you couldn't tell what color they'd originally been. He probably hadn't bathed all winter, and with two spring rains since, the smell was absolutely indescribable. Worse still, his dark, withered fingers kept picking through his tangled hair, occasionally pinching out a fat, round louse. The image was something else, truly.

Jiang Yan and the other southern candidates were all dressed in clean, muted colors. Even if waiting outside the Ministry had left them a bit disheveled, it didn't diminish the refined, noble air they carried.

Even the humblest among them came from families of country gentry or landed wealth. They'd never known true hardship—the hardest stretch of their lives had been the months of the metropolitan exam. They all had servants and attendants, though they'd either chased them off or simply not brought them along.

As the old beggar drew closer, an indescribable stench of sour filth and rot hit them like a physical wall, making the crowd dizzy and sick to their stomachs.

The candidates nearest to the beggar grimaced, instinctively covering their noses and mouths as they stumbled backward, desperate to get away from the foul presence. Their eyes were full of disgust and impatience.

The old beggar seemed to notice their revulsion. He stopped mid-step, looking uncertain, and pulled back the hand holding his bowl. Several strands of matted hair hung over his eyes, and beneath the greasy strands, his gaze held no spark of intelligence—dull, vacant, lost.

A crisp "clink" rang out as two pieces of silver, each the size of a peanut, landed in the beggar's filthy bowl—bright and clean against the grime.

Jiang Yan tucked away his money pouch, his brow deeply furrowed. Holding a silk handkerchief over his nose and mouth, he said in a muffled voice, "Take it."

The old beggar looked down at the two pieces of silver in his bowl, staring blankly. He showed neither wild joy nor grateful kowtows. He just stood there, stiff as an abandoned tree stump by the roadside, letting the humid spring air cling to his reeking body.

Seeing that the beggar had been given money but still didn't leave, the surrounding candidates assumed he wanted more. Unwilling to be pestered by this filthy creature, they frowned and fished out a few coins or bits of silver from their pouches, tossing them from a distance into the beggar's broken bowl. A cacophony of clinks and clatters followed. Some coins rolled around and even bounced over the rim, landing in the dusty ground.

The old beggar's vacant eyes suddenly grew frantic. He chased the coins on the ground, dropping to his knees and crawling around to pick up each one, clutching them like treasures as he tucked them one by one into his broken bowl.

Cradling his bowl, the old beggar seemed to belatedly remember something. He reached into his rags and pulled out a tattered, crumbling piece of paper. As if afraid the hostile-looking scholars might hit him, he hastily tossed the paper toward Jiang Yan—who seemed the most mild-tempered—before Jiang Yan could react. Jiang Yan flinched back, and the paper fluttered to the ground.

How absurd. This half-witted beggar actually understood gratitude, refusing to accept charity without giving something in return.

The scholars had given him coins and silver, so he offered a torn scrap of paper in return.

"What filthy piece of garbage, daring to be offered to Young Master Jiang!" One candidate, already irritated from waiting so long outside the Ministry with no one paying them any mind, raised his foot to stomp on the yellowed, tattered paper.

"No, no!" The old beggar was slow, his aged body moving with all the speed he could muster, but he couldn't protect the paper before the other man's foot came down.

It was a bored candidate who happened to glance at the now even more crumpled paper that caught his attention. He let out a surprised "Huh? Why does this have an official seal on it?"

The paper lay at Jiang Yan's feet. His brow had been furrowed for quite some time now, and his gaze settled on the yellowed sheet before him.

The Jiang family dealt in silk. Though Jiang Yan didn't involve himself in the family business, the main household would always send him samples of new products. Even though the writing on the paper had long since faded beyond legibility, he recognized at a glance that this was no ordinary scrap—it was fine silk.

Silk came in many varieties, produced in different regions, and some types were rare even in the capital.

Jiang Yan condescended to bend down, using the corner of his silk handkerchief to carefully pinch the paper up, avoiding direct contact as much as possible.

When he unfolded it, it was barely larger than a palm. The edges were ragged and uneven, and the writing was blurred, but it had clearly been well preserved. Looking further down, he saw the official seal stamped at the corner, and beside it, a fainter personal seal. Both impressions were still faintly discernible.

"Suzhou... Prefectural seal... personal... seal... Rushan!" Jiang Yan read out the names on the seals one by one, his face flooding with shock at the final two characters.

"The Suzhou Prefectural seal?" The candidate who'd spotted the seal earlier immediately crowded in. Like Jiang Yan, he was from Suzhou, and after getting a clear look at the seal, he was equally incredulous. "Rushan? Suzhou Prefect Fang Rushan? What relation is this beggar to him?"

Yingtian Prefecture, Suzhou Prefecture, Yangzhou Prefecture, and Lin'an Prefecture were the four wealthiest prefectures in the south. Most of these candidates came from those four regions, with Suzhou and Yangzhou having the most academies and thus the most students.

Suzhou Prefect Fang Rushan was known to all as the former prefect of Suzhou—and a good official known throughout the entire nation.

What makes a good official?

Upright and incorruptible to have a clear conscience, compassionate toward the people to not fail the world, diligent in duty to not disgrace the imperial mandate. Fang Rushan had achieved only two of these three.

During the previous emperor's reign, the Taihu Lake region of Suzhou Prefecture was struck by a once-in-a-century flood. The Wusong River burst its banks, three counties were submerged, the prefectural granaries ran dry, and grain merchants jacked up prices. For three full years, prices never fell.

Poor farmers could hold out until the court sent disaster relief and plant their fields again the following year. But the vast numbers of tenant farmers lost their own harvests entirely, and on top of that, they still owed grain to the gentry landlords.

Fang Rushan cracked down on the grain merchants while comforting the poor farmers. But when tenant farmers abandoned their fields in droves, wandering the land as beggars, their numbers soon exceeding even the ordinary refugees, this official—who had exhausted himself for the people—finally broke.

The grain merchants were slippery as eels, protected by powerful families behind the scenes. He hated his own incompetence, unable to bring even a single grain merchant to heel.

As refugees multiplied, he swallowed his pride and personally visited the gentry, begging for silver to settle the displaced. But he knew all too well that the reason those refugees had been driven to such extremes was that vast tracts of land were not in the hands of the common people. They depended on the landlords' mercy. When the flood destroyed their harvests, the estate owners still demanded their rents.

How absurd. The emperor had exempted them from three years of land taxes, yet they still had to pay every cent to their landlords.

Those wealthy men, on one hand, hypocritically doled out charity to the poor, and on the other, viciously squeezed out whatever remaining value they could. Every pot of porridge they gave was soaked in the blood and flesh of tenant farmers!

Fang Rushan burned his bridges. He secretly allied with several like-minded officials from humble backgrounds, and during the slack season after the autumn harvest, they surveyed all the hidden farmland in Suzhou Prefecture. They re-measured the lands that powerful families, gentry, and landlords had seized and concealed, registered them in the ledgers, and levied taxes according to the law.

This move was like poking a hornet's nest. Suzhou's great families were deeply entrenched with vast power. Fang Rushan, a prefect parachuted in from outside, was smashing a rock with an egg.

Sure enough, halfway through the land survey, he was accused of "colluding with bandits and harboring treasonous intent" and thrown into prison by the Provincial Judicial Commission.

The irony was that the so-called "bandits" were nothing more than desperate refugees who had banded together to resist their landlords.

Fang Rushan endured brutal torture in prison but refused to confess. In the end, while being escorted back to the capital to face trial before the Three Judicial Offices—the Ministry of Justice, the Censorate, and the Grand Court of Revision—he vanished without a trace. To this day, his whereabouts remain unknown.

Others only knew Fang Rushan as a reckless criminal official. Only the people of Suzhou knew the truth: they had survived because, before his arrest, Fang Rushan had ordered his assistant prefect and vice-prefect to distribute those "ownerless" lands to the homeless refugees, saving countless lives in that disaster.

Every student from Suzhou, including Jiang Yan, turned their gaze toward the old beggar, their eyes filled with shock, doubt, or pity.

It was impossible. That once-ambitious Lord Fang... how... how could he have come to this?

The old beggar, perhaps noticing that his bowl was now full of coins and silver, suddenly broke into a foolish grin. His voice, scraped raw like gravel, came out hoarse and muddy, hard to understand: "Full! Full! Rich now! Rich now!"

He grinned, showing off a set of bare gums without a single tooth, grinning like a kid who just got a piece of candy.

The laughter caught the attention of the man who'd been looking for him. An elderly man in tattered clothes hurried over, nearly tripping in his rush.

He called out anxiously, "Master, why have you come here? Come with me, let's go back."

The beggar didn't respond, still lost in his own world, joyfully clutching his broken bowl.

"M...Master? Is he really Master Fang Rushan?" Jiang Yan's voice wavered.

The old man, who was tugging at the beggar, stiffened at the words, his face filled with panic. "I don't know what you mean, young master. Who is Fang Rushan? We don't know him. Master, come with me quickly!"

"What the heck is going on? Since when is the Ministry of Rites entrance a hangout for riffraff? And where did these two beggars come from? They stink to high heaven. Chi Yu, get rid of them now! I can barely breathe!"

A pretentious voice rang out as Meng Wan approached, covering his nose and mouth with a handkerchief, Chi Yu following behind. He carried himself just like the scholars from before, his disdain unmistakable.

The beggar was clearly not all there, but the old man could tell these people were all wealthy and influential, and some had even recognized their master. They couldn't stay here any longer. He quickly helped the beggar to his feet, bowing and scraping, "Forgive us, young sir. I'll leave right away, right away."

But Meng Wan wouldn't let it go, acting like the two beggars were an eyesore. He sneered, "Leave? You've dirtied the very ground I walk on, and you think you can just walk away? Chi Yu, drag them into the alley and beat them!"

Chi Yu, upon receiving the order, puffed out his chest and stepped forward to act. The old man helping the beggar turned pale, shielding the beggar behind him, "Young sir, have mercy! Beat me if you must, but don't touch our master!"

Jiang Yan watched the scene unfold. The frustration from failing the exam, which had been simmering inside him, was somehow pushed aside by the plight of the old beggar and Meng Wan's arrogance. He recalled the official seal on the silk, the integrity Fang Rushan had once embodied, and now looked at this foolish, destitute figure. A profound sadness welled up in his heart.

Seeing Meng Wan deliberately making trouble, he stepped forward, placing himself between the old man and the beggar, and spoke up in protest, "Young sir, they are but two pitiful souls. Why stoop to their level?"

The other examinees, seemingly sharing the same complex feelings, chimed in, "You're being unreasonable! The road is open to all, and everyone walks on it!"

"Exactly! How can you be so cruel, young sir? They are both at death's door. If you have your servant push them around, it might just be the end of them." The examinee who spoke looked up at Chi Yu, his eyes twitching at the pregnancy mark on the latter's forehead.

Meng Wan refused to back down, "Why are you all ganging up on me? Don't think I didn't see—you were all about to send your servants to shoo them away too! If you can do it, why can't I?"