The conversation is divided into two ends, and the timeline goes back to the third day of October a few days ago.

In Xiangyang City, the "Jiangnan Gongyuan" and the Changkenan Courtyard exam in the first year have reached its last day.

Thousands of candidates from nearly forty counties in three and a half states in the southern part of Liu Bei’s camp are in the final battle to compete for nearly 200 admission quotas.

This admission volume is indeed a bit large in the later imperial examinations, but after all, the official positions that were tested are also of lower value, so there is no risk of the proliferation of officials.

In later generations, those who were admitted to the imperial examinations in the Tang, Song and Ming dynasties were basically the main officials at the deputy county level. And officials similar to "a certain branch of the county" were not selected as exams in history, and were all "officials".

The imperial examinations set up by Li Su and the four major examinations were only the six county chiefs, which was equivalent to the leaders of the county branch and the eighth rank. The filial and honest ones were even candidates, and it would take some time for internship to be given to the above-mentioned actual positions.

Maocai, who was directly appointed to a county-level official position after the examination, only took more than a dozen people every three years, and once in the south camp, accounting for less than 10% of the total number of people. Therefore, there is still a shortage of collecting more than a dozen county magistrates every three years.

Dong Yun, Yang Yi, Fei Yi and other people are all candidates this year. They also have different situations and reference backgrounds. It can even be said that they just represent three different types of candidates.

Dong Yun is a second-generation official, and his father Dong He is already ranked at the level of a deputy minister. Fei Yi is a down-and-out and poor branch of the aristocratic family. Yang Yi is a relatively wealthy middle-aged scholar. It is just because he is young and his family has not planned to specially support him, but just let him try his luck. If he wins, he will be lucky.

The only thing they have in common is that they are all young, all under 20 years old. Even if they fail to test the waters, there will be opportunities in the future.

Even the reason why Fei Yi was chosen by the master to accompany him to accompany him is because he was too young and bullied him. "I have been studying for a few years and my knowledge is definitely not good." If Fei Yi had already achieved the championship this year, the patriarch would see that his grades were temporarily revealed, and he might not dare to let him come.

But when they arrived at the venue, their determination to try their best for the future was the same.

...

"It's the last day, just hold on. This broken place has not been able to sleep well for two nights. How could it be possible to perform well? It's simply a disgrace to be gentle."

As a second-generation official, Dong Yun sat in the semi-open examination room, covered with a pure white cheesecloth as a quilt. He stretched his waist from the hardwood bed, feeling uncomfortable all over his body.

Then he wiped his face with a thick porcelain basin provided by the government, cleaned his teeth with a bamboo silk brush similar to the tea ceremony in later generations, and poured all the sewage into the ditch in front of the examination room compartment.

Then continue to pour water from the large porcelain bottle next to it to clean the basin, and then continue to use this basin that washes the face and brushes the teeth to eat and drink water.

In the entire examination room, everything was provided by the government. It was nothing more than a table board mounted on the wall, a hardwood bed as wide as the room number, a bedding bed. There was also a large bottle of water purifier, a container with a washbasin, tooth cup, rice bowl, and a small wooden barrel for urination. There was nothing else.

A long sewer was dug at the entrance of the room. The sewage could be poured directly, but the bucket had to be taken away by the cleaning staff in the examination room.

At the same time, the beds in all rooms are actually a kang passage connected to the bottom. When the weather is too cold, the government will specially activate torches at both ends to blow hot smoke in to make the candidates warmer.

Therefore, personal heating items such as charcoal basins are completely eliminated and not allowed to be brought. On the one hand, it is to reduce the operating space for cheating and in the second hand, it is to prevent the number room from intensively igniting fires to keep heating carbon monoxide poisoning.

However, Dong Yun didn't know that even though he felt dissatisfied with the conditions, the conditions that he was much better than the conditions for the imperial examinations in later generations, and the degree of respect for scholars was much higher.

If the Song Dynasty had been put on the Song Dynasty, at least they would regard literati as talented people. But in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, they would expect the government to provide you with bedding, face, brushing teeth, and drinking containers for eating and drinking?

The wooden boards in the Ming and Qing dynasties were not even enough for a person to lie flat, so the imperial examination candidates at that time did not even sleep strictly for the two nights. They just put their lower body on the wooden board, their upper body leaned against the wall, and their bodies were folded to take a nap, trying to finish the hell as soon as possible. Therefore, the imperial examination candidates who were weak occasionally suffered casualties in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

In this life, Li Sucao's imperial examination was already trying hard to make the objective material conditions as much as possible without humiliating scholars and let scholars learn self-esteem.

This is also a judgment that Li Su made after careful consideration and understanding the world. Because scholars in the late Han Dynasty were still very moral and face-saving and were more sensitive to humiliation. They were really as angrily as the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and might abandon the exam in anger, and even defect to Yuan Shao to take revenge.

So Li Su’s principle is: it is impossible to eat, drink and sleep well, after all, it is difficult to adjust everyone. But at least the candidates will not feel hunger and cold and can lie down and sleep flat.

In addition, the body searches for preventing fraud in the Ming and Qing Dynasties did not exist here, but the government made other arrangements in the name of providing benefits.

All the clothes worn by the candidates after entering the venue are also uniformly dressed by the imperial court for public expenses. They are simple cotton robes and are not allowed to wear their own clothes.

Moreover, when you enter the market on the first day, there is a full one and a half hours of preparation time from the first batch of admission to the final delivery of the papers. It will be released from the middle of the Mao hour, and the official exam will not be held until the end of the Chen hour, the end of the Si hour.

After entering the venue, everyone is not allowed to come out within these three days. Those who enter first will not be given a paper. You can take a nap in the exam room for a while and then announce the question only when it is time to stop.

The reason why I left three hours to enter the venue was because of a pioneering act by Li Su who set up an isolation area inside the gate of the Gongyuan and outside the examination area, which gave people changing clothes and showering.

Everyone first left everything they brought in the locker room outside, and put the test license plate and bracelet on their hands to lock it. After three days, they could only come back with the license plate to collect it with their license plate.

After taking off your clothes and personal belongings, you go in and shower in a public shower room. This way, everything is washed away, making it even less likely to be cheated, and avoiding the insultingness of the imperial examinations in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. It is said that it is a hygiene benefit given to the candidates by the court.

After taking a shower, everyone changed into uniforms given by the court for free, and avoided the importance of dressing, and everyone treated everyone equally.

This year, it was a bit hasty to make this batch of uniforms, and the specifications were not uniform. This gave Li Su a headache. He also thought of asking Zhuge Liang to find a way to invent a simple hand-crank sewing machine. After all, Li Su knew this general principle and knew that this route would definitely be made. He still had hope of providing creativity for others to invent.

(To be precise, Huang Yueying asked to invent it, because Zhuge Liang is already very busy now and is not suitable to study the technology used by these women.)

The reason why it is unrealistic to take large-scale baths and change clothes to prevent cheating in history is that in history, the ancients relied on soaking in bathing, and they would only water and take a shower in summer. They could not bear it in the cold state of autumn and winter. The "Autumn Examination" time of the imperial examination was late autumn.

But with Li Su, the situation was obviously different. Eight years ago, he invented a copper-pipe shower for showers and built a water tower for centralized hot water supply.

After settled in Chengdu six or seven years ago, after the construction of the Bathing Hou Mansion, the bathing and hot water supply and drainage technology was far beyond the times. Later, in order to promote the commercial and cultural atmosphere of the Chengdu Plain, Li Su organized the people's spontaneous teahouses and bathhouses to connect every village, and had long accumulated countless experience in the coordinated construction of water supply and drainage infrastructure.

Therefore, now in Chang'an and Xiangyang Gongyuan, these construction experiences come in handy easily. As early as when Li Sugang decided to hold the north-south branch exam, even though he had not come to Xiangyang yet, he had already instructed his subordinates to go to Xiangyang to supervise the construction of the Gongyuan.

So after working for more than two months, there are more than 1,000 beds and several large water towers. The water pressure is enough to meet the scale of the Gongyuan where more than 100 hot water pipes are discharged at the same time.

Each batch of candidates who are put in requires that the shower time should not exceed half an incense stick (15 minutes). After washing, they should immediately dry and change into new clothes. In this way, the bathhouse can be used in turn without being too redundant. Just make sure that one-tenth of the candidates shower at the same time and wash it in ten batches.

To put it bluntly, the construction of the number room for the examination is actually completely different from the number room for the imperial examination in history. If people from later generations come to visit, they will definitely have an impression: Why does this number room look like a seating area in a bath center?

It’s just that there is a chopping board for writing and answering the papers in front, and there are private rooms separated by partitions between each bed. This is a bit like the Tokyo Capsule Hotel of later generations, or the decoration style of the rest cabin.

No matter what, if you upgrade your accommodation and treatment for the imperial examination to the bath center level, no one will die suddenly because they are too tired and overdrawn during the exam.

And later, some funny butterfly effects were caused, so I don’t need to go into details one by one: for example, because this life was the first thing that was like a tribute, and the folk “bathing center” appeared later. As a result, all the decoration styles of the bathing center were learned from the tribute.

When those Qinlou Chu Pavilion, which originally operated the cultural and entertainment industry, saw how elegant the Gongyuan was, they studied and set up places in their own business premises to build high-quality and high-quality bathing and rest with high business value.

However, these filthy evolutions are really irrelevant to Li Su's original intention. They can only be said to be capital pursuing profits. The public is spontaneously happy to hear about it, and Li Su can't stop it.

...

After Dong Yun and Yang Yi and others washed and cleaned up their personal hygiene problems, they were feeling hungry. As the sound of gongs sounded at the beginning of the Chen Shishi, the examination room gradually became quiet.

Then a staff member began to distribute the third professional course test papers. Each group was distributed by two staff members. The first person gave the papers and the second person gave the food for the day.

In order to discipline and reduce the movement of staff in the examination room, the work of delivering food should be completed once a day in the morning and evening, so as to prevent disturbing the ideas of candidates who are doing the questions.

Therefore, the examination room meals are only hot meals for breakfast and midnight snacks, and cold meals are all during the day, so candidates can eat them whenever they want.

Dong Yun was in good condition when he was at home. Two days ago, he felt that the food was not as good as his appetite, so he ate less. On the third day, he got used to it a little, and was hungry two days ago, so he finally looked forward to breakfast.

The staff walked up to him and looked at him eagerly. The breakfast was a large bowl of thick rice and yellow rice noodles. The porridge was covered with pickled radish strips and salty vegetables, and two half-hot fluffy steamed buns.

The main reason is that it is not easy to keep the dim sum warm. Unlike the porridge water that is kept in a bucket, even if it is distributed for a long time, the examination organizers also realize that the distribution is slower, so hot meals mainly rely on porridge.

In addition, there is no meat or meat at all. On the one hand, the court has to provide thousands of people with free food at one time, and everyone has a lot of expenses for eating meat. At the same time, it is also afraid that poor candidates have never eaten greasy gastrointestinal discomfort, and it is inconvenient to be in the closed examination room, so they would rather eat vegetarian food equally to reduce the risk.

Everyone eats hot breakfast so much, and people with big appetites cannot take more. However, you can put the snacks you eat cold during the day, and you can plead with more according to your personal situation.

The last day's dry snacks were still dried baked pies with dried plums and vegetables, which were a bit similar to the large and thin Jinyun sesame cakes/Jinhua Yongkang dried vegetable cakes in later generations. At first glance, it was the Shanyue people's taste in the southern mountainous area of ​​Kuaiji County.

When many candidates eat this kind of dim sum for the first time, it is quite strange that the organizers of the exam are mainly from the north, and even if there are southerners, they will not be the barbarians of Shanyue. How can they choose the dim sum for the taste of Kuaiji Shanyue?

However, after eating it, most candidates think the taste is pretty good. Even the children of rich people will not feel difficult to swallow. Moreover, this thing has a salty and umami flavor, and it still has no loss of taste after it is cooled down. So everyone accepted it quickly and thanked the organizer for finding this kind of good thing, which can be delicious even hot and cold.

After drinking hot porridge, Dong Yun ate steamed buns, and then ate another dried vegetable scone cake. He wiped his mouth and started to do the questions.
Chapter completed!