"Your Highness, this is a detailed list of the expenses of this examination from our staff."
In the afternoon, an official from the Ministry of Civil Affairs sent the cost report of this scientific examination to Zhao Hongrun.
Obviously, Zhao Hongrun's revenge on Luo Rong in the morning was regarded by the invigilators of the Ministry of Civil Affairs as a deterrent to scare the monkeys.
Zhao Hongrun refused to point out this.
"Thank you very much, sir. Let me go and get busy first."
"yes."
The official resigned.
Seeing this, Zhao Hongrun picked up the stack of reports and looked at them carefully.
At this time, he was sitting alone in the side hall room of Confucius Temple, accompanied by only eight clan guards except Shen Yu and Lu Mu.
As the saying goes, if you are not in your position, you will not seek to govern. Now, as a prisoner, Zhao Hongrun should patrol the exams of the scholars in the examination hall to find out whether there is any fraud. But the problem is that there are more than 100 people in the entire Confucius Temple. How could he and eight Zongwei alone monitor more than 2,600 candidates at the same time?
Even if you break your leg while running, you can’t do it!
Therefore, Zhao Hongrun was not in a hurry to catch the fraud problem. Anyway, for him, the whole Luo Wenzhong was the purpose of this trip. As for the fraud problem in the examination room, let's see if he could catch any clues.
If it really happened, Zhao Hongrun wouldn't mind rectifying the examination room for Wei. After all, the more stable the Wei Dynasty is, the more stable he will be as a prince, and the easier it will be for him to become a free king.
Reaching out to pick up the tea cup next to him and taking a few sips, Zhao Hongrun turned his eyes to the report in his hand again.
As he expected, there were indeed falsehoods in this official report.
"Forty-six thousand three hundred taels...ha!"
Zhao Hongrun shook his head slightly.
According to the records in this report, the Ministry of Personnel submitted an application for a total of 46,300 taels of silver to the Ministry of Household Affairs this time to repair the nearly 3,000 rooms in the Confucius Temple. Facilities, candles distributed to scholars, and relevant allowances for officials and handymen who participated in the examination, etc.
This list was quite detailed, and it seemed that there was nothing wrong with it. However, Zhao Hongrun had seen the extremely crude cells with his own eyes, and he would never believe that the Ministry of Personnel spent more than half of the money to repair those cells.
One quilt costs ten taels? Are you kidding me?
Zhao Hongrun simply couldn't imagine that the bedding in the room, which was so thin that there was almost no cotton wool, and exuded a musty smell as if it had not been taken out of the warehouse for an unknown number of days, could be worth ten taels.
You must know that Zhao Hongrun asked the eunuch for a brand new thick quilt stuffed with cotton wool in the palace, which only cost more than ten taels.
"Gao Kuo, Zhongzhao, you two go check it out. I want to know the source of these cotton mattresses... Go to the warehouse of the Ministry of Personnel to find it, give some money to the handymen there, and ask them to relax. If you give I still refuse to disclose the money, so you two can make up your own mind."
"Yes." Zong Wei Gao Kuo made a move and the two of them clasped their fists and left.
At this time, Zhao Hongrun put the report in his arms and walked out of the side hall of Confucius Temple with the remaining six sect guards to the number room.
The general layout of the nearly three thousand number houses is in the shape of a "back" from a bird's eye view, with the outer circle and the inner circle built face to face. Therefore, when walking on the path, you can see the two rows of numbers on the left and right respectively. room, and clearly saw the scholars in the room immersed in writing.
Zhao Hongrun approached a room curiously and glanced sideways at the scholar's examination paper.
"..." Maybe he noticed something. The scholar raised his head and looked at the masked Zhao Hongrun in astonishment. Without knowing what was going on, he was inevitably a little nervous.
Seeing this, Zhao Hongrun said calmly: "You write your own, I just read the test questions."
"Yes..." The student breathed a sigh of relief after hearing this and continued writing quickly.
"Hmm, are the four essays tested on the first day?"
After glancing at the test questions, Zhao Hongrun walked away.
The so-called Four Books refers to using paragraphs and sentences within the scope of the Four Books as questions to test students' talents.
What are the Four Books?
That is, the four books "Great Learning", "The Doctrine of the Mean", "The Analects" and "Mencius". The examiners who set the questions often arbitrarily extract a paragraph of text or even a few numbers from them. Apart from this, there is no other prompt.
This is used to test students' proficiency in the Four Books.
The so-called Four Books are also called "Speech on behalf of the Saints". As the name suggests, they are written in the tone of Confucius and Mencius.
Different from other literary genres such as poems, songs, and poems, the framework of the Four Books is strictly limited. The article must strictly follow [breaking the title], [carrying the title], [starting], [starting], [starting], and [middle]
It is written in eight parts: strands], [back strands], and [bundled strands]. Among the four parts of the last four strands, each part needs to have two strands of parallel words, that is, pairs, which require equal and oblique opposition.
Therefore, the four-script essay is also called the eight-legged essay.
The most demanding thing is that the words and allusions used in the article need to be found in scriptures or historical records. They cannot make up random things by themselves, and they must not describe romance.
In short, it is a very boring and almost unreadable article, but on the other hand, it can also be used to test students' understanding and familiarity with the Four Books, and it is one of the criteria for testing a scholar's knowledge.
And this time the examination question set by the Ministry of Civil Affairs is, "The Master said to Yan Yuan, use it and do it, discard it and hide it, but you and I have this husband!"
This sentence comes from the "Shu Er" chapter of "The Analects". It is what Confucius said to his student Yan Yuan. The original meaning is, "When the country uses you, you should use your talents to implement various ideas according to your own ideas."
"When the country no longer needs you, you put away your opinions and ideas. It seems that you and I are the only ones who can do this naturally and frankly."
In Zhao Hongrun's opinion, this question is not difficult. As long as you can recite "Shu Er" in its entirety, it is not difficult to understand the meaning of this sentence. The problem is how to write a narrative using the words of sages to elaborate on this point of view.
"The Master said to Yan Yuan, "If you use it, you will practice it; if you leave it, you will hide it. But I have this husband with you! The proper way for a sage to move and store things will be revealed to those who are able to do so. The sage's behavior and storage is not easy to regulate, since Yan Zi
A few, and only then can we talk about it. Therefore, it is specially said: There are only one or two ways to experience a life.
It is often but rare to listen to others' opinions and seek to be able to go beyond what is available. When you have something, you can be confident. But you may be alone and have nothing in common, and you may be alone and have nothing to talk to. This is the meaning of its support.
That’s right, and I’m lucky enough to have something to say to you now…Well, this scholar writes well.”
Zhao Hongrun checked each student's answer sheet from time to time as he walked.
There are scholars who write well and well, even Zhao Hongrun feels inferior to him, after all, he is not interested in it at all; there are also those who write in a messy way and copy the words of saints and sages without any detail.
If you don't have your own ideas, what's the point of speaking on behalf of the sages? It's just like using the words of the sages to speak.
During this period, Zhao Hongrun also saw a strange thing. He actually translated the sage's words as, "Confucius said to Yan Yuan, whatever you can use is useful, and what you don't need should be hidden. You and I who understand this truth,
He is the most manly person in the world!』
Zhao Hongrun was simply stunned.
"What does it mean that you and I, who understand the whole truth, are considered to be manly people in the world?... Does it really not matter if you translate it so domineeringly?"
Zhao Hongrun was almost frightened when he saw that weird student didn't even write any words after finishing the translation, but just drank and ate chicken as if to celebrate himself.
"This guy is just here to try out the three-day tour, right? It's such a vast world, full of wonders."
After taking a look at the gorgeous red brocade clothes on that strange student, Zhao Hongrun shook his head and walked away.
In his opinion, this student is most likely the son of a local rich and powerful person. He is just here to visit the capital. How can he still take part in the examination at this level?
"I don't know how much I spent to buy a place for the provincial examination."
Shaking his head, Zhao Hongrun put this strange student behind him. He didn't bother to pay attention to this kind of guy. Anyway, this guy couldn't get into the rankings at all.
Zhao Hongrun walked for a while again.
I have to say, apart from that weird one, the standards of the scholars who participated in the examination this time were generally acceptable. Some of the students' articles even made Zhao Hongrun feel good after reading them. But having said that, today they are just good at it.
On the first day of the test, it was difficult to determine the final score.
In addition to understanding the level of candidates in this examination, Zhao Hongrun was also secretly concerned about the issue of fraud in the examination room, but as far as he could see, he did not find anything wrong. It seemed that all the scholars were answering questions and writing in a disciplined manner.
Word.
"This is strange. Could it be that the fraud in the examination room is a myth? Or... are officials from the Ministry of Civil Affairs involved?"
Zhao Hongrun thought silently.
In his view, there are two types of fraud in examinations. One is that candidates cheat on their own, and the other is that candidates bribe examiners to cheat together. No fraud incident can escape from these two assumptions.
When it comes to candidates cheating on their own, it is nothing more than secretly concealing it. However, the officials of Confucius Temple are very strict on this point, and there should be no oversights. In other words, if it still happens frequently in the examination hall in previous years
In case of fraud, it is only possible that some officials from the Ministry of Civil Affairs were involved.
To be honest, this method of fraud is not easy to catch. After all, there are too many people involved. From the invigilator to the directors, officers and handymen of the Confucius Temple, they may all be co-conspirators. As long as the parties involved remain silent, this kind of fraud will
It's hard to get a handle on things.
Around dusk, Zongwei, Gao Kuo and Zhongzhao came back and brought back the results of their investigation.
They spent fifty taels of silver to bribe a keeper of the official's warehouse, and then they learned that there were many tattered cotton mattresses piled up in the official's warehouse. Most of these cotton mattresses were from people in the capital.
The price of what was taken back from the hands varied from two taels of silver to four or five taels of silver. However, after the Ministry of Officials took back these junk goods at a low price, they submitted a report to the Ministry of Household Affairs stating that a quilt cost 10 taels of silver and passed it off as good.
Don't think that you can earn a few taels of silver just by making a cotton mattress. You must know that there are more than 2,600 scholars here. In total, this is nearly 20,000 taels of silver, which is a lot of money.
"It seems that the DPRK lacks a supervisory agency, such as the Yushitai or something...it relies solely on self-supervision by the staff, haha!"
On that day, Zhao Hongrun wrote down the matter and waited for it to be submitted to the emperor in the future.
『PS: There is a guest appearance by a special character in this chapter. Those of you who understand it are not allowed to comment. In addition, I would like to thank classmate "靇靻 Hello" for being the first host of this book. I just noticed it. Please allow me to add more.
Slowly, I have been compiling the detailed outline and information of this volume in the past two days. Thank you very much.』