Governmental Organization of The Ming Dynasty

A Model of Institutional Complementarities in Ancient China

“…12 Exams were held at three levels: provincial, metropolitan, and the palace examination. 13 A candidate was called a Bachelor (xiu cai) if succeeded in provincial examination, a Licentiate (ju ren) if succeeded in metropolitan examination, and a Doctor (jin shi) if succeeded in the palace examination (Teng, 1943;Hucker, 1958). In the Song dynasty, materials covered in the exams were in general relevant to the handling of government affairs.…”

“…In the Ming dynasty, authority at the province level was divided among the Provincial surveillance Office (an cha si), the Provincial Administration Office (bu zheng si), and the Regional Military Commission (du zhi hui shi si), which formed a triad of autonomous agencies called "the three provincial offices" (san si). With the division of authority among the three offices, no person had the authority of a provincial governor (Hucker, 1958).…”

Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires

“…56.7,Polybios 5.56.12, and the posthumous accusation against Hermeias in Polybios 5.55.5. 33 We are informed that also Attalos III of Pergamon and the Seleukid king Alexandros I Balas eliminated the philoi of their predecessors upon their accession Livy,Periochae 50). The court of Alexander the Great, too, was troubled by the king's constant and increasingly violent attempts to rid himself of the established court grandees who dominated his council, and to replace them with his own confidants, cf.…”

“…These areas-corresponding effectively to the palace of Constantine and Justinian-are seldom heard of again, although the Hall of the Nineteen Couches was apparently still functioning c. 1040. 33 As Cyril Mango has plausibly argued, they probably lay outside the fortification wall which the emperor Nikephoros II Phokas put up around the inhabited section of the palace between 963 and 969-thus at exactly the time when the Book of Ceremonies was being compiled. The fortification turned the Palace into "a kind of castle, called by disgruntled contemporaries a 'tyrant's acropolis' ".…”

“…32 Soon scions of noble families would be brought up in the palace together with the imperial off-spring; and through a complex web of matrimonial alliances, the ruling house of the Julio-Claudians ended up absorbing almost the entire old nobility. 33 As befits a court, sycophancy and conceit, flattery and pretence belonged to the order of the day. Self-restraint and polishing of social mores to master the rigid decorum required to play the game of politics in the ambience of the ruler became de rigueur, as described in Wallace-Hadrill's contribution to this volume.…”