Historical Simulation: A Study of Civil Service Examinations, the Family Line and Cultural Capital in China

Abstract

In this study, we investigate what would happen in a Chinese historical family line. We have analyzed a particular family line which had a great many candidates who passed the very tough examinations for Chinese government officials over 500 years. First, we studied the genealogical records Zokufu in China. Second, based on the study, we implemented an agent-based model with the family line network as an adjacency matrix, and the personal profile data as an attribution matrix. Third, using the "inverse simulation" technique, we optimized the agent-based model in order to fit the simulation profiles to the real profile data. From the intensive experiments, we have found that both grandfather and mother have a profound impact within a family in (1) transmitting cultural capital to the children, and (2) maintaining the norm system of the family. We conclude that advanced agent-based models are able to contribute to the discovery of new knowledge in the fields of historical science.

Pattern-Oriented Inverse Simulation for Analyzing Social Problems: Family Strategies in Civil Service Examination in Imperial China

“…Among this group, simulation experiment 1 employs a single pattern that (1) successful candidates who received qualified titles as Jinshi , Gongshi , Juren, Gongsheng, Jiansheng and Shengyuan were sustained in the time series, and (2) drawing was kept as a traditional life style in the descendants and painters were sustained in the time series respectively to reproduce patterns observed in the Y family line. The simulation setting corresponds to the IS with a single pattern used in [9]. In simulation experiment 2, there were two patterns of successful candidates at different scales where (1) successful candidates who passed the final examination and received titles as Jinshi were sustained in the time series, and (2) successful candidates who received titles as Gongshi , Juren, Gongsheng, Jiansheng or Shengyuan were sustained in the time series are employed to reproduce patterns observed in the Y family line.…”

“…Terano and Kurahashi employed IS to historical and cultural anthropology in imperial China [9]. They successfully reproduced the successful examination candidate pattern of a family line and showed an applicability of IS with a single pattern to historical studies [9].…”

“…However, our previous work ignored the importance of using observed multiple patterns to guide the agent-based modeling for analyzing family strategies. We failed to reproduce multiple observed patterns of the Y family line [9,21].…”