Han Khan

Chapter 101: Imperial Examination? No, it is hereditary official position and salary

In Zhang Sheng's opinion, since he has already admitted that the Jinhan tribe is not his own, he must establish a deep-rooted foundation from now on.

The foundation is: the emperor, nobles and priests rule Jinhan together!
The Son of Heaven is the noble leader who was inspired by the Lord of Heaven to establish the Holy Religion and the Jinhan tribe, which is a combination of politics and religion. The nobles and priests are the assistants appointed and enthroned by the Son of Heaven to assist the Son of Heaven in managing the kingdom of God and believers on earth.

Zhang Sheng needs to give them enough benefits so that they can take the initiative to serve the interests of themselves, the Holy Church, and Jin Han.

A theocratic priest system had been established to govern education and religious affairs in Jinhan, but this was far from enough.

Zhang Sheng had to establish an aristocratic system loyal to himself to lead his people and the army, but why couldn't he choose bureaucrats?
The reason is simple. Even if enough bureaucrats are appointed as heads of various hundred households, battalions, and regiments, these positions will gradually become hereditary over time.

This is because the way of ruling nomadic peoples is fundamentally different from that of managing settled farming farmers.

To become the leader of Jinhan organizations at all levels, one does not need much cultural knowledge. Instead, one needs to be an officer with strong personal strength and be able to lead the entire hundred households and battalion groups to join the army and fight.

What's more, it is impossible for education to make everyone understand knowledge all at once and assist Zhang Sheng in managing Jin Han, not to mention that this is on the grassland of cultural desert.

However, whether it is the priests or the fourteen levels of nobles that will appear in the future, their roots and sources all come from Zhang Sheng, the emperor.

If they dare to betray Zhang Sheng, they will lose their status, wealth and legal rights to their lives.

At that time, Zhang Sheng could legitimately deprive them of their power and wealth, and dispose of their lives.

In this way, not only can Zhang Sheng ensure absolute control over the Jinhan tribe, but his own safety can also be guaranteed.

At the same time, this system would force those who wanted to gain more power and wealth to rely on Zhang Sheng, thus further consolidating his ruling position.

In contrast, priests were able to improve their status by learning and mastering various knowledge. They were valued and promoted because of their erudition and wisdom.

However, the situation is not so simple for the officers who command the people.

So, how did the nobility come into being in the Jinhan tribe?
This relied on the system of selecting people based on military merit and conferring titles. The core of this system was to emphasize the principle of military merit above all else, and only by establishing merit on the battlefield could one obtain aristocratic status.

If a person has not made great military achievements, he will only become an ordinary citizen or even a slave and be ruled.

Military strength and combat capability have always been regarded as the most important abilities in the Jinhan tribe. Officers who became heads of ten households, heads of a hundred households, battalion commanders, etc., all obtained their status through military exploits.

From then on, all members of the Jinhan tribe could only accumulate military merits by participating in wars and conquests, thereby achieving promotion in their personal status and rank.

This selection mechanism based on military merit allowed those who were brave, talented and good at fighting to stand out and become the elite class in society - the aristocracy.

Of course, Zhang Sheng is not so rigid as to really achieve absolute fairness, and such fairness would not be good for him.

Nominal relatives like Zhang Zhongxian, Zhang Xibao, Zhang Anzuo and Zhang Jinda, as well as many Han military generals and loyal people like Koza, will definitely be relied upon by him and become great nobles.

Why was the aristocracy necessary? This was because among the population ruled by the Jin and Han dynasties, in addition to more than 10,000 Han people, the remaining 80,000 to 90,000 were conquered Hu nomads.

These people do not have the same cultural background and living habits as the Han people, so a special system is needed to manage them.

Therefore, Zhang Sheng decided to follow the example of the Zhou emperor, enfeoff the nobles on a large scale, and implement the system of Xia Jun Yi Min.

He will select those Han people who can speak elegant language and write sacred texts, and appoint them as nobles and priests of Jin Han.

These Han people will manage the Hu herdsmen from different tribes and clans on behalf of Zhang Sheng, and will be responsible for spreading the Haotian belief.

In this way, these people of different backgrounds can be better unified and managed, and a stable order can be established in Jinhan. In addition, because of the mixing of various tribes and clans, and Zhang Sheng's order to prohibit the use of the previous tribe name, everyone can only call themselves Jinhan people, so the nobles can only be called Jinhan nobles, not tribal nobles as before.

He hoped that in this way, all the Hu people would identify themselves as members of the Jin Han, thus promoting integration between different ethnic groups.

Only in this way can we truly establish a group of Jinhan people who believe in Haotian and achieve long-term stability in Jinhan.

The system that Zhang Sheng was planning to establish was actually like the idea of ​​the emperor and the literati in the Song Dynasty sharing the world.

However, the "scholar-officials" of Jin Han were not selected through the imperial examination system. Instead, they were selected based on military merits and closeness to Zhang Sheng. This is really...

People like Zhang Zhongxian and Zhang Xibao achieved their status through their military achievements, loyalty to Zhang Sheng, and knowledge. More importantly, they were both Han Chinese and had nominal clan relations, so they were canonized as nobles by Zhang Sheng.

Once they obtain this position, all they have to do is continue to be loyal to Zhang Sheng and his descendants.

Then their hereditary status would be guaranteed, because it would be their descendants who would assist the new emperor after Zhang Sheng's death.

It's quite retro, as if we have returned to the era when officials were appointed based on blood ties.

And Zhang Sheng is the source of their status and privileges. Only with his appointment and words can the nobles be nobles and the priests be priests.

Of course, all this was just his idea, but he had already figured out how to rule the Jinhan tribe.

He knew that he didn't need to manage everyone in the Jinhan tribe, he only needed to manage those who received power from him.

But he didn't want the Jinhan tribe to become like the Song Dynasty, where officials who were not good at martial arts and management were selected from those who only knew how to write to manage the Jinhan tribe.

The system of selecting officials based on their writing skills was not suitable for Jin Han, and this method of selecting talents would even kill Jin Han.

The system of selecting officials through examinations originated in the Chinese state. In theory, this official selection system that only considers writing regardless of blood relationship is very fair, and it allows most male subjects in a country to have the opportunity to become officials.

Compared to relying on bloodline or reincarnation to become an official, this is such an improvement!
In the future, "civil servant examinations" and "public servant examinations" will become popular in many advanced countries. Selecting grassroots public servants through examinations has become the mainstream in the world.

Therefore, the progressiveness of the imperial examination system is beyond doubt!

But the current Jinhan tribe cannot implement such an official selection system, because there are too few people under the Jinhan tribe who can speak Chinese and write Chinese characters, and even the most basic paper is a problem.

How to enable more people to get access to books and learn knowledge is still a huge challenge.

What's more, the small Jinhan tribe does not need so many officials.

Noblemen could not pass the imperial examinations.

However, the examination system can be retained in the Imperial Academy of the Temple, as a test of the knowledge of the priests and students who study in the Imperial Academy, and then they will be awarded the corresponding degrees.

Especially those priests, after they are proficient in reading and reciting the three scriptures of the holy religion and various holy rituals, they can be sent out to serve as priests in each hundred households, or sent to other tribes as missionaries to spread the holy religion.

Zhang Sheng turned his head and looked at the people around him. He seemed to be able to see the long river of history flowing before his eyes.

He said:
"In the distant Shang and Zhou dynasties, King Wu of Zhou granted fiefs to the princes to protect the Zhou Dynasty.

In Jinhan, I also hope to be able to assist me in managing all the people of Jinhan by conferring titles on fourteen levels of nobles...

(End of this chapter)