However, in history, there was a man who was killed because he got the top prize. This man is called Lang, the most miserable scholar in history.
Chen An, a native of Min County, Fujian Province, was born in the early Ming Dynasty. He was called a holy boy since childhood, especially good at poetry and prose, and became famous as an adult. He is also known as Lin Hong and Chen Zhongwan? Top Ten Talents in Southern Fujian? . In the year of Legacy of Envoys, Zhu Yuanzhang held a huge imperial examination, with Liu Sanwu and Wang Fuzhi as examiners.
At that time, Chen An was lucky enough to take the exam and successfully reached the top of high school, becoming the sixth champion of Daming. Originally, it was a happy and glorious thing for An Chen, and he himself was still waiting to ride a burly horse. However, what happened next completely changed the fate of An Chen and the imperial examination system that had been inherited for nearly 800 years.
The thing is, in the imperial examination, the imperial court chose 52 scholars, but the problem is that these 52 scholars are all southerners, which in itself has made the northern students very dissatisfied, but it happened that the three officials in charge of the examiner at that time were southerners, which made the northern students have to suspect that there was fraud.
So, on the day the list was released, northern students took to the streets to make trouble and asked the court to give a statement. At this time, some ministers in the north of the imperial court also wrote to ask for a thorough investigation of this matter, so Zhu Yuanzhang ordered a thorough investigation of the imperial examination.
However, when the examiners sent by Zhu Yuanzhang consulted the papers of some northern students, they found that the articles they wrote were obviously not as good as those of southern students.
In fact, this is understandable. Since the Song Dynasty, the level of economic development in the north began to lag far behind that in the south. The so-called economic base determines the superstructure, and the imbalance of economic development will inevitably lead to the extreme imbalance of educational resources. In this context, the number of Jinshi admitted to the South naturally began to be far greater than that of the North.
According to the researchers' statistics, during the whole Northern Song Dynasty, there were 9,630 people who passed the examination for Jinshi, of whom only 400 were from the north, and there was not even a fraction of those from the south. At the same time, in the nearly 300-year history of the Ming Dynasty, there were 89 top scholars, but only 1 1 was from the north, which shows the gap in education level between the north and the south.
Of course, this reason was obviously unconvincing for the northern students at that time, especially when they learned that Zhu Yuanzhang was personally concerned about this matter, which made it more and more fierce. In their view, they are not on the list anyway, and barefoot people are not afraid of wearing shoes. Finally, maybe they will give some places. Therefore, they insist that there must be a black-box operation and keep putting pressure on the court.
Finally, in order to make things clear thoroughly, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered all the papers of the students from the north and the south to be transferred out and re-examined. In fact, so far, Zhu Yuanzhang has not killed his heart. He just wants to find out the truth.
But the bad thing is that several examiners are witty. When Zhu Yuanzhang asked for a thorough investigation for the first time, they deliberately took out the inferior papers of northern literati for the examiner's reference, thinking that things could be concluded without anyone knowing.
But the problem is that they didn't expect the northern students to be more and more fierce. In the end, Zhu Yuanzhang actually wanted to look at everyone's papers, so it was naturally exposed. Although Zhu Yuanzhang read all the papers and found that the articles written by students in the north were obviously not as good as those written in the south, it was obviously exaggerated to say that a Jinshi was not selected. After all, some articles written by northern students are actually not bad, and it is reasonable to choose them.
But the problem is that the examiner's behavior before was obviously deceiving the monarch, which made people vaguely feel that there was fraud. Therefore, Zhu Yuanzhang used this as an excuse to rectify the examination style and discipline and launched a vigorous campaign to crack down on the fraud in the imperial examination. As a result, examiners Wang Fuji, Zhang Xin and Bai Xindao were all executed, and 84-year-old Liu Sanwu was spared the death penalty because of his age, but he was also sent to the frontier. This incident is also the most famous North-South List case in history.
As for Chen An, the top scholar, and Tan Hua, the second place, were all removed from their names because of this incident, and then Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the car to be executed. It's really a pity that there are only 20 days before their high school. After this incident, Zhu Yuanzhang began to implement the system of taking scholars from north to south, and the imperial examination system was divided into two lists from then on.