#785 1015 · Song dynasty imperial court · Public administration / examination system

Song China solved exam-grader bribery by making it impossible to know whose paper you were grading

问题

Examiners who could see a candidate's name and handwriting could be bribed or could favor a patron's son, no matter how the court tried to police their conscience

背景

Song-dynasty China's imperial examinations were the primary gateway into the civil service, and examiners graded papers with the candidate's name, birthplace, and family background written plainly on the page. An examiner who recognized a name — a patron's son, a personal favorite, a rival's relative, or simply a candidate who had paid a bribe — could tilt a grade with little chance of being caught, regardless of how strictly the court tried to vet examiners' character beforehand.

Simply punishing examiners after the fact, once favoritism was discovered, did nothing to stop it happening in the first place, and no amount of screening could guarantee a grader's honesty would hold when a familiar or influential name appeared on the page in front of them.

换别人会怎么做

Vet examiners more carefully before appointing them and punish favoritism severely after the fact -- the standard imperial response to corruption, which relies entirely on an examiner's character holding up in the moment a familiar or influential name actually appears in front of them.

他们看到了什么

No amount of screening or threatened punishment can guarantee an examiner's honesty will survive recognizing a patron's son on the page -- the court realized the fix wasn't to make examiners more trustworthy, it was to remove the one piece of information (the candidate's identity) that made favoritism or bribery possible to act on at all.

那一手

Song Taizong first adopted huming ('name concealment'), sealing or removing identifying information from exam papers, on official Chen Jing's advice. The court went further with tenglu ('transcription'): a separate copying office recopied every exam script in a standardized hand before it reached graders, first trialed at the palace examination in 1005 and extended to the provincial examinations in 1015, so that not even a candidate's distinctive handwriting could tip off an examiner to their identity. Up to eight examiners graded each transcribed, anonymized paper independently.

为什么管用

Sealing a candidate's name and having a separate office transcribe every script into a standardized hand before grading removes both the name and the handwriting -- the two channels an examiner could otherwise use to identify who they were grading. With neither signal available, an examiner has no way to act on a bribe, a family connection, or a personal grudge even if they wanted to, because favoring a specific candidate requires first knowing which paper is theirs. Having up to eight examiners independently grade the same anonymized script adds a second layer, since even a lucky guess at a candidate's identity by one examiner couldn't consistently sway a result across all of them.

值了多少

Examiners grading a Song-dynasty exam had no reliable way to know whose paper they were reading, removing both the temptation and the practical means to favor a specific candidate by name, family connection, or bribe, regardless of the examiner's own character or intentions.

什么时候会失灵

The mechanism depends on the concealment actually being complete -- a distinctive writing style, an unusual phrase, or examiner-candidate collusion arranged in advance (a prearranged signal hidden in the answer itself) can defeat anonymization, which is why the transcription step existed specifically to close the handwriting loophole that name-sealing alone left open. It also only works for decisions that can be evaluated on the content of a submission alone; it doesn't transfer to evaluations that legitimately require knowing who the person is, such as an interview, a reference check, or any judgment that depends on the candidate's specific history or circumstances rather than a discrete, gradable piece of work.

后来呢

Huming and tenglu are recognized in the history of the keju examination system as early, empire-scale ancestors of blind review — the same underlying principle used a millennium later in double-blind peer review for academic journals and the screens used in modern professional orchestra auditions to prevent bias by name or appearance.

资料来源

[1]试卷糊名的由来光明网 (Guangming Daily), 2024news.gmw.cn
[2]科举考试中的糊名与誊录制度上海市教育考试院 (Shanghai Municipal Education Examinations Authority), 2020shmeea.edu.cn