What is it about?
All officials should be honest, right? So what happens when one official's incorruptibility gets celebrated? This article traces through the Ming period (1368-1644) how a peculiar institution arose to honor one imperial official, and was imitated to honor others. But it was then used against the first man in factional court politics, so that the story of how he earned he had to be retold.
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Why is it important?
We often think of Confucian ethics as being fixed, at least by the Ming period, which began some 1800 years after Confucius's lifetime. But the practice of Confucian ethics was always changing, just as with any other human product. It was affected by political strife as well as by the actions of especially good men and the people they worked for.
Perspectives
I ran across this kind of building, a "Pavilion to Honor an Official who Rejected Money" or "Nixed-the-Bucks Hut" and had not idea what it was. After finding a number of examples I finally managed to put them all in chronological order and figure out what the heck was going on. It was not easy!
SARAH SCHNEEWIND
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Pavilions to Celebrate Honest Officials: An Authenticity Dilemma in Fifteenth-Century China, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, February 2022, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341565.
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