On the fourth day of the fifth month of the fourth year of Tiansheng, the imperial court has an edict that the imperial examination will be held this year, and all those who should have been admitted to the three examinations and the five examinations in previous years will be exempted from the solution and directly participate in the provincial examination. Although Lin Wensi is only 35 years old, he has actually participated in five provincial examinations and obtained the qualification for exemption.

Xu Ping felt that he had succeeded in studying in the past two years, and he was determined to take the exam this year, actively preparing for the exam, and on the other hand, he was moving around to find a guarantor and trust his relationship in order to obtain the qualification to participate in the release examination.

There is a character in the imperial examination, which refers to its ancient meaning, the inspection system since the Han Dynasty. Unlike the Ming and Qing dynasties, the imperial examination in the Song Dynasty still attached equal importance to inspection and examination, and the local government had the obligation to review the qualifications of candidates. Otherwise, even if you go all the way to high school, if you are found to have unethical things, such as having a criminal record, not honoring your parents, etc., you will still be deprived of your birth, and the magistrate will also be implicated, so this review is not a formality, and needs to be taken seriously.

Fortunately, Xu Ping has been successful in the operation of the grange over the years, and has helped several places to tidy up the fields, and has gained a good reputation and easily passed this hurdle. Originally, there were restrictions on participating in the imperial examination as a merchant, but it was not completely liberalized at this time, but Xu Zheng already had an official body, and the Xu family became an official household, so this restriction was gone.

At the beginning of June, after the farm work in the village was completed, Xu Ping devoted himself to the intense preparation for the exam.

On this day, the wind and the sun were beautiful, and there were no clouds, Xu Ping sat in the shade under the big willow tree outside the village, holding a book of endowments in his hand, and studied it painstakingly.

Not far away, Lin Suniang sat on a big rock by the water, stretched into the water with her bare feet, and watched a group of fish swim around her delicate feet, quietly enjoying the early summer sun.

Xu Ping had already told her not to bind her feet, and she was blinded by Lin Suniang. Fortunately, after a while, Lin Suniang herself felt that it was too uncomfortable to wrap her feet, so she let go again. And at this time, the little girl is the most popular to wear girl socks, which are the kind of socks with five toes separated, which cannot be worn after wrapping the feet, which also makes Lin Suniang distressed. After a month or two of playing with Su'er, they threw the matter of foot binding to Java.

Not far away, Xiuxiu and Su'er were sitting facing each other, one of them playing with a handful of flowers and plants. The two are two years older, so it's not enough to still play.

Since he knew that this year's opening of the course, Xu Ping's days have mostly been like this. In the next year, she will marry Lin Suniang, and the relationship between the two is much closer, and they can say almost anything, without the scruples of the previous two years. Lin Suniang was fine anyway, so she accompanied Xu Ping to study.

After reading the two articles of his predecessors, Xu Ping rubbed his eyes, put the book under his head, hid on the grass, and looked at the few white clouds in the sky.

What is the most troublesome part of preparing for the imperial examination? If Xu Ping was asked to answer when he first arrived in this world, he must have said that he was memorizing those scriptures. I actually read the book, and after I prepared it, I realized that it wasn't like that at all. The scriptures are dead, and the hardest thing is the transformation of thoughts.

Every era has its own ideological mainstream, which affects all aspects of society. In particular, the content of the imperial examination directly reflects the ruler's will and rule, and is closely related to the mainstream ideology of society.

And the era in which Xu Ping lives is a period of great ideological change, if you can't grasp the pulse of the times, it will be a joke to think that the first place in the imperial examination. Taizu Zhao Kuangyin immediately fought the world, although he admired literature, he did not have any specific ideological direction. Taizong worships the Buddha, and although the imperial examination is dominated by Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism still have a great influence. It was not until Emperor Zhenzong established that the Confucian scriptures were used as the basis for scientific research, but the wind of doubting the scriptures had risen, and a great storm of ideological change was brewing in the whole society.

This is the big ideological background, and it took Xu Ping more than two years to understand this background.

In the previous life, due to the influence of the idea of class struggle in historical research, and also because the study of modern history began with the collapse of the country and the collapse of the family, and the relationship between being bullied by outsiders everywhere, the study of Song history was particularly sketchy, which directly affected the historical education that Xu Ping received. In the textbooks, the Song Dynasty was the beginning of the decline of ancient Chinese society, and poverty and weakness were unified, and the evaluation was very low. When Xu Ping grew up, he evaluated the Song Dynasty as the pinnacle of Chinese feudal society from the perspective of social development. To sum up, it is nothing more than a vacillation between the relations of production and the productive forces, and it is impossible to reach a convincing conclusion.

Overseas, Song history is a prominent study in the study of Chinese history, especially in Japan, and the Song Dynasty is said to be the beginning of modern Chinese history, that is, the theory of change in the Tang and Song dynasties. Its origin is nothing more than a historical syllogism of East Asian history to the West, and a theoretical construction for the purpose of invading China. Europe and the United States have taken a different path, treating the scholarly class formed in the Song Dynasty as the social elite, and using Western elite theories to explain Chinese society after the Song Dynasty.

In Xu Ping's previous life, he studied Chinese history from a Western point of view, first set up a European template there, and stuffed the long Chinese history into it, distorting it to the point where it could not be distorted.

Putting aside the influence of the West, looking at history purely from the perspective of the Chinese is naturally different. In this era, if Xu Ping used the education of his previous life to talk about history with others, he would definitely be regarded as a neurotic.

Chinese do not believe in God and do not automatically think that history has a fixed template there, and as long as the template is set in, it is a winner. It is not wrong that the productive forces determine the relations of production, but it is wrong to think that the relations of production are only the same set of templates that have occurred in Europe in history.

Xu Ping's politics are still qualified, and he naturally knows that the so-called capitalism that replaces feudalism is capitalism of free competition, and this system has only been successful in predominantly Christian countries, and all transplants in the rest of the world have failed, without exception for hundreds of years. That is to say, every civilization can only succeed if it finds a system that fits it, and whether in his previous life or in this era of the world, transplanting a capitalist system can only be a disaster, not a good outcome. If you want to contribute to this world, you can only combine some of the basic principles you learned in your previous life with this era.

Xu Ping, from the perspective of a reader of this era, the periodization of Chinese history is very different from the Western template. The Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties were ancient, and the Zhou Dynasty was extremely prosperous, and in order to solve the crisis that appeared in the late Zhou Dynasty, there was a cultural grand occasion of the hundred schools of thought.

In the following one or two thousand years, they were all experimenting with reform within the ideological framework of the hundred schools of thought. The rule of the world in the hundreds of schools is nothing more than the four schools of Confucianism, Taoism and Mo, and the others are not systematic.

The first to appear on the stage of history was the Legalists, who completed the unification of the world for hundreds of years from the Warring States Period to the Qin Dynasty. Legalism is a theory tailored for rulers, with the emperor in the world, to the extreme, except for the Son of Heaven, all the people in the world are the tools of the Son of Heaven. Everything in the world depends on the word of the Son of Heaven. This is a more extreme theory than the fascist militarism of later generations, which still serves one class, while Legalist theory completely serves one person. Of course, Legalism has nothing to do with a society governed by the rule of law, and this set of theories is based on a hierarchical class society. Since the end of the Qin Dynasty, Chen Sheng shouted: "Princes and generals, rather have a kind!" "Legalism has been completely eliminated, and this kind of theory is a disaster for governing the country.

In the Qin Dynasty of the Han Dynasty, it was the Taoists who replaced the Legalists in the forefront, the so-called Huang Lao's technique, and ruled by inaction. After decades to Emperor Wu, the local tyrants were rampant, the central strength was weak, the external humiliation was to the Xiongnu, and the internal was subject to the local control. Emperor Wu put an end to the dominance of Taoism, and Confucianism came to the forefront. At this time, Confucianism was different from later generations, emphasizing the induction of heaven and man, and the study of weft, which was a school of mysticism in Confucianism. At this time, Confucianism still obviously had the characteristics of serving the rulers, but lacked the ideal of governing the world. Finally, in the war with the Taoists who turned to the people, the Han Dynasty finally fell, and the theoretical experiment of the hundred schools of thought came to an end.

After that, in the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the mainstream thought oscillated and swayed in Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, and the Han nation itself faced an existential crisis, and its thinking did not make great achievements.

Sui and Qin died in the second century, and until the middle of the Tang Dynasty, they ushered in a period of peace. The Tang Dynasty was a very special dynasty, with great external martial arts in the early stage, and collapsed in the middle and late stages, which was out of control. The cultural thought of the Tang Dynasty, especially in the early stage, was mainly based on accepting foreign culture, and its independent development was basically stagnant, which seemed to be prosperous and lively, but it buried a crisis for the Han nation. There is the Tang Dynasty, which is a rare dynasty in Chinese history that continues to have the Huhua of the Han people and the Huhua of the Han land. By the end of the Tang Dynasty, some traditional Han lands in the north, such as the Yellow River and the Liao River in the northeast, were the core areas of the Han people since the Warring States period, and at this time they were dominated by the Hu people, mainly the Bohai people and the Xi people. The northwest is from the west of Guanzhong to the north, and Hexi and Jiuyuan are also dominated by Han people from the Han Dynasty, and they are completely Hu at this time. Xu Ping didn't understand why the territory of the Northern Song Dynasty was so small in his previous life, but he realized that this was already the largest area where the Han people lived. In terms of dynasties, the territory of the Tang Dynasty was vast, and in terms of ethnicity, the living area of the Han people in the Tang Dynasty continued to shrink, and it was only after the Song Dynasty that it expanded again.

It is against this background that Confucianism, which adheres to the distinction between Huayi and Yi, has re-entered the stage of history. At this time, Confucianism was different from Han Confucianism, starting from Han Yu, moving out the way of Confucius and Mencius, especially Mencius, and finally forming Song Confucianism. The doctrine of this school is said to be the least liked by the rulers, and the idea that the people are noble and the monarch is light has many constraints on the imperial power. However, since Song Taizong began to lose repeated wars with foreign countries, the imperial power could only be impatient to compromise.

Xu Ping's era was the time when Confucianism was about to officially enter the stage of history, full of vitality, and a storm of ideas would form a few decades later, second only to the period of the Hundred Schools of Thought in history. At this time, Confucianism was not yet the later decadent Confucianism, and it was a time when it was actively enterprising ideologically.

If the blooming of the hundred schools of thought is a flower that blooms on the body of the Zhou Dynasty, then the corpse of the Zhou Dynasty continues the history of China for 2,000 years. In the end, no flowers bloomed on the corpses of the Song Dynasty, leaving only a decomposing corpse, which lasted for nearly a thousand years.

The Shang of the Zhou Dynasty sealed the descendants of the merchants in the Song State to succeed the Shang dynasty. More than 2,000 years later, Zhao Kuangyin added the yellow robe to the Guide Festival, returned to the Song Prefecture Army, set the country name as Song, and Song Dynasty Zhou, and completed a reincarnation in history. This cycle ended, and the classical era of China came to an end. Since then, China's history has basically struggled with the corpse of the Song Dynasty, and there was no time when the ideology flourished until the advent of the great changes unseen in 3,000 years.

It took Xu Ping more than two years to grasp this point, and he was able to re-examine history from the perspective of a classical Chinese to understand the positioning of this era. Even if he participated in the imperial examination, Xu Ping would not become a scholar in the traditional sense, but he would eventually become a classical Chinese with the knowledge of later generations, rather than coming to classical China to fool around and turn China into a deranged person of Western civilization in another sense.

China should have had its own way, which was ended by the iron cavalry of the nomads, and completely smashed by the cannons of the ships from overseas, and struggled in hell to find a new life. After all, this should be the path of the Chinese themselves, not Handan toddlers, even in Xu Ping's previous life, he may not have found it, he came to this era, can only try to continue to find.