Abstract

Mandarin Promotion (Shengguan tu 升官圖), essentially a career race game modelling promotion in the bureaucracy of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), was a unique Chinese dice game that was kept distinct from ordinary games of gambling and entertainment. The game gained wide recognition and participation among literati. It was employed as an educational tool and functioned as a ritual activity during the New Year holidays. Similar games in China had a long history and diverse forms, with each version reflecting changes in the administrative structures of its own era, or even recreating historical bureaucracies. By the nineteenth century, Mandarin Promotions circulated in many versions, some of them abbreviated and illustrated for popular consumption. At least two versions aimed at a complete representation of Qing officialdom: a larger one that included both civil and military officials and used six dice, and a smaller one limited to civil officials and played with four dice. Since Thomas Hyde first introduced the six-dice version to European readers in 1694 as “Ludus Promotionis Mandarinorum”, scholars have generally regarded the game as a reflection of the realities of the Qing bureaucracy, at least to some extent.

Our study builds on the four-dice civil version analyzed by Puk Win-kin (Bu Yongjian卜永坚) in his 2010 monograph “Playing the Officialdom: Mandarin Promotions and China’s Bureaucratic Culture.” Combining historical methods with digital tools including a network study and a Monte Carlo simulation, we investigate how the Qing bureaucratic structures unfolded in the eye of the anonymous game designer and what the game’s relation was to the actual official system. We suggest that the four-dice civil version dated “Daoguang Gengzi” (1840) preserved in the Bodleian Library (Image) was an original recreation of the game, since the rules outlined therein broadly correspond to the bureaucratic order of the period. Later reprints of the game largely retained the original structure and did not register the transformations following the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864). However, they did incorporate some additional mechanisms for the purchase of office which reflect the rampant sale of ranks in the nineteenth century.

What impact, then, did the introduction of office purchase have on the game? On the surface, purchase seems to undermine the rule of fate determined by dice, allowing players to improve their chances of promotion through strategy, and perhaps even diminishing the game’s entertainment value. Yet our simulations reveal that office purchasers did not necessarily benefit. The greatest winners remained the Manchu aristocracy with officials who advanced through the civil service examinations coming second. This outcome highlights the deep sensitivity of Qing society to the notion of “qualification for office” (chushen 出身) which included both meritocratic and hereditary elements.

Biography

Elisabeth Kaske is a historian specializing in 19th- and early 20th-century China. Since April 2017, she has been a professor of society and culture of modern China at the University of Leipzig. She has published on German military advisors in China, the politics of language reform, as well as state finances and the sale of public offices in the late Qing period. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled “Twilight of the Mandarins: Status, Bureaucracy, and Social Change in Late Qing China.”

Co-author of this paper: Florian Keßler is a Ph.D. student at Erlangen University and member of the research group “Algorithms, Prediction, and Statistics”. He studies the history of mathematics in China.