Confucius Temple and Qinhuai Riverside, Nanjing (南京夫子庙秦淮风光带)

Why Go

The Exam Hall and the Boats Outside It

1. Two institutions facing each other across the water

For several centuries the provincial civil service examination for this part of China was held on this riverbank, in a walled compound of small brick cells where candidates were shut in for days at a stretch to write. The compound stood a few minutes from the Confucian temple that gives the district its name, which was the appropriate neighbour: the temple honoured the philosopher whose texts the candidates had spent their lives memorising.

On the same water, at the same time, ran the pleasure boats. The Qinhuai frontage was the entertainment quarter of the city, known for its courtesans, its singing houses and its hired boats, and a substantial part of its trade came from the men who travelled in to sit the examination and the officials who administered it. The arrangement was not a scandal that somebody later uncovered. It was the ordinary shape of the district, and Chinese poetry and fiction have been returning to it for a very long time.

That pairing is the reason to put this place on an itinerary. A foreign visitor who comes for a lit river and a shopping street will have a pleasant two hours and leave with nothing. A visitor who understands that the examination compound is fifty paces from the temple, and that both of them are fifty paces from where the boats tied up, is looking at how imperial China actually recruited its administrators and at what grew up around that machinery.

2. Nearly everything standing here is a reconstruction

The whitewashed walls, the black tile, the timber shopfronts and the carved balustrades are recent. This district was wrecked in the nineteenth-century wars, damaged again in the twentieth, and what a visitor sees today comes from a rebuilding programme carried out over the last few decades. The page says so plainly because the alternative is letting people discover it on their own and conclude they have been sold something false.

The daylight pictures below make the point without any help. Behind the tiled roofs on the far bank stand high-rise apartment slabs and an office tower, because this is the middle of a city of millions rather than a preserved town. The evening effect is made with lighting: strips of coloured light run along the eaves and ridges to draw the buildings after dark, the boats carry their own outlines, and the long screen wall with its pair of golden dragons is floodlit from below. Two illuminated advertising panels for a car manufacturer stand at either end of that wall, which is a fair description of how the whole frontage is paid for.

None of that makes the visit worthless, and it is worth being clear why. The street plan is old, the river is where it has always been, the temple and the examination compound are on their original ground, and the habit of coming down to this water in the evening is older than any of the buildings. What has been rebuilt is the surface. Treat it as a stage set over a real site and it reads correctly.

3. The lantern fair is a fortnight, the lighting is every night

Most photography of this place, including most of the pictures on this page, was taken during the lantern fair that runs from the lunar new year to the lantern festival. That is when the stalls appear selling silk lanterns to carry, when corridors of lit panels go up along the lanes, when large figure lanterns are floated at the bank, and when the crowd becomes thick enough that the lanes move at a shuffle.

Outside those two weeks the stalls and the figures are gone and the permanent lighting remains, which is still worth an evening. The distinction matters because the fair moves with the lunar calendar and lands in January or February. Anyone booking a summer trip on the strength of a lantern photograph is booking the wrong fortnight, and this is the single most common misreading of the place.

Orientation

The River Is the Spine

The river runs through the middle of the district and everything is arranged along it. The temple enclosure stands on one bank, and the long screen wall with the dragons on it faces the temple from the opposite bank, across the water. That arrangement is unusual and makes the district easy to orient in: once the wall and the temple have been identified, the rest follows from them.

Behind the river frontage a grid of pedestrian lanes carries the shops, the snack stalls and the tea houses, and during the fair the lantern stalls fill them. The examination compound museum is a short walk along the bank from the temple. Boats board from steps on the frontage. The whole district is compact enough to cross on foot in fifteen minutes when it is empty, and a good deal longer when it is not.

Context

What the Examination Compound Was For

Imperial China recruited its officials by written examination. A candidate worked through levels, and the provincial level was sat in compounds like the one on this riverbank: rows of narrow brick cells, one man to a cell, sealed in with his writing materials for several days while he produced essays on the Confucian classics. Food went in, papers came out, and the cells were watched. It was an ordeal by endurance as much as by learning, and men sat it repeatedly over decades.

The system mattered because of what it replaced. A bureaucracy staffed by examination was a bureaucracy that a farmer’s son could in principle enter, in a period when most of the world staffed its governments by birth. In practice the years of study required meant that families with money had an enormous advantage, and the curriculum rewarded memory and literary form over anything a modern administrator would recognise as training. Both things are true at once, and Chinese debate about the examinations has been arguing over the balance between them for a thousand years.

This is also why the district looks the way it does. Thousands of men converging on one riverbank every few years, most of them with time to fill and some of them with money, produced the inns, the teahouses, the singing houses and the boats. The entertainment quarter was a direct product of the examination hall, and the two survived and declined together. The examinations were abolished in the early twentieth century, and the district has been finding other uses for itself ever since. The present one is tourism.

Where to Base

Nanjing (南京)

Nanjing was the capital of China more than once, most recently under the republic, and it carries the buildings and the wounds of both facts. It sits on the Yangtze an hour and a half from Shanghai by fast train, which makes it one of the easiest major Chinese cities to add to a trip and one of the most often skipped.

This district is the city’s evening set piece and is a poor guide to the rest of it. The city wall, the Ming tomb on the hill, the museum and the memorial to the 1937 massacre are all a different order of experience, and a visitor who gives Nanjing only one night on this riverbank has seen the least serious thing in it.