Sir Henry Norman Far East collection, circa 1890

View looking along the path running between the two rows of small stone huts used for examinations. Norman (1895, p. 203) provides this description. The Government of China is a vast system of competitive examination tempered by bribery, and this Kao Chang is its focus. It is a miniature city, with one wide artery down the middle, hundreds of parallel streets running from this on both sides, each street mathematically subdivided into houses, a big semblance of a palace at one end of the main street, and little elevated watch-towers here and there. But the palace is merely the examiners Hall, the streets are three feet wide, and one side of them is a blank wall, the towers are for proctors to spy upon cribbing, and the houses are perfectly plain brick cells measuring 38 inches by 50. In the enclosure there are no fewer than fourteen thousand of them.

Reproduced in: Norman, Henry (1895). The people and politics of the Far East, London : T.F. Unwin, p. 204.

Indexed