Zhu Youxiao smiled after seeing the minutes of the cabinet meeting, Sun Chengzong's performance made him very satisfied, he had already understood the psychology of the people, knew what methods to use to make the people accept good policies, and had become a pragmatic official.

And the original Donglin people such as Yang Lian and Zuo Guangdou have slowly shed the style that Donglin people have always been good at lying and ignoring facts, and they have become capable officials who can take charge of themselves. In the original history, these two people have died in prison, but now they are a scholar, and they have done their best for the agriculture and water conservancy of the Ming Dynasty, and have been praised by the ministers and the people.

It can be seen that the emperor's preferences are easily known to the officials, and they have a guiding effect on the entire officialdom. Like Emperor Jiajing's superstitious Taoism, there was a heavy use of Yan Song, the prime minister of green words, and the ministers came to write green words. Now that Zhu Youxiao wants to be an official who does practical things, then the officials will easily change from the usual passionate current affairs to being pragmatic and promising. Therefore, the saying that if something is good at the top, it will be very good at the bottom. And the upper beam is not right, and the lower beam is crooked, which tells the essence of the matter.

The number of officials in the Ming Dynasty is increasing rapidly, and after the students of the Clerk's School and the Accounting School enter the official offices at all levels for internships, the outstanding ones are quickly promoted to the Ministry of Railways, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Water Resources, the Taxation Bureau, the Bank and other emerging departments. Of course, this is far from enough, and a new school of management has been added to the Beijing Normal University Hall to train junior officials.

However, the imperial examination is still being held normally, but the number of participants has decreased significantly. The number of Jinshi places of hundreds of a year is indeed too small for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lifters, not to mention that after the school comes out, you can also be an official, like the highest student in the first phase of the official school is already a fourth-grade official, which is considered a high-ranking official, and the promotion speed is not necessarily able to reach the first class of the imperial examination.

Of course, the form of the imperial examination has also been reformed, in the past, the examination was eight-strand text, emphasizing the battle, and the format of the writing was extremely important, but now the imperial examination is divided into two parts, one is arithmetic, and the other is strategy. Arithmetic cannot be faked, and the answer is unique, which also prevents favoritism and fraud, accounting for half of the score. Policy theory is generally aimed at a specific matter, requiring that there is something to be said, and empty words will not get high marks.

Arithmetic must score 30 or more (out of 50) in order to be judged by his strategy. Once it is discovered that there is favoritism and malpractice, the examiner will deprive him of his official position, and his family property will be confiscated, and he will never be allowed to enter the officialdom again. Candidates are permanently disqualified from the examination and have to be reformed in a labor camp for three years.

The Ministry of Education organizes local school teachers to write and mark the test papers of each township examination. The examination was written by the emperor himself, and it was not until the evening before the exam that the emperor prepared the questions, and then the clerk copied them and announced them in the examination room the next day. This greatly reduces the possibility of questions leaking and ensures that the test results are relatively authentic.

The palace examination is a policy thesis, which is asked by the emperor on the spot, which is generally the view of the current situation of the Ming Kingdom, and belongs to the open topic. The tributes answered on the spot, and the cabinet members read the papers on the spot, and the emperor reviewed them, and then assessed the ranking.

Although there are fewer people who take the Jinshi exam, in fact, those who can enter the palace exam in the thousands of troops are extremely smart people, so Zhu Youxiao still has great hopes for them, and he has also selected some very good talents from them, and put them in the official offices at all levels to experience first, waiting for them to shine brightly.

However, students in the vassal states lacked interest in the academy, but they had a soft spot for the imperial examinations. Especially in South Vietnam, in the imperial examination in the eleventh year of the Apocalypse, there was a South Vietnamese student who passed the list of eyes in high school, and the Ming Dynasty directly appointed this South Vietnamese list eye as the imperial history of Guangxi Province, and rewarded his family with a large amount of silver money and goods, which shocked the entire South Vietnam for a while. Soon there was a learning boom in South Vietnam, and the local Chinese books in South Vietnam were sold out, which made the book sellers very profitable.

Zhu Youxiao believes that the imperial examination still has a great role, especially in the dissemination of Chinese culture, and now the Sinicization education in Nanyue, Xinzhou, and Boni is going extremely smoothly, and Chinese has become a noble language in the local area, and the local language has been suppressed very much. Japan and Korea, where Chinese characters are used extensively, are now being further enhanced. In particular, North Korea originally only used Chinese and Chinese characters at the top level (the lower class people were basically illiterate), but now with the export of labor services, the exchanges between the Ming Dynasty and North Korea have become more frequent, so that a large number of lower-class people have also begun to recognize the Chinese language and take pride in speaking Chinese, and the proverbs of North Korea itself have become a symbol of low status.

For this situation, the monarchs and ministers of the Ming Dynasty are happy to hear about it. In particular, a group of officials led by Sun Chengzong always believed that only Chinese characters were the most beautiful characters, and Chinese was the most beautiful language, and that it was the goal of every Confucian disciple to make all the people of the vassal state speak Chinese and write Chinese characters. And his loyal supporter, Minister of Education Yang He arranged for a large number of students to go to the vassal states of the Ming Dynasty to carry out Chinese education.

In order to spread Chinese and Chinese characters in the vassal states where most of the people were illiterate, with the approval of Zhu Youxiao, Yang He took the lead in organizing the bachelors of the Hanlin Academy to carry out the work of simplifying Chinese characters. The simplification of Chinese characters itself is a process that has been going on since the birth of Chinese characters, and the name simplified Chinese characters appeared for the first time during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, also known as broken characters, vulgar characters, etc. It's just that it hasn't been officially recognized.

Yang He and his team first collected some simplified characters commonly used since the Song and Yuan dynasties and made the "List of Commonly Used Simplified Chinese Characters". There are three principles in the choice of words: the principle of describing but not doing; Choose the simplified Chinese characters that are more common in the society and use them first; If the original character strokes are very simple, no longer seek simplicity.

The "List of Commonly Used Simplified Chinese Characters" was first applied to the vassal country, and the results were very good, and the difficulty of writing characters that everyone has been criticized for a long time has been greatly improved here. After reporting to the emperor for approval, in the tenth year of the Apocalypse, it began to be implemented in domestic schools.

In his recital to the emperor, Yang He triumphantly pointed out that according to the current development trend, the murmur script of South Vietnam and the proverb script of Korea should completely disappear in less than 50 years, while most of Luzon, Bo Ni, Burma, and Siam have no written language, only language, which is suitable for the entry of Chinese characters. It can be expected that within a hundred years, these vassal states will be no different from the country.