Research on the Existence of the Qing Imperial Examination Document

Abstract

Compared with the imperial examination documents of the Ming Dynasty, the existing total amount of the documents of metropolitan imperial examination in the Qing Dynasty is much larger and the categories are more abundant. But there also remain the problems of collection dispersion, low degree of information disclosure, difficulties in obtainability and low utilization rate. This paper, based on the real time data of the Geographical Distribution Database of Metropolitan Imperial Examination Documents in the Qing Dynasty, makes a holistic research and analysis on the year distribution, collection locations, document categories and circulation of 671 kinds of metropolitan and palace examination papers in the Qing Dynasty, intending to help the research colleagues on the imperial examination with an overall impression of metropolitan examination documents in the Qing Dynasty. Through statistical analysis, there are 19 kinds of imperial metropolitan examination documents in the Qing Dynasty. The existence of the published lists of names only is as high as 206 volumes which are collected by 44 domestic and overseas institutes. 550 volumes of documents are collected by 33 national institutes. The First Historical Archives of China takes 138 volumes and another 11 overseas institutes take 120 volumes. By collating and summarizing, during the period of 112 years of 9 emperors in the Qing Dynasty, the most missing documents of metropolitan examinations were those in the periods of Yongzheng and Qianlong.