Updating them together has scrambled my brain. Better get back to finishing Dream of the Red Chamber first.
The carriage had been away from the Imperial College for quite some time, yet the furrow between Sun Shaozong's brows had not eased in the slightest. Instead, it had deepened further.
When he had first proposed Law Popularization in Rural Areas, one purpose had been to help Dali Temple escape its predicament of having a name but no real authority. The other had been to suppress and restrain the power of the local gentry, even supervise grassroots officials, so they would not squeeze the common people too harshly.
Yet the results of its trial implementation in Cangzhou Prefecture had been far from encouraging—mainly because the scholars had proven far less steadfast than he had expected.
There were few willing to stand up for the people, while those who had fallen to wine, women, wealth, and power were everywhere. A few had even been so shamelessly greedy that they provoked popular uprisings.
As the one who had initiated it, Sun Shaozong had also endured quite a bit of criticism at court.
Fortunately, the senior figures of the Grand Secretariat had not rejected the policy outright. Instead, they proposed that Dali Temple and the Imperial College work together to select some Imperial College Students for pre-service training, then choose the best among them for a second round of testing.
That was already an unusually generous degree of tolerance. If he had not been someone as influential as Sun Erlang, he likely would not have been given so many chances to make mistakes and try again.
But the problem was that the overwhelming majority of the Imperial College Students came from wealthy and noble families.
Getting a few of them to betray their own class