nations. It had been found
that almost the whole of the gentry in the Yangtze region sat at the
examinations; and that at these examinations their representatives made
sure, through their mutual relations, that only their members should
pass, so that the candidates from the north were virtually excluded. The
important military clique in the north protested against this, and a
compromise was arrived at: at every examination one-third of the
candidates must come from the north and two-thirds from the south. This
system lasted for a long time, and led to many disputes.

At his death Hsuean Tsung left the empire to his eight-year-old son Ying
Tsung (1436-49 and 1459-64), who was entirely in the hands of the Yang
clique, which was associated with his grandmother. Soon, however,
another clique, led by the eunuch Wang Chen, gained the upper hand at
court. The Mongols were very active at this time, and made several raids
on the province of Shansi; Wang Chen proposed a great campaign against
them, and in this campaign he took with him the young emperor, who had
reached his twenty-first birthday in 1449. The emperor had grown up in
the palace and knew nothing of the world outside; he was therefore glad
to go with Wang Chen; but that eunuch had also lived in the palace and
also knew nothing of the world, and in particular of war. Consequently
he failed in the organization of reinforcements for his army, some
100,000 strong; after a few brief engagements the Oirat-Mongol prince
Esen had the imperial army surrounded and the emperor a prisoner. The
eunuch Wang Chen came to his end, and his clique, of course, no longer
counted. The Mongols had no intention of killing the emperor; they
proposed to hold him to ransom, at a high price. The various cliques at
court cared little, however, about their ruler. After the fall of the
Wang clique there were two others, of which one, that of General Yue,
became particularly powerful, as he had been able to repel a Mongol
attack on Peking. Yue proclaimed a new emperor--not the captive emperor's
son, a baby, but his brother, who became the emperor Ching Tsung. The
Yang clique insisted on the rights of the imperial baby. From all this
the Mongols saw that the Chinese were not inclined to spend a lot of
money on their imperial captive. Accordingly they made an enormous
reduction in the ransom demanded, and more or less forced the Chinese to
take back their former emperor. The Mongols hoped that this w