Hello I'm reading China by J. A. G. Roberts, and in the chapter on the Qing dynasty he mentioned the 8 legged essay. Google shows very few comprehensive results as to what exactly the essay is supposed to be; the samples I see are very difficult to understand for me. The wiki article says that the essay supposedly may have contributed to cultural stagnation, but I'm not sure how accurate such an assertion can be given that the civil service and aristocracy is usually a minority of any society? Any input is appreciated
What you're talking about was basically the test format to become a civil servant.
Historically, in China, the aristocracy (or any job except for military service) was specifically and explicitly not limited to bloodlines, meaning that literally anyone could become a public servant, or a so-called "scholar", the highest, most honorable, and most respected of the Confucian social structure, provided they could pass the examination(s) to do so.
It was a grueling, days-long test, the specific topics of which changed throughout history, but which always included tests on the knowledge of (and ability to regurgitate verbatim) the Confucian texts. Historically, the tests also usually included some kind of creative element, but trended more and more toward strict, rote, perfectionist formality.
You can imagine that such a test affected the way the country was run in two broad ways:
Though civil service was technically open to anybody, only those from a certain segment of the economy or of certain connection or influence could realistically afford to have family members do nothing but study and be tutored enough to ever hope to pass the test, let alone the means of even traveling to take it at all.
The trend away from any creative testing ensured that any who were able to pass the test themselves were neither expected to have nor valued whatever for creativity. This means the government itself trended more and more away from any creative application or interpretation of the rule of law to a bureaucratic hell built almost exclusively on, for, and by political intrigue.
This is the basic premise of the argument you quoted.
The 8-legged essay (八股文), as a previous commenter mentions, was a prose format that dominated the imperial examination system of the mid-Ming and Qing dynasties. Indeed this 'orthodox' format was really the only acceptable version of written essays and any candidate who wanted to have a chance at succeeding within the various levels of the examination required a high level of proficiency in composing this form of essay.
Each essay was prompted by a topic which was always a direct quotation from the Confucian Canon and often no more than a scant few characters and breaks down into the following components:
The essay form takes its name from the 'Limbs' which formed the central argument of the author writing the essay. Within each section of the essay, prospective scholar-officials needed to meet highly specific requirements shaped by decades of examination orthodoxy. For instance, in the first section, poti, candidates had to demonstrate that they could correctly identify the exact passage from which the examination topic was pulled but needed to refrain from directly quoting the text. For instance, when Wang Ao (future grand secretary of the Ming dynasty) was challenged with this passage during on metropolitan examination during the late 15th century: "有朋友(friends)自远方来(arrive from afar)", he demonstrated his knowledge of the text by writing in his poti: "即同类(like-minded individuals)之信从(come together)...".^(1) Pretty similar phrases but Wang cleverly avoids any direct quotation of the topic at hand or the Analects more broadly. In the chengti, the author would then begin to expound on the topic by outlining the Canonical intent of the phrase, concluding the three-to-five-sentence section with a clear explanation of the orthodox interpretation of the phrase's meaning. The four main 'limbs' or 'legs' were then composed in very strict parallel meter, within which the essay writer would present his explanation and interpretation of the examination topic, usually with the orthodox commentaries laid down starting in the Song dynasty in mind.^(2) Finally, the dajie was used to formally tie everything together and conclude the paper. The composition of these essays can and did vary slightly, especially during the Ming dynasty when the form was in its infancy but for the most part, they could all be broadly shaped to fit this eight-legged format.
The question as to why the eight-legged essay contributed to cultural stagnation really needs to be addressed more broadly by looking at the imperial examination system as a whole. There has been a lot of discussion on the topic, perhaps most vocally by revolutionary Chinese scholars (and by revolutionary, I mean end-of-the-Qing-Dynasty revolutionary). Modern scholars have also examined the cultural impact of the examinations at depth and often times, these discussions circle back to the narrow focus of the imperial examinations. In the Tang dynasty iterations of the exams, we know that essay topics often covered more 'practical' topics beyond the highly theoretically and strictly literary material seen in the late empire. Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi's examination essays survive from the early 9th century and we know from other examination materials from the time period that issues of governance were posed in a manner which was far less tied to the Canonical interpretations of good governorship. The Qing dynasty's ill-fated reform movements in the late 19th century also saw attempts at reforming the content and nature of the imperial examination in order to better prepare China's literary elite for administering the empire in a time of increasing pressure from imperial powers. These late iterations of the imperial exam aimed to address more current issues as seen in the celun essays from the final decades of the 19th century. But for the near-millennia in which the examination system operated in its most recognized form, 'practical' subjects were basically never examined and the focus was basically entirely focused on theoretical interpretations of the Confucian Canon. With such a narrow scope, it is not particularly difficult to see how such a system would have negatively impacted the depth of knowledge and experience that many of China's ruling civil officials were exposed to. But at the same time, the narrow focus and strict form of the exams gave China - a country and empire bigger than Europe with a population in the hundreds of millions by 1800 - a core group of civil officials with the same literary and education background to staff and govern the vast bureaucracy in a centralized manner. I have written about the topic here as well.