officialdom

  • Return to the Garden and Fields – No. 1

    — by Tao Yuanming (Jin Dynasty) From youth I had no taste for worldly ways,My nature loved the hills and mountains.By mistake I fell into the dusty net,And for thirty years I strayed.A caged bird longs for its former woods,A pond fish yearns for its native deeps.So now I clear wild land along the…

  • Han Feizi – Chapter 22.33

    Han Feizi tells a Wei man taught his daughter to hoard wealth. She was divorced but richer, mirroring corrupt officials’ greed.

  • Unveiling political corruption with two cases of bribery [Three Kingdoms]

    In a previous article, we discussed how the author of Romance of the Three Kingdoms was unfair in his evaluation of the Yellow Turban Uprising. Writing from the standpoint of the landlord class, his perspective on the peasant uprising was inevitably biased.

  • Yu De

    Yin Tunan of Wuchang had a second house, just outside his own residence. The house had been rented by a scholar. Yin had not bothered to see the house or his tenet for the last six months.