Category: Learning

If you grew up in America and went to a public school, you likely learned how to write the famous five paragraph essay. What is the five paragraph essay? It’s composed of a paragraph for the introduction and your thesis statement, three paragraphs for evidence to support your thesis statement, and finally a paragraph for the conclusion that wraps up the whole essay. This was something that I had to learn how to write in, not only for English classes, but for history classes as well in high school.

A few days ago, I was chatting with a few of my high school friends when the topic of writing education in high school came up. We pretty much all agreed that the essays we were writing on were all of a similar “style.” Our works were usually centered on analysis on what we read, and we had little room to explore other methods of writing, such as story narration or speechwriting. It’s safe to say that I’ve never really had any opportunities to find my own “voice” when writing, and while I never noticed this in high school, it became apparent when I started writing for fun after high school.

A day after this conversation with my high school friends, I stumbled on a separate conversation online on Discord where a public school teacher was critical about the current state of writing education in America. He pointed out that if he told his students that they can write outside of the five paragraph essay framework, he’ll start receiving blank faces. 

Honestly, I can’t blame him at all. If you asked me to write outside of such a framework in high school, I’d be confused as well. After all, I don’t recall learning any specific format outside of that; it’s hard for me to think of any opportunity where I had ample time to explore other ways of writing. When you’re a high school student who has to wake up around 6 AM every week day, go to school and come back around 4 PM, and then spend the rest of the evening hustling to get your homework done before you become tired at 12 AM, the last thing that will be in your head is taking some time out of each day to craft your essays to contain your “voice.” I’d rather stick to the standard format so I can get homework done quicker and go to sleep earlier so I don’t have to wake up tomorrow morning barely dragging myself out of bed.

I started wondering if this is anyone’s fault. Obviously, I can’t put this on the teachers, since they had to conform with a set of curricula that their students have to master by the end of the school year. Besides, sticking with the standard format will probably make grading easier, as well as making it more fair for students. After all, I’d reckon a teacher would have a harder time assigning a “fair” score to each paper if the format is completely different for each of them.

At this point, I remembered learning about how in ancient China, civil service examination candidates were sometimes expected to write in a certain format, called the baguwen, which translated into English means eight-legged essay. Unsurprisingly, these essays were composed of eight parts. When I read the Wikipedia article on the baguwen, especially the viewpoints section which described the positive and negative views on such a format, one can hardly be surprised. The positive views were that such a format would have ensured greater fairness and ease when grading exams. The negative views were that the baguwen stifled creativity and might have contributed to the decline of Chinese poetry. Some even go as far as to say that it constrained thinking and might be responsible for China’s “economic backwardness.”

I’m not an expert on Chinese poetry, but I do know that the Tang had famous shi, the Song had ci, and finally the Yuan had qu. Overall, it seems that most of the famous Chinese poetry was written in these eras compared to later dynasties, so there does seem to be some correlation between the adoption of the baguwen and the decline in Chinese poetry. I’m speculating here that writing poetry is a muscle to strengthen, and if candidates spent most of their time writing for a certain format, the poetry muscle would likely atrophy or not develop at all. If you know anything about classical Chinese poetry, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on any noticeable changes throughout this era of history.

As to whether this format constrained thinking to the point of contributing to the Chinese decline, and caused the West to overtake it (the Needham Question), I think it might be worth it to ask another question. Rather than the format causing constraints in thinking, what if it was a constraint in thinking that caused the baguwen to be adopted for the examinations, and the tradition stuck for a few hundred years afterwards?

After all, given my current understanding of Chinese history, it seems that China fell behind the West because of its strict conservatism and reluctance to change. After Zheng He set sail for the Pacific in one of the largest fleets of its era, conservative mandarins in the Ming Court thought such an expedition was costly and unnecessary. With attitudes like these, colonization would never come to fruition, and interaction with the outside world became more limited in scope.

In such an environment, it’s no surprise that innovation was frowned upon, and the format of the imperial civil service examinations started to calcify. When the priorities aren’t on recruiting the most creative and innovative students, there is no problem with sticking to a certain format for testing.

What does it mean for us? Why did we go on a long tangent on the baguwen? Rather than just criticizing the five paragraph essay for stifling creativity, we should look at a deeper phenomenon taking place. Perhaps it’s an education system that no longer prioritizes creativity as it used to. The phenomenon of prioritizing efficiency over quality is quite possibly merely a symptom of the current cultural attitude.

My path to learning Classical Chinese, also known as literary Chinese, is one that has been going on for several years. Growing up going to Chinese school every week, I’d say I can read the average Chinese book published nowadays without any major problems. Reading books that are written in Classical Chinese, however, is a whole other matter.

My interests in Classical Chinese started from learning about the Four PIllars of Destiny, a traditional Chinese fate calculation technique. However, past a certain point, I realized that many of the classics teaching these methods were written several hundred years ago, with the original book on this topic stretching back all the way to the Song Dynasty. Needless to say, if I wanted to read and understand the text in its original form, I had to learn Classical Chinese.

Of course, there are other reasons to learn Classical Chinese as well. A lot of Chinese philosophical texts were written in literary Chinese. If you are interested in this, I have an article on learning Chinese philosophy. Historical texts such as The Records of the Grand Historian were also written in it. If you want to read the primary sources, you will have to learn it. This might sound cliché, but learning it literally opens up doors if you are interested in Chinese history and philosophy, as you no longer have to depend on modern translations.

How do I learn Classical Chinese though? Through my research there seems to be two ways. Either continuously grinding through progressively older texts, trying to figure out the older grammatical structure and common vocabulary that occurs in the texts, or picking up a textbook on that subject. I later settled on the latter option, and went searching for a textbook.

Considering I live in the West where Chinese books are not easy to find, I eventually settled on a textbook that taught Classical Chinese in English. The textbook was titled An Introduction to Literary Chinese by Michael A. Fuller. If I were able to access a textbook that taught the subject in Chinese, that would have been better, but alas, circumstances did not permit me to do that, so I had to go with the next best option of a textbook written in English.

I then proceeded to read through An Introduction to Literary Chinese, with me rereading some sections several times. While I admit I do not fully understand everything from the book, I’d say I picked up quite a bit of the basics, particularly the grammatical structure and the vocabulary employed in Classical Chinese.

Once I’ve read a large portion of that book, I was able to trudge through Sun Tzu’s Art of War with a dictionary for more obscure characters. There are dictionaries for Classical Chinese specifically, because certain characters can have different definitions in Classical Chinese vs Modern Chinese. For example, the character 走 means “run” in Classical Chinese, but “walk” in Modern Chinese. Interestingly, Japanese seems to have preserved the older definition (“run”) of this character. There is a pretty famous dictionary by Wang Li, a Chinese linguist, which I find helpful from time to time.

By this point, if you pick up the original version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you should be able to understand a decent portion of it. After all, it was written in a style that tilts more vernacular mixed with some literary Chinese elements within it. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, by Pu Songling, however, is still a struggle for me to get through. Hopefully in the future as I improve on my Classical Chinese I will be able to understand all of it.

I’m still learning Classical Chinese, and so this will be a post that I will continuously update in the future as I progress on this journey. Do you have any tips and suggestions? If so, feel free to share in the comments.