page_title: Ming dynasty
section_title: Lesser functionaries
hierarchical_section_title: Ming dynasty / Government / Personnel / Lesser functionaries
caption_attribution_description: English: Ming Xuande Xing Le Tu, collection of the Palace Museum (Forbidden City). The Ming Emperor Xuande playing a game that looks like golf, called chuiwan. Čeština: 明宣宗行乐图, Ming Süan-te sing le tchu, volně Hra císaře Süan-te, barva na hedvábí, z kolekce Palácového muzea Zakázaného města. Na obraze mingský císař Süan-te (1398–1435; vládl 1425–1435) hraje s palácovými eunuchy čchuej-wan, čínskou hru podobnou golfu.
context_page_description: The Ming dynasty, officially the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last imperial dynasty of China ruled by Han Chinese. Although the primary capital of Beijing fell in 1644 to a rebellion led by Li Zicheng, numerous rump regimes ruled by remnants of the Ming imperial family—collectively called the Southern Ming—survived until 1662.
  The Hongwu Emperor attempted to create a society of self-sufficient rural communities ordered in a rigid, immobile system that would guarantee and support a permanent class of soldiers for his dynasty: the empire's standing army exceeded one million troops and the navy's dockyards in Nanjing were the largest in the world. He also took great care breaking the power of the court eunuchs and unrelated magnates, enfeoffing his many sons throughout China and attempting to guide these princes through the Huang-Ming Zuxun, a set of published dynastic instructions.
context_section_description: Scholar-officials who entered civil service through examinations acted as executive officials to a much larger body of non-ranked personnel called lesser functionaries. They outnumbered officials by four to one; Charles Hucker estimates that they were perhaps as many as 100,000 throughout the empire. These lesser functionaries performed clerical and technical tasks for government agencies. Yet they should not be confused with lowly lictors, runners, and bearers; lesser functionaries were given periodic merit evaluations like officials and after nine years of service might be accepted into a low civil service rank. The one great advantage of the lesser functionaries over officials was that officials were periodically rotated and assigned to different regional posts and had to rely on the good service and cooperation of the local lesser functionaries.
caption: The Xuande Emperor playing chuiwan with his eunuchs, a game similar to golf, by an anonymous court painter of the Xuande period (1425–35).
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