生平

十一岁时父汪楷客死广东，赖继母王氏、生母徐氏抚养成人，十七岁入县学，乾隆三十三年（1768年）中举，开始赡养生母和继母。二十岁担任师爷，历佐江浙州县牧令凡十六年，「讲习律令，剖条发蕴，寻绎究竟，轻重之间，不爽铢黍」，「治爰书不设成见，平情静虑，易地而身处，侔境揣形，反覆求间，予以可生之路」，精明zh-hans:干; zh-hant:干;炼，博览群书，侦「童养媳非媳」案，时有「事经汪君，必无冤狱」之誉。乾隆四十年（1775年）年中进士，官湖南永州府甯远县知县，曾言「亲民之治，实惟州县，州县而上，皆以整饬州县之治为治而已。」「州县一官作孽易，造福亦易」。

汪辉祖同时也是一位史学家，自云「诸史年四十又八，始得内版二十一史及《旧唐书》、《明史》，通二十三种，五六年来佐吏余功，以读史自课」，成就颇大，「每谓史才难得，俗学多乖」，乃「考核同异，折衷是非」。乾隆五十六年（1791），以足疾归里，途经宁远时，「民空邑走送境上，老幼泣拥，舆不得行」

嘉庆元年（1796年）卧病，命儿辈著年谱《病榻梦痕录》，后收入《汪龙庄遗书》。王宗炎曾撰《汪龙庄行状》。著有《元史本证》、《史姓韵编》、《九史同姓名略》、《二十四史同姓名录》、《三史同名录》、《元史证字》、《学治臆说》、《》等。

注释

参考书目

• 《清史稿》卷四七七《循吏传》

• 《清史列传》卷七十五

• 鲍永军：《绍兴师爷汪辉祖研究》

Early life

Wang Huizu was born on 21 January 1731 in Hsiao-Shan, in Zhejiang province, which is situated in the lower-Yangzi valley. This region was marked by the presence of Jiangnan, a city which was the center of Chinese literacy and an intellectually flourishing area. Wang Huizu's father, Wang K'ai, was the warden of a prison in Honan. Wang's mother was K'ai's concubine. Therefore, it could be said that Wang Huizu belonged to the local literati elite. However, Wang K'ai died in Canton in 1741, putting Wang and his mother into a precarious.situation. As a result, the young Wang was forced to struggle in poverty.

Life and career as an official

In 1747, at the age of sixteen, Wang Huizu passed the local-level examination and therefore gained the status of shengyuan ("born official"). He taught at school in the wake of this success and got married in 1749. Thank to his new status, he became in 1752 the private secretary of Wang Tsung-min, his father-in-law who was a district-magistrate. Wang Huizu specialized into judicial affairs, which was the most lucrative choice for a private secretary. He continued to work as a secretary in judicial matters for thirty-four years, but served sixteen different officials in the provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu.

In 1768, Wang Huizu completed the Provincial-level exam which gave him the status of Juren ("recommended man") after having failed height times. After three avorted attempts, he finally passed the highest level of the Civil Service Examination in 1775, reaching the status of Jinshi ("presented scholar").

This new status allowed him to be appointed magistrate of the district of Ning-yüan in Hunan province in 1786. He was re-appointed magistrate in 1788 in the neighboring district of Hsin-t'ien, and re-appointed again in Daozhou in 1790, always in Hunan province. He was dismissed from his post in 1791 because of what he presents in his autobiography as an intrigue against him. In fact, Wang was asked by his superiors to examine four human skeletons in the county of Guiyang, but he didn't find the requisite medical examiner in the imparted time, which offered a reason to the provincial magistrate to struck off Wang Huizu from the public administration. Afterward, he remained for a moment in Changsha but finally retired in his home district in 1793 where he focused on his work as a scholar.

Wang Huizu became paralyzed in 1795 and died on the first of May 1807.

Scholarship

The jurist

Wang Huizu wrote two guides of public administration which had become paramount for Chinese officials until the end of the Qing empire. The first one, Tso-shih yao-yen, was printed by Wang's friend, Pso T'ing Po, in 1785. The second, Hsueh-chih i-shuo ("Views on Learning Governance"), was published in 1793. In this second piece, Wang focused on county government and compared county magistrates to medicine men, wooden puppets or fragile glass screens: all these evocative comparisons reflect the officials' inability to manage an economically and demographically expanding society. Wang Huizu even stated in the preface of his book that he would make a critical study on the routine of Chinese local administrators. He expressed the idea that the scholar is much closer to the people than the administrator and that the official should rely on scholars if he wants to act efficiently, notably regarding the diffusion of Confucian moral values. He also underlined the importance of the hearing of people's plaints as one of the key for a good governance, notably because this activity creates a direct link between the magistrate and the civilians under his jurisdiction. In that respect, Wang Huizu thinks that magistrates should comment on plaints in public session rather than in private session in order to be heard by the community and to prevent the same trouble from coming back.

Wang's work has been very influential for all the Chinese officials after him, there is no denying that his guides have a significant moral dimension. For instance, Wang advocates a compassionate vision of justice. He notably gives the counter-example of a particularly strict magistrate named Zhang, who sentenced a cheater at the civil service examinations to be cangued publicly. the latter asked for his sentence to be adjourned because of the examinations. As the magistrate refused, the cheater's bride committed suicide, and when the young man was released, he committed suicide as well. Therefore, Wang concludes that sentences should be softened by the principle of human compassion (qing).

The historian

Wang Huizu developed, throughout his life, a strong interest in history. His originality as an historian is that he understood the importance of practical devices, like indexes, as historical tools. His taste for history might have been originated by the Han-shu (history of former Han dynasty) he bought in 1769 in Beijing. Indeed, he certainly hadn't had the opportunity to become familiar with history before this time given his quite modest social origins. In the wake of this first purchase, Wang bought copies of all the twenty-four dynastic histories and compiled all the biographies encountered in these texts into an index in sixty-four volumes. This index called Shih-hsing yün-pien and published in 1783 became vital for the study of Chinese history during the Qing era. He also completed his most prominent piece by two other indexes called Chiu-shih t'ung hsing-ming lüeh and Liao Chin Yuan san-sih t'ung hsing-ming lu both dealing with homonyms found in the histories of the Chinese dynasties. They were respectively printed in 1790 and 1801.Between 1796 and 1800, Wang Huizu worked on Yuan shih pên-chêng, a historical criticism of the history of the early Yuan dynasty.

Autobiography

In 1795, Wang Huizu began to write his autobiography titled Ping-t'a meng-hen lu ("Traces of Dreams from a Sick Bed"). He first published it in 1796 but continued to enrich it regularly until 1806 and his sons even continued to fill it in after their father's death. This autogiography provides information on the life of the literati class in China but also on public administration, notably Wang's role as a magistrate. He advocates for mediation in the resolution of conflicts rather than lawsuits. If we take the example of formal adjudication, Wang Huizu tells us that when he was in Ning-yüan county in 1787, out of the two-hundred plaints he received each day, only ten usually led to a formal lawsuit. This shows that, in a majority of cases, arbitrage was used to ensure civil justice, this was a convenient mean to maintain social peace.

Although, many literati got involved into literature, notably into poetry, this was not the case of Wang Huizu. However, he was in contact with other Chinese scholars such as the historian Zhang Xuecheng and Zhu Yun, who originated the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries under the Qianlong emperor, Shao Chin-Han, Liu Chu-kao or the bibliophyle Pao T'ing-po.

The moralist

Wang Huizu was also a moralist, he notably originated a handbook for the management of family-life called Shuang jietang yongxun ("Simple Precepts from the Hall enshrining a Pair of Chaste Widows"). Wang wrote that the two women who inspired his model of the virtuous, chaste wife were his mother and his father's second wife. The book was dedicated to educating his sons as future patriarchs. He underlines that the equilibrium of a family, especially the virtue of its women, depends on the zunzhang yueshu ("family elder's discipline").