ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Yuan Jue's career path and views on education as a window onto the ways the South Chinese participated in Yuan politics. It demonstrates that the medical bureaucracy in the fourteenth century retained the form set in the late thirteenth century but that the South Chinese changed its focus in subtle ways. The chapter discusses the post-1300 development of medical institutions, after some descendants of the former Southern Song subjects, like Yuan Jue, began serving the Mongol empire. Soon after the revival of the civil service examinations in 1314, the government established an examination system to select medical administrators. At the same time, local government officials and elites continued constructing and renovating medical temple-schools. While giving Mongol emperors and their collaborators credits for creating the system, the authors of the inscriptions dedicated to the Temples of the Three Progenitors made sure to incorporate the buildings in their own Neo-Confucian landscape.
