Sacred Edict of the Kangxi Emperor

Evidently worried that the seven character lines of his father’s maxims could not be understood by local people, the Yongzheng Emperor's Amplified Instructions explains "Our text attempts to be clear and precise; our words, for the most part, are direct and simple."

Systematic village lectures began at least as early as the Song dynasty, when Confucian scholars expounded the virtues of cooperation and self-cultivation to neighborhood audiences.

The most widely popular was the Shengyu guangxun zhijie (Direct explanation of the Amplified Instructions on the Sacred Edict) by Wang Youpu (王又樸 1680-1761), a jinshi scholar and official.

Won’t we then have a world in perfect concord?” Then he might go on: Wang would conclude: The 19th-century missionary and translator of the Sacred Edict William Milne describes the scene: Country magistrates sent to frontier areas could use the occasion to deliver lectures to non-Han peoples on the virtues of Confucian culture.

Guo Moruo, the Marxist and New Culture iconoclast, wrote in his autobiography that in his youth he and other villagers loved to hear the lecturer on the Sacred Edict who would come around.

Victor Mair comments that this popular form of story telling was probably more effective in spreading Confucian values than the condescending lectures of the scholars and officials.

[11] One western scholar traveling in China in the 1870s reported that the widespread dissemination of the Sacred Edict following the mid-century Taiping Rebellion "proved a serious blow to the immediate spread of Christianity.