关键词: 宋代, 皇帝之问, 殿试, 策问, 模式化焦虑, 政治话语

Abstract: The current study on the questions in the final imperial examination in the Song Dynasty usually confines itself to their historical values and stylistic significance. After being accepted as the only content in the final imperial examination, the practice of questioning and answering became an important way of communication between the emperor and the literati. The palace questions normally reflected the anxiety of the emperor, which often derived from the contrast between the present governance and the ideal one in the ancient, the excellent one in the Han or Tang Dynasties, or that of previous emperors in the Song Dynasty. The anxiety also came from natural calamities or the doctrines and recordings in the Confucian Classics. Such anxiety, as well as its causes, had occurred in the palace questions before. It can be called “the patternized anxiety”, which belongs to the political discourse shared by the emperor and the literati. It shows the serious limitations of ancient emperors in political imagination. Once the political situation was severe, however, the palace questions would possess some special political imprints mingled with and conceived by the patternized anxiety and usual political discourse as well.