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In 1670, when the Kangxi Emperor of China's Qing dynasty was sixteen years old, he issued the Sacred Edict (simplified Chinese: 圣谕; traditional Chinese: 聖諭; pinyin: shèng yù), consisting of sixteen maxims, each seven characters long, to instruct the average citizen in the basic principles of Confucian orthodoxy. They were to be publicly posted in every town and village, then read aloud two times each month. Since they were written in terse formal classical Chinese, a local scholar was required to explicate them using the local dialect of the spoken language. This practice continued into the 20th century.[1]
In 1724, the second year of his reign, the Yongzheng Emperor issued the Shengyu Guangxun (simplified Chinese: 圣谕广训; traditional Chinese: 聖諭廣訓; pinyin: shèng yù guǎng xùn; "Amplified instructions on the Sacred Edict") in 10,000 characters. 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." The prose is relatively easy to understand for those with a beginning understanding of the literary language. The Amplified Instructions was also published in a Manchu translation and then in a combined Chinese, Manchu, and Mongol version.[2]