廉 (lián) — Integrity · What Was Declined · The Edge Where a Person Stops

贾谊, writing to a young Emperor Wen around 174 BCE about why a ruler needs height, reached for a building — and for a word that by then had been doing moral work for centuries, used here in the plain architectural sense it came from. The sovereign is the raised hall, the officials are the flight of steps, everyone else is the ground: 陛九级上，廉远地，则堂高 — run the stairs up nine flights and the 廉 stands far off the earth, and the hall is high. Take the steps away, 廉近地, and the hall is nothing. The word there is not a virtue and not a person. It is a piece of architecture: the edge of the raised floor, the line where the platform stops and the drop starts. 说文解字 (c. 100 CE) files the character under 广, the element for a structure built against a slope, and glosses it in a single word — 廉，仄也, narrow, on an angle. The sound comes from 兼.

A floor edge is a thing you can stub a toe on, and that is the entire metaphor. 廉隅 — edge and corner — became the ordinary word for whatever part of a person refuses to round off, and 《礼记·儒行》 lists 砥厉廉隅 among the marks of a scholar: he grinds his edges sharp rather than smooth. 《论语·阳货》 catches the same shape going out of fashion. Confucius says the self-regarding men of an earlier generation were 廉, and the ones in front of him are merely 忿戾, touchy — the edge has degraded into a temper. What the edge is for turns explicit once the word enters government. 《周礼·天官·小宰》 sets out six counts on which the state audits its clerks, and 廉 is not one of the six; it is the first character of all six — 廉善, 廉能, 廉敬, 廉正, 廉法, 廉辨. 郑玄's commentary states the reasoning flatly: 既断以六事，又以廉为本. Competence, diligence, correctness and judgement were each to be assessed with the question of what the man had already taken folded inside them.

The move from the floor edge to the person was made long before 贾谊 sat down to write, and the 楚辞 catches it already complete. 《卜居》 puts 屈原 in a diviner's rooms asking the wrong kind of question — not what will happen but what to be — and sets the alternatives out in pairs: 宁廉洁正直以自清乎, shall I be 廉洁 and upright and so keep myself clear, against the option of going supple as grease and soft as tanned hide and fitting himself round whatever pillar is nearest. He gets no answer; it is not the kind of question a shell can take. 《招魂》, in the same collection, opens on the same compound — 朕幼清以廉洁兮 — and the Han commentator 王逸 glosses it in eight characters that have been quoted after him ever since: 不受曰廉，不污曰洁. Not receiving is 廉; not being stained is 洁. Which of the two pieces came first is not settled and may not be settleable, but by the time either was written the word already meant what it means now. A second line of descent runs the other way and is no less direct: an edge is a thin thing, a thin thing is spare, and from spare the road goes to 薄利 and out onto the price tag. One character, two futures — the official who will not take the gold and the merchant who will not pad the margin — and both are the same idea, which is that nothing has been added on at the edge.

• 可以取，可以无取，取伤廉；可以与，可以无与，与伤惠。

  《孟子·离娄下》(Mencius, Book IV B, c. 300 BCE)
  When you may take and may equally not take, taking damages your 廉; when you may give and may equally not give, giving damages your generosity. — The whole test sits in the first two clauses. 孟子 is not discussing theft, which needs no argument and no character. He means the case where the thing is offered, the rule permits it, the person offering wants you to have it, and no one afterwards would have raised it. He also refuses to let 廉 collapse into generosity: he sets the two in adjacent clauses and lets each fail on its own terms.

• 以听官府之六计，弊群吏之治：一曰廉善，二曰廉能，三曰廉敬，四曰廉正，五曰廉法，六曰廉辨。

  《周礼·天官·小宰》(Rites of Zhou, "The Junior Steward," compiled c. 300 BCE)
  Judge the conduct of the officials by six reckonings: 廉善, 廉能, 廉敬, 廉正, 廉法, 廉辨. — Good at the work and well spoken of; capable; diligent; correct; by the book; discerning — six counts, and one character opening every one of them. 郑玄's commentary explains the design: 既断以六事，又以廉为本, judgement is passed on the six matters, and 廉 is the root of them. This is the oldest job description in Chinese for holding a post, and it treats the question of what a person took as prior to the question of how well they worked.

• 宁廉洁正直以自清乎？将突梯滑稽，如脂如韦，以絜楹乎？

  《楚辞·卜居》(Songs of Chu, "Divining Where to Dwell," c. 3rd c. BCE)
  Shall I be 廉洁 and upright and so keep myself clear — or go smooth and glib, like grease, like softened leather, and fit myself around the pillar? — The piece puts 屈原, out of favour and out of options, in front of a diviner, asking him to settle not what will happen but what kind of man to be. The diviner sets down the yarrow stalks and tells him the tortoise shell does not answer questions of this kind. The word 廉洁 arrives here fully formed and already opposed to exactly the thing it is still opposed to.

In older villages across Henan, Shaanxi and Hunan you can still find 四知堂 — Hall of the Four Knowings — painted over a doorway. It is a 堂号, the house-name a lineage carries, and this one belongs to the 杨 family. The story behind it takes four sentences in 《后汉书》. 杨震, travelling to take up a governorship in the second century, was visited at his lodging after dark by 王密, a man he had once recommended for office, who had brought ten catties of gold. 王密 pressed it on him with the obvious argument — 暮夜无知者, it is late, nobody will know. 杨震 answered: 天知，神知，我知，子知。何谓无知 — Heaven knows, the spirits know, I know, and you know; in what sense does nobody know? 王密 left ashamed. When friends later urged 杨震 to buy land so his sons would have something, he refused and gave them the line his descendants took as a name: 使后世称为清白吏子孙，以此遗之，不亦厚乎 — let later generations call them the children of a clean official; is that not a rich enough thing to leave them? The family took him at his word, and the name has been carried for eighteen hundred years.

The character also holds down a national-scale job. 《管子·牧民》 names four cords that keep a state from coming apart — 礼, 义, 廉, 耻 — and warns 四维不张，国乃灭亡: let the four go slack and the state is finished. That four-character line, 礼义廉耻, went onto school gates and assembly-hall walls across China and Taiwan through the twentieth century and is still legible on a good many of them. What this cord names is not how a person carries themselves, and not what they feel afterwards. It is the thing in front of them, and the hand not moving.