Three massive cast-bronze cooking pots sat on granite stone bases in the center of the heavy trial square, their dark alloy surfaces slick with freezing drizzle.
The smallest weighed three hundred jin. The middle cooking pot was stamped with the six-hundred-jin foundry seal of the Provincial Arsenal. The largest, an ancient three-legged vessel cast during the last dynasty, bore a raised stone carving along its rim: One Thousand Jin. It stood nearly five feet tall, its thick bronze ears covered in green rust and its belly caked with hundreds of years of rusted patina.
Around the muddy outer edge, two hundred martial examinees stood shivering in the biting wind. It was surrounded by guard post pikemen and yamen court guards holding split-bamboo rods.
“Examinee #142! Step to the stone base!” a scarred guard post lieutenant barked from beneath an oiled-canvas pavilion. He sat beside an iron fire bowl, a stack of wooden tester slips resting beside his brass balance scales. “Standard qualification is three hundred jin hoisted to shoulder height for three seconds! Two failures, and your tablet is cracked in half!”
A broad-shouldered blacksmith’s apprentice from the northern counties stepped forward. His forearms were thick, wrapped in coarse hemp strips, his breath steaming in the damp air. He approached the three-hundred-jin cooking pot. He planted his boots in the gravel, and hooked both hands beneath the curved bronze rim.
