 Throughout the Song-Ming period, mastery of Confucian texts was required for the civil service exams and thus for most appointments to state office. Confucianism had also long enjoyed a special prestige among bureaucrats and state officials, being seen by many as offering the best training for the skills and ethical demands of governance. Accordingly, many of the major Confucian philosophers and their interlocutors had experience with and were keenly interested in administration and state affairs. Most Confucians conceived of their obligations to the state as pulling in two directions: they saw loyalty to the hereditary monarchy as mandatory in most major respects, but they also regarded it as their duty to share the benefit of their ethical guidance and sound judgment with the emperor and authorities at every level. On one relatively prevalent understanding of that role, to both serve the emperor and provide him with ethical moorings was the highest form of loyalty, for it helped to sustain the rule and further consolidate its legitimacy as a successor regime to the Confucian sage-kings of old. At times, however, many Song-Ming Confucians lost confidence in the emperor and his court and sought to promote more decentralized forms of government with local and non-state institutions taking on a larger role (Angle &amp; Tiwald 2017: 181–189).