Civilian Rank Badge

This civilian rank badge is an official front rank badge featuring a silver pheasant in flight. The bird is set in a sky full of stylized clouds and a solar disk. The silver pheasant is the symbol of the most numerous of the civil ranks, the fifth. Fully twenty five percent of the mandarins failed to reach the upper ranks of the civil service. Apparently most of these moderately successful bureaucrats accumulated at the fifth rank. The silver pheasant is one of the predominantly white bird. It usually has a crested head and can be identified by its long, scalloped or serrated edged tail feathers. In the early Ching period it typically had three tail feathers, later it had five.