Definition of "mandarin"

LIKE THE MANDARINS of old, the rulers of China live behind high walls. When they emerge, which they rarely do, they travel in cars with rear windows curtained like sedan chairs.They live in the Chung Nan Hai, a walled park adjacent to the Forbidden City from where ancient dynasties ruled the Celestial Empire.

1991, Chris Mullin, The Year of the Fire Monkey‎ (Fiction), London: Chatto & Windus, page 252

Its sting preserved to literature a fierce peculiar genius [Waugh] who, in the 40 years before his death last week at 62, achieved recognition as the grand old mandarin of modern British prose and as a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers’ row (Swift, Pope, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters.

1966, “The Beauty of His Malice”, in Time

When mandarins on the court pointed to obscure language in the Constitution to overturn a century of precedent and declare the income tax unconstitutional, Harlan sided with precedent[.]

2021 June 23, Peter S. Canellos, “Why The ‘Trump Court’ Won’t Be Like Trump”, in Politico

A mandarin impassivity had descended over Smiley's face. The earlier emotion was quite gone.

1979, John Le Carré, Smiley's People, Folio Society, published 2010, page 58

Though alert to riddles' strong roots in vernacular narrative, Cook's tastes are mandarin, and she gives a loving account of Wallace Stevens's meditations on the life of poetic images and simile […].

2007, Marina Warner, “Doubly Damned”, in London Review of Books, 29:3, p. 26