Chinese Empire

The Imperial Examination System: How China Selected Its Officials

For more than a thousand years, the most distinctive institution of Chinese government was the examination system by which the imperial state recruited its officials. From its Sui and Tang origins through its Song flowering, its Ming codification, and its Qing twilight and abolition in 1905, the examination system shaped the structure of the Chinese state, the social composition of the governing class, the content of Chinese education, the nature of Chinese literature, and the everyday life of millions of families. No other pre-modern state had anything quite like it. The Roman emperor Vespasian is said to have quipped that a million sesterces maintained a man in idleness; the Chinese empire built an institution that, for a fraction of the cost, kept a merit-selected scholar class in productive service for centuries at a stretch.

This section examines the imperial examination system in depth: its origins in Han and Wei-Jin precedent, its Sui and Tang crystallisation, its Song elaboration, its Ming and Qing refinements, the actual mechanics of how a candidate moved from rural schoolboy to metropolitan jinshi, the literary and ideological content of the examinations, the social impact of the system on Chinese society, and the long afterlife of the examination tradition in modern East Asia. The section is part of our larger survey of Chinese government and bureaucracy, which treats the examination system as one of the three legs of the imperial state — the others being the provincial administration and the legal code.

Origins: From Recommendation to Examination

The examination system did not appear suddenly. Its roots lie in the Han practice of recruiting officials by recommendation. Under the Western Han, local officials were required to recommend worthy and capable men from their jurisdictions as filial and incorrupt (孝廉, xiàolián) candidates for office. The recommendations were meant to draw on local knowledge of character, and the recommended men were to enter service in subordinate positions and be tested by performance. The system worked, but it was prone to nepotism and local faction. The Eastern Han reformer Wang Mang (r. 9–23 CE) and, more durably, the Han emperor Wu experimented with the idea of testing candidates in writing, and by the late Han there existed a small imperial academy that tested scholars on the classics.

After the Han fell, the Cao Wei state (220–265 CE) experimented with a system called the Nine-Rank System (九品中正制, jiǔpǐn zhōngzhèng zhì), in which a local censor classified each candidate into one of nine grades. The system rapidly calcified into an aristocratic tool, dominated by great families, and the Northern Wei, the Sui, and the Tang all abolished it in turn. The Tang, having inherited a deeply entrenched aristocracy, had an additional motive: the new dynasty needed officials who owed their position to the throne rather than to the great clans, and the examination was a way of recruiting them.

The Sui emperor Wen is traditionally credited with establishing a rudimentary examination system in 587 CE, and the Tang emperors expanded it. The early Tang exams were modest affairs, supplementing recruitment by recommendation and by descent. The famous Tang examination essay of the eighth century, the examination of the classics and policy (明經, míngjīng and 策問, cèwèn), tested candidates on the meaning of the classics and on their opinions of current policy. The most famous Tang degree-holder, the poet Bai Juyi (772–846), won his jinshi in 800, and the early Tang saw the rise of the first cohort of scholar-officials whose position rested on examination success rather than on hereditary rank.

The Tang and Song: The System Matures

The Tang examination system established the basic outline that all later dynasties would refine. Candidates presented themselves before a board of examiners, often including high officials of the central government, sat for the exams in closed cells in a government compound, and were ranked into three classes. The success rate was extremely low — in most Tang cohorts, fewer than one in fifty candidates passed — and the prestige of the jinshi degree was correspondingly high.

The Song, from its foundation in 960, made the examination the dominant path to office. The Song founder Zhao Kuangyin is said to have declared that he would rather the empire’s best talent be found in the examination compound than at the head of an army — a remark that has been the object of much subsequent commentary. Under the Song, the examination was held every three years, the cohorts expanded, and the jinshi degree became a near-prerequisite for high office. The system was also increasingly dominated by a single essay form, the policy discussion or eight-legged essay (八股文, bāgǔ wén), whose form was fixed in the Ming but whose origins lie in the late Tang and early Song. By the Northern Song, roughly four-fifths of the jinshi were recruited through the regular examinations, and the Tang aristocratic practice of recruiting officials by recommendation from the great clans had been effectively abolished.

The Song examinations were, by the standards of the time, remarkably fair. Candidates were identified only by number, not by name; their papers were copied by clerks before grading to disguise the handwriting; and the examiners were themselves chosen by lot from a pool of senior officials. The Song also introduced the practice of reciting the classics from memory as a test of preparation, and candidates were expected to be able to recite the Four Books and the Five Classics in their entirety. The system was not perfect — bribery and favouritism were present, especially at the higher levels — but it represented a significant improvement over the aristocratic Nine-Rank System it replaced.

The Song examination also expanded the curriculum. The Tang exams tested a relatively narrow range of texts — the Book of Poetry, the Book of Documents, the Spring and Autumn Annals, and a few other classics, with an emphasis on the orthodox commentary of the Han scholars. The Song, building on the Neo-Confucian synthesis of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), added a richer philosophical vocabulary and a much wider range of classical texts. The result was a system that was both intellectually more demanding and more ideologically coherent, and that produced the cohort of scholar-officials who defined Song political life — men like Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), Su Shi (1037–1101), Sima Guang (1019–1086), and Wang Anshi (1021–1086).

The Ming and Qing: The System Codified

The Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang (the Hongwu emperor, r. 1368–1398) abolished the chancellor’s office and centralised policy in the emperor’s own hands, but he preserved and elaborated the examination system. The eight-legged essay (八股文, bāgǔ wén) was standardised in the Ming — a highly formulaic composition with eight prescribed sections, in which candidates were required to expand on a passage from the Four Books of Confucianism in a fixed form, beginning with an opening statement of the topic, then a series of parallel expansions, and ending with a synthesis. The form was so rigid that later critics blamed it for stifling Chinese thought, and the Qing reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the abolition of the eight-legged essay as a symbol of intellectual modernisation.

The Ming and Qing also systematised the lower tiers of the examination, from the county-level tests that produced the shengyuan (生員) to the provincial exams that produced the juren (舉人), and they built up an elaborate apparatus of examination compounds, examiners, graders, and (in the Qing) palace examinations personally conducted by the emperor. The examination compounds (貢院, gòngyuàn) of the provincial capitals were fortified cities within cities, designed to prevent cheating. Candidates were searched, their writing implements were inspected, and they were locked into tiny individual cells for the duration of the multi-day exams. The compounds survive in many Chinese cities today, often converted to museums or schools, and are a vivid reminder of the centrality of the examination to imperial life.

The Qing also added new examination forms, including special examinations for Manchus, for banner members, and for subjects of the empire’s frontier territories (Mongols, Tibetans, and others). The Qing examination was a relatively conservative institution, but it produced some of the most distinguished scholar-officials of the late imperial period, including the statesman Zeng Guofan and the scholar Zhang Zhidong.

Social Impact

The examination system is the single most important reason that imperial China, despite its enormous population and vast territory, was governed by a culturally and ideologically unified elite. The gentry class that dominated Chinese political life from the Song onward was, in the main, an examination gentry: men whose families had at least one jinshi, and who used the prestige and perquisites of the degree to build up local power.

The system did not produce a fully open meritocracy. Candidates had to be male, of free status, of adult age, and not in mourning. They were expected to be literate in classical Chinese, which effectively excluded the great majority of the population, including most women. Practical preparation required years of private study, often with a private tutor, and a candidate who could not afford years without earning a living rarely made it past the county-level test. In some periods, hereditary military households, certain artisan families, and most women were excluded by statute. The full story of commoners’ chances of becoming officials is treated elsewhere.

Yet the system remained more open than any other pre-modern institution of comparable importance. In any given cohort, perhaps a third of successful jinshi came from families with no previous degree-holders. Famous Song jinshi such as Fan Zhongyan (989–1052) and Sima Guang came from relatively modest backgrounds, and the Song in particular made a point of recruiting from the lower reaches of the gentry. The Ming and Qing examination essays are full of references to the candidate’s poverty, his father’s death, his mother’s toil — the system was a place where a poor but brilliant young man could rise.

The examination also shaped the social structure of the gentry. The degrees ranked the entire gentry class, and a successful jinshi could expect to marry into a good family, receive a salary from the state, and rise through the bureaucracy on the basis of his ability. The gentry, in turn, dominated local life: they ran the local schools, served as unofficial mediators in disputes, and (in the Ming and Qing) were the principal conduit between the imperial state and the villages. The gentry-dominated social order lasted, in essence, until the abolition of the examinations in 1905.

Legacy

The examination system was abolished in 1905, after almost thirteen centuries of continuous use. The abolition was part of the late Qing reform programme, and it was justified by the argument that the old examination, with its eight-legged essays and its Confucian curriculum, was inadequate to the needs of a modern nation-state. It is worth noted, however, that the abolition was not just a matter of reform. It was also a matter of the system’s own failure. By the late Qing, the system had become so rigid, the curriculum so out of touch with the realities of a modern state, and the demand for admission so intense that the examination compounds were scenes of crushing failure. The pressure to succeed had driven generations of young men into years of unproductive study, had encouraged corruption in the grading process, and had produced a gentry class that was at once deeply learned in the classics and dangerously ignorant of the world. The abolition of the examinations was, in a sense, the system collapsing under its own weight.

It is worth noting, in the same breath, that the modern Chinese civil service examination — the guokao (高考) for university entrance and the civil service examination for entry into the bureaucracy — is in some ways a descendant of the old system. The exam is still the central gatekeeper of upward mobility, and the Confucian emphasis on merit, classical learning, and bureaucratic service remains a feature of the modern Chinese state. The two-tiered structure of the imperial exam — local testing followed by central testing — has echoes in the modern Chinese system, and the prestige of the metropolitan jinshi is echoed in the prestige of the Peking University and Tsinghua University graduates who today enter the elite ranks of the Chinese civil service.

Internationally, the Chinese examination system influenced the development of similar systems in Korea, Vietnam, and (in the early modern period) Europe. The British civil service examination, introduced in 1855, was openly modelled on the Chinese example, and American civil service reformers in the 1880s cited the Chinese precedent. The Chinese examination system, as the comparative sociologist James Q. Wilson once put it, was the first modern bureaucracy; the European states only caught up in the nineteenth century.

Our section includes two focused articles: a piece on how the civil service exam actually worked, with details on the multi-tiered structure, the eight-legged essay, preparation, and the prestige of the jinshi; and a piece on whether commoners could become officials, on the social mobility the system did and did not produce.

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