Chinese Empire

Could Commoners Become Officials in Imperial China?

One of the most common claims made about the Chinese imperial examination system is that it allowed bright boys of peasant origin to rise to the highest offices of the empire. The claim is partly true and partly misleading, and the full story of who actually rose, and who did not, is one of the most important questions in the social history of pre-modern China. This article examines the social mobility produced by the examination system, the limits of that mobility, and the rise of the gentry class that dominated Chinese life in the Song, Ming, and Qing.

For the broader context, see our overview of the imperial examination and our survey of Chinese government and bureaucracy. For the mechanics of the examination itself, see our article on how the civil service exam worked.

The Theory of Merit

The theory of the system was meritocratic. The examination tested candidates on the basis of their written performance on a standard set of texts. Candidates from any region could sit; the examinations were held in every province; the grading was nominally blind. In principle, a young man of any background could become a jinshi, and a jinshi could rise to the highest positions in the imperial service.

The principle was articulated explicitly in Song policy. The Song founder Zhao Kuangyin, having unified China under military leadership, deliberately opened the civil service to talent from across the empire, and the Song examination was famous for recruiting officials from modest backgrounds. The Song reformer Fan Zhongyan (989–1052), whose family lost his father when he was two, rose to become a senior minister of state. The historian Sima Guang (1019–1086) became chancellor in 1086. The statesman Bao Zheng (999–1062), the just magistrate of popular legend, came from a modest family in Anhui. The Song, more than any other dynasty, made the examination the path of upward mobility for talented commoners.

The principle was reaffirmed in every subsequent dynasty. The Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang (the Hongwu emperor) was himself the son of a poor peasant family. The Qing, despite being a Manchu conquest dynasty, preserved the examination system and recruited Han Chinese degree-holders into the imperial service on a substantial scale.

The Reality of Class

In practice, the examination system was far from open. Several practical barriers kept the great majority of the population from participating at all.

The first barrier was literacy. The examination was conducted entirely in classical Chinese, which was not the spoken language of everyday life. A candidate had to read classical Chinese fluently, write it correctly, and memorise thousands of pages of classical texts. In a population that was overwhelmingly illiterate, this was a substantial barrier. Estimates suggest that even at the height of the late Qing, perhaps 20–30 per cent of the male population could read, and perhaps 5–10 per cent could read classical Chinese well enough to attempt the examinations.

The second barrier was time. The preparation for the examinations took years, often decades. A candidate would begin studying in childhood, sit for the county exam in his teens or twenties, and (if successful) take the provincial exam in his twenties or thirties. Few families could support a young man for that long. The candidate was effectively a student for the first twenty or thirty years of his adult life, contributing nothing to the household economy. For a poor peasant family, the cost was often prohibitive.

The third barrier was access to teachers and the cost of travel to the examination compound. A candidate had to bring his own food, paper, and ink. The county and prefectural exams were within reach of a poor but determined candidate; the provincial exam, in the provincial capital, was a major financial undertaking; the metropolitan exam, in Beijing, was a journey of weeks or months for a candidate from the south.

The result was that the examination system was, in practice, a system for the gentry and the would-be gentry. The famous jinshi of the Song, Ming, and Qing were almost all from families with at least modest resources, and the great majority were from gentry families. The proportion of successful jinshi from families with no previous degree-holders is sometimes estimated at one-third in the Song, falling to perhaps 10–20 per cent in the Qing.

Commoners Who Rose

Despite these barriers, commoners did rise through the examination system, and the stories of their rise are some of the most celebrated in Chinese literature. The Tang poet Bai Juyi (772–846) came from a poor family and won his jinshi only after a long struggle. The Song historian Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) lost his father at four and was raised by his mother, who taught him to write with reeds in the absence of brushes; he became one of the most distinguished scholars of his age. The Qing statesman Zeng Guofan (1811–1872), one of the most powerful officials of the nineteenth century, came from a poor peasant family in Hunan and succeeded at the examinations only after multiple attempts.

These figures were unusual, but they were not unique. The system produced, in every generation, a small but steady stream of commoners who rose to the gentry through examination success. The famous Song jinshi Fan Zhongyan is the prototype: a poor boy who, through talent and hard work, becomes a senior official. The figure of the brilliant but poor scholar is a stock character in Chinese drama and fiction, and the cultural weight of the figure testifies to the reality it represents.

The Gentry Class

The corollary of commoner upward mobility was the rise of a gentry class that dominated Chinese life. The shidafu (士大夫) — the scholar-official class — was composed of men who had passed the examinations, plus their families, plus men whose families had passed in earlier generations. The gentry enjoyed tax exemptions, access to office, social prestige, and (in many cases) substantial local landholdings. They dominated local society, served as informal mediators in disputes, ran the local schools, and were the principal conduit between the imperial state and the villages.

The gentry class grew over time. The Song, with its expanded examinations, produced a much larger gentry than the Tang. The Ming, with its provincial academies and its expanded school system, produced a still larger one. The Qing produced the largest gentry of all — perhaps 1.5 million shengyuan and juren across the empire by the eighteenth century. The gentry was, in this sense, a hereditary class: a man who became a jinshi in his thirties would expect his sons and grandsons to become officials, and the family would remain in the gentry for generations.

The Limits of Mobility

The system was, in the end, less open than its theory suggested and more open than its critics allowed. The history of imperial China is full of cases in which poor boys rose, and full of cases in which rich boys failed. The system did not produce a fully open meritocracy, but it did produce a class of officials whose claim to office rested on ability rather than on birth.

The system also had darker consequences. The pressure to succeed drove generations of young men into years of unproductive study. The examination essays restricted intellectual life. The gentry class, as it grew, became increasingly concentrated and increasingly resistant to the reforms that the late Qing state needed. The abolition of the examination in 1905 was, in part, a recognition that the system had outlived its usefulness.

For a focused treatment of the examination itself, see our article on the civil service exam. For the broader context, see our overview of the imperial examination and our survey of Chinese government and bureaucracy.