The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China (Excerpt)

by Mark Cartwright 
published on 08 February 2019

The idea of recruiting officials to staff the imperial bureaucracy developed from the HanDynasty. An
Imperial Academy had been established in 124 BCE for scholars to study in depth the Confucian and
Taoist classics, and by the end of the Han period, this institution was training an impressive 30,000
students each year. In general, the state held the view that education was a mark of a civilised society
and in order to get the best administrators to run China’s vast territories efficiently, an entire class of
scholar civil servants was required. This view would prevail under varying dynasties right up to the
mid-20th century CE. From the early 8th century CE the military had its own separate set of
examinations.

The rulers of the Sui Dynasty (581-618 CE), who had once again unified China, were keen to further
improve and centralise the traditional administration system set up by the Han. There was now a
much greater emphasis not on an officials’ family connections and their letters of recommendations
from powerful friends but on the abilities demonstrated in their performance in civil service
examinations held in the capital. These examinations combined elements from tests used in previous
regimes such as questions on government and knowledge of the classics of Chinese literature,
especially those on Confucianism.

Emperor Gaozu (r. 618-626 CE), founder of the Tang dynasty (618-906 CE) continued with the same
policy and added further refinements such as testing a candidate’s speaking skills. The examinations
themselves were now more sophisticated with both regularly held ones and special event exams to
weed out the very best recruits. Now fully established, the civil service examinations tested a young
man's knowledge of the following:

 writing and calligraphy
 formal essay writing techniques
 classic literature
 mathematics
 legal matters
 government matters
 poetry
 clear and coherent speaking
 Civil Service Exams in the Song Dynasty
Since the Sui Dynasty (581-617), it had been possible to
become a government official by passing a series of written
examinations. It was only in the Song, however, that the
examination system came to be considered the normal
ladder to success.

From the point of view of the early Song emperors, the

purpose of the civil service examinations was to draw men
with literary educations into the government to counter the
dominance of military men. So long as the system
identified men who would make good officials, it did not
matter much if some talented people were missed.

From the point of view of those taking the examinations, however, fairness was crucial. They wanted
to be assured that everyone was given an equal chance and the examiners did not favor those they
knew. To increase their confidence in the objectivity of the examiners, the Song government decided
to replace candidates’ names with numbers and had clerks recopy each exam so that the handwriting
could not be recognized.

Scholars in and out of the government regularly debated what should be asked on the examinations,
but everyone agreed that one element should be command of Confucian texts. Candidates were
usually asked to discuss policy issues, but the examinations tested general education more than
knowledge of government laws and regulations.

Candidates even had to write poetry in specified forms.

To prepare for the examinations, men would memorize the Confucian classics in order to be able to
recognize even the most obscure passages.

In Song times exam success came to carry such prestige that the number of men entering each
competition grew steadily, from fewer than 30,000 early in the dynasty, to about 400,000 by the
dynasty’s end. Because the number of available posts did not change, a candidate’s chances of
passing plummeted, reaching as low as one in 333 in some prefectures.

Men often took the examinations several times, and were on average a little over 30 when they
succeeded. The great majority of those who devoted years to preparing for the exams, however, never
became officials.

SOURCE: East Asian Institute at Columbia University

 Scholar-Officials of China
Beginning in the late tenth century, in the early Northern Song, the government bureaucracy was staffed entirely by
scholar-officials chosen through a civil examination system. The highest degree, the jinshi (“presented scholar”), was
awarded as the culmination of a three-stage process. The examinations produced 200 to 300 jinshi candidates each year.
By the late eighteenth century, China’s population had grown to about 300 million. The more than 1,200 counties,
divided into eighteen provinces, were governed through an imperial bureaucracy of only 3,000 to 4,000 ranked degree-
holding officials. The officials ruled the land with the help of local gentry and locally recruited government clerks.
Because the governmental superstructure was so thinly spread, it was heavily invested in the Confucian virtue ethic as
the binding social force—and when that failed, in the use of harsh punishment—for maintaining stability and order.

This system operated as a mechanism through which the state replaced entrenched local hereditary landowners and
rich merchants with people whose authority was conferred (and could easily be removed) by the state. Scholar-officials,
unlike the other three social classes, did not therefore constitute an economic class as such, as their only power resided
in their Confucian ideals and their moral and ethical values. Nevertheless, the landowners, the craftsmen, and the
merchants were controlled by the state and the state was administered by the scholar-officials, who discouraged
entrepreneurial endeavor and the accumulation of wealth with the Confucian admonition that acceptance of limitations
leads to happiness.
Department of Asian Art. “Scholar-Officials of China.” In  Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–.  

“Neo-Confucianism”
There was a vigorous revival of Confucianism in the Song period. Confucian teachings were central to
the civil service examination system, the identity of the scholar-official class, the family system, and
political discourse.

Confucianism had naturally changed over the centuries since the time of Confucius (ca. 500 BCE).
Confucius’s own teachings, recorded by his followers in the Analects, were still a central element, as
were the texts that came to be called the Confucian classics, which included early poetry, historical
records, moral and ritual injunctions, and a divination manual. But the issues stressed by Confucian
teachers changed as Confucianism became closely associated with the state from about 100 BCE on,
and as it had to face competition from Buddhism, from the second century CE onward. Confucian
teachers responded to the challenge of Buddhist metaphysics by developing their own account of the
natural and human world.

With roots in the late Tang dynasty, the Confucian revival flourished in the Northern and Southern
Song periods and continued in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties that followed. The revived
Confucianism of the Song period (often called Neo-Confucianism) emphasized self-cultivation as a
path not only to self-fulfillment but to the formation of a virtuous and harmonious society and state.

SOURCE: East Asian Institute at Columbia University

Excerpt from China’s Examination Hell, by Ichisada Miyazaki