page_title: Imperial examination
section_title: Education
hierarchical_section_title: Imperial examination / Impact / Education
caption_attribution_description: English: A gate into the Guozijian in Beijing, China.
context_page_description: Chinese imperial examinations were a civil service examination system in Imperial China for selecting candidates for the state bureaucracy. The concept of choosing bureaucrats by merit rather than birth started early in Chinese history but using written examinations as a tool of selection started in earnest during the mid-Tang dynasty. The system became dominant during the Song dynasty and lasted until it was abolished in the late Qing dynasty reforms in 1905.
  The exams served to ensure a common knowledge of writing, the classics, and literary style among state officials. This common culture helped to unify the empire and the ideal of achievement by merit gave legitimacy to imperial rule. The examination system played a significant role in tempering the power of hereditary aristocracy, military authority, and the rise of a gentry class of scholar-bureaucrats.
  Starting with the Song dynasty, the system was regularized and developed into a roughly three-tiered ladder from local to provincial to court exams. The content was narrowed and fixed on texts of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy by the Ming dynasty, during which the highest degree, the jinshi, became essential for the highest offices.
context_section_description: During the Tang period, a set curricular schedule took shape where the three steps of reading, writing, and the composition of texts had to be learnt before students could enter state academies. As the number of graduates increased, competition for government posts became more fierce. Whereas at the beginning of the Tang dynasty, there were few jinshi, during the Song dynasty, there were more than the government needed. Several reforms to education were suggested to thin the number of candidates and improve their quality. In 1044, Han Qi, Fan Zhongyan, Ouyang Xiu, and Song Qi implemented the Qingli Reforms, which included hiring experts in the classics to teach at government schools, setting up schools in every prefecture, and requiring every candidate to have attended the prefectural school for at least 300 days to qualify for the prefectural exam. Prior to the Qingli Reforms, the role of the state was limited to supporting a few institutions, such as in 1022 when the government granted a prefectural school in Yanzhou with 151 acres of land. The Qingli Reforms were abandoned after only one year.
  By the end of the Northern Song... government schools connected in a hierarchical empire-wide system, but there was a high degree of organizational uniformity as well. Prefectural school preceptorships became respected posts in local administration which, as far as we can tell, were routinely filled; educational support fields and student support provisions became the rule rather than the exception; and to cope with the rising demand of schooling, school entrance examinations became common.
  — John W. Chaffee
  Wang Anshi (1021–86) proposed that examinations alone were not enough to select talent. His answer to the glut of graduates was to found new schools (shuyuan) for the selection of officials, with the ultimate goal of replacing the examinations altogether by selecting officials directly from the school's students. The government expanded the Guozijian (National University) and ordered each circuit to grant land to schools and to hire supervising teachers for them. In 1076, a special examination for teachers was introduced. Implementation of the reforms was uneven and slow. Of the 320 prefectures, only 53 had prefectural schools with supervising teachers by 1078 and only a few were given the ordered allotment of land. Wang died and his reforms languished until the early 12th century when Emperor Huizong of Song injected more resources into the national education project. Schools received approximately 1.5 million acres of land taken from the state granaries. In 1104, students started being processed up the three-colleges ranking system from the county school to the Guozijian for direct appointment in the bureaucracy. At its height the Song education system counted roughly 200,000 students in total, or approximately 0.2% of its one hundred million people. The schools went into decline starting from the Southern Song period (1127–1279) after the loss of the north to the Jin dynasty. The government was reluctant to fund them because they did not create immediate profits and as a result, cuts were made in teaching personnel, and the national university itself was reduced in size. Schools in imperial China never recovered from the decline starting from the Southern Song. For the rest of China's dynastic history, government funded academies functioned primarily as gateways to the examination system, and did not offer any real instruction to students. Functionally they were not schools but rather preparatory institutions for the examinations. Wang's goal of replacing the examinations was never realized. Although Wang's reforms fell short of their mark, they launched the first state led initiative to regulate the day to day education of its subjects through the appointment of teachers and funding of schools.
  The major exception was in the 1140s when the court played an active role in the reconstruction of schools and made repeated efforts to get them all staffed with degree-holding preceptors... Following this period, the central gove
caption: Gate of the Guozijian in Beijing in modern times
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