Elman, Benjamin. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

== Summary ==
This
book assesses the role of education, examination, and China's civil service in
fostering the world's first professional class (the literati) based on
demonstrated knowledge and skill. Civil
examinations had been instituted in China as early as the seventh century CE,
but in the Ming and Qing eras they were the nexus linking the intellectual,
political, and economic life of imperial China. Local elites and members of the
court sought to influence how the government regulated the classical curriculum
and selected civil officials. As a guarantor of educational merit, civil
examinations served to tie the dynasty to the privileged gentry and literati
classes--both ideologically and institutionally. These examinations thus took
on cultural salience: they represented the focal point for imperial interests,
family strategies, and individual hopes and aspirations. Moreover, the
education ethos carried over in the domains of medicine, law, fiscal policy,
and military affairs. The ninety-five percent that failed often became doctors,
Buddhist priests, teachers, notaries, merchants, astronomers, and printers. He
argues that these civil examinations restructured the complex relationships
between social status, political power, and cultural lineage, in which civil
examinations, as a test of educational merit, “tied the dynasty and its elites
together bureaucratically via culture.” (318) It was also key precedent to late
adaptations by western countries (especially in France).  He writes: “A classical education based on
nontechnical moral and statecraft theory was as suitable for selection of
elites in China… as humanism and a classical education served elites in the
nation-states of early-modern Europe.” (317)
See Also: John Carson