How the Imperial Test Ended Up Destroying Chinese Government

The Test became all important - actual governing became secondary

(Picture: the Imperial Exam Museum in Nanjing)

The Imperial Exam is one of the most important inventions of the Chinese. See the companion essay: The Good Aspects of the Imperial Exam.

The Imperial Exam was - in effect - a supremely difficult intelligence test. Out of an initial batch of test takers - say 4,000 educated men, only one man would pass the final exam.

The test took place once every three years, and it was held in successive stages, about one month apart. Only one man out of 100 passed the 1st stage. The next stage of the test was only open to the men who passed the first stage. Again, the passage rate for stage 2 was even less than 1 out 100. The last stage, held in the capital, was only for the winners of stage 2. Of the ~120 men who sat for this exam, around 20-25 men passed. This group of Jinshi were than examined by the Huangdi (Emperor) of China in person, and a final ranking was made - very rarely would the Huangdi fail anyone who sat before him.

The test required:

1. Complete mastery of a number of classic works. The easiest of these was the Analects of Confucius. The hardest was the memorization of the Spring-Autumn Annals, an incredibly dull recitation of trivial events which took place in the final 400 years of Chu Dynasty (907 BCE to 495 BCE). (Note: at various times, depending on who was in charge, the exact books being tested changed. See Chaffee’s chapter in The Cambridge History of China - The Sung. Part Two).

2. Complete memorization and understanding of each character used in these works. One question might be: How many times does the character 城 (cheng) appear in the writings of Mencius. How was it used?

3. A nearly complete understanding of the major commentaries on these classic works. Many Chinese scholars had written books about each of the classics and you had to know what the famous writers had already written about certain important passages in the classics.

4. Knowledge of the current official attitude towards certain hot topics. Every 50 years, a new way of talking about a certain topic would become the official understanding of that topic. If you failed to show that you knew the current understanding of this decade’s hot topic - you wouldn’t pass the test.

5. Mastery of a style for answering the questions called the Eight Legged Essay. If you answered the question but without the right style - you wouldn’t pass the test.

6. Ability to write a poem on a specific topic. There were specific styles which every candidate had to know, not just based on the number of characters per line but also based on rhyming patterns and with a required pattern of tones in each line.

No test in the Western world has ever been as difficult as the Imperial Exam. For example, the hardest of the State Bar exams in the US is the California Bar. In 2022, the passage rate was about 50 out of 100. The Sonoma Sage can boast of the fact that he passed the California State bar exam on his first attempt. That said, the Sage is quite certain he would not have passed the Imperial Exam.

Again, the passage rate for stages 1 and 2 of the Imperial exam was only 1% each time. Further, the Imperial exam was not open to anyone. You had to have a document proving the completion of your studies from a recognized teacher before you could even sit for the Stage 1 test.

The Evolution of the Imperial Exam

The first serious exams were conducted during the reign of Wu Zetian - the only woman to take the title of Huangdi. For 15 years, Wu Zetian ruled outright as the supreme head of the Tang government. In an attempt to get loyal men working for her - as opposed to the somewhat disloyal members of the Tang nobility - she instituted an exam system to get men of talent from outside the existing power structure.

After her death, the following Tang Huangdi also held exams, albeit irregularly, and mostly to allow highly connected young men to jump up the ranks of the government without causing too much unrest. Relatively few outsiders from non-noble families passed the Tang exams.

The Song Dynasty changed this dramatically. The second Song Huangdi, Zhao Kuangyi (AKA: Taizong of Song) wanted new men loyal to him, as opposed to the older men in his government who had served under his older brother, the founder of the Song Dynasty. So the second Song Huangdi instituted an exam system in 976 which continued, with a 100 year break, all the way till 1905.

The test was designed to get new men, from almost any background, into the government. It succeeded, to a degree. More than 35,000 men would take the exams in the capital of the Southern Song (Hangzhou) in the years 1180 to 1260. One estimate is that 7% of the male population in the Song Dynasty tried to pass at least one level of the Imperial Exam.

The Ming Dynasty refined the exam, allowed more people to take it, and made it easier to to take, by spreading the three days of the exam with three day breaks between each test day - though candidates still died during the exam from the strain. However, as the population grew, the number of positions in the government did not. Thus, mid-way through the Ming Dynasty, men passed the exam at the 2nd level and found there were no jobs available for them. It became common to bribe clerks in the Ministry of Personnel just to get a low-ranking position in the Ming government.

The Qing kept the Ming exam system with hardly any changes. The biggest modification was the Qing created a special easy exam which was only open to men of the Eight Banners - which generally meant that only Manchu men could take and pass the easy exam.

The reason for the easy exam was the Manchu controlled China by putting new Manchu-only layer of officials in place. The job of the Manchu officials was to make decisions and supervise the activity of their Chinese counterparts who did most of the work. So the Manchu increased the size of the Ming government, from roughly 5,000 officials to more than 8,000. However for the ethnic Chinese population, there was no change.

By 1800, half a million men were taking the exam, and yet the number of Jinshi remained the same. Instead of 1 out of 3,000 test takers actually making it to sit before the Huangdi, it was 1 out of 25,000. A number of highly literate men stopped trying to pass the exam and wrote the more than 1,000 dramas written during the Qing Dynasty.

How the Test Destroyed the Chinese Government

The exam system ended up destroying the Chinese government. It started out as a brilliant system for improving the government and - over 500 years - turned into a monster.

1. You get what you test for. The test rapidly lost touch with the real world. From the begining, memorization of useless information was part of the test - hence the argument over including the Spring-Autumn Annals as part of the test materials. Early in the Song, people could opt to be tested on law, history, ritual, or ancient poetry. For reasons which are hard to comprehend, the Chinese always gave primacy to those who mastered the ancient poems and had the ability to write their own poems. Soon, everyone who took the test opted for the Poetry expertise, as that led to the highest ranked jobs in the government. After 150 years, the other parts of the test (law, history, current affairs) were dropped from the test. Mastery of poetry was the only thing that mattered.

2. Most of the men who passed the Imperial exam were profoundly ignorant about the world they lived in. Most men who passed the test had no knowledge of their own government’s legal system. Not one man passed the Imperial exam based on his knowledge of: Korean language & history - Japanese language & history - or any European language and history! Military arts and knowlege was completely ignored. Engineering of any form, even dam building and maintaining canals was ignored. Given that the Yellow River routinely flooded when a dams or levees broke, killing tens of thousands of people, one might think that bringing people into the government who were experts in dam building would make a lot of sense. Nope. The theory was: any man smart enough to pass the test was smart enough to master something as simple as dam building.

3. The test totally distorted learning in Chinese society. Few people in China wrote books about foreign nations - it wasn’t on the test. As the test was incredibly narrow in focus, so to were educated Chinese men narrow minded and obsessed with useless knowledge like mastery of Shi or Lushi poetry, and counting the number of characters of each type used in the Xunzi. Instead of broadening the minds and knowledge of the people, the Imperial exam caused intellectuals in China to loose all curiosity about the world beyond what was on the test.

4. The exam’s passage rate was so low that thousands of brilliant and capable men were not able to enter into the government. One such man, Hong Xiuquan, came close to passing the 1st stage of the exam on his first attempt at age 19. He studied obsessively for the next three years and took the test again at age 22. After all that effort, his result was worse. Hong’s failure led to a mental breakdown, he saw visions and he ended up starting a revolutionary movement which swept over China - called the Taiping Rebellion. Over 20 million Chinese men, women, and children died in the fighting and several major cities were utterly destroyed (including Nanjing). All because the exam system had such a low passage rate that it excluded many highly talented men. Frustrated but talented men are extremely dangerous, as historians know (see Robespierre, Lenin, Adolph Hitler…).

5. Because the test never asked about information relating to other nations, the leading Chinese intellectuals didn’t have any incentive to learn about the rest of the world. So far as the Sage can tell, not one Jinshi ever visited Europe before the year 1870! Marco Polo traveled to China and back in the years 1270-1290. Almost certainly some European priests had made this trip even earlier. Europeans routinely sailed to China starting in 1508. A few Chinese made the journey to Europe and back over the next 400 years but not one Chinese government official ever went to Europe. The Qing signed a treaty with Russia in 1689 and they could have set up an embassy in Moscow the following year. They didn’t. Two hundred years passed before the Qing finally established embassies in Russia, and other European nations. Consequently, the Chinese had no clue how rapidly Europe was changing as the decades passed. It takes a special kind of blindness to assume that nothing which happens outside your nation matters! The exam was the central cause of this blindness.

6. When Vietnam stopped sending tribute to China in 1530, the Chinese had no clue as to why. They had to send a special fact-finding mission to Vietnam in order to figure out that a civil war was raging and Mac Dang Dung had killed the previous Le Kings and put himself on the throne of Vietnam. One might think - given the close connection between China and Vietnam - that the Chinese might have paid a bit more attention to events taking place in their southern neighbor, but no. The Ming government debated for years about sending an army into Vietnam to restore the Le, but finally opted to do nothing.

7. In 1609, the Satsuma clan took control over the Ryukyu Islands. Ryukyu had been an independent kingdom for several hundred years and a tributary state of China. Then Satsuma conquered Ryukyu in a swift invasion. The Chinese didn’t realize this fact for the next 265 years. The Chinese had so little interest in this neighboring kingdom - just 100 miles off the coast of China - that they remained unaware of the fact that Japan was now in control. The Ryukyu continued to send tribute missions to China every three years, as they were supposed to, and the hints the Ryukyu delegation dropped when they were in Beijing were ignored or dismissed by the Chinese staff at the Ministry of Rites.

8. The Imperial exam rewarded men who were superb at memorization and poetry, but it did not reward men who were brilliant innovators, out-of-the-box thinkers, genius engineers, great scientists, or even brilliant writers.

9. The exam winners were filled with arrogance. As a group they felt superior to all other men on Earth. They had mastered trivia and were generously rewarded for it by the government. It was a bit like giving all powers of the state into the hands of the men who memorized baseball stats. The exam winners must have known they had won by a mix of luck and mastery of useless knowledge. They certainly did their best to resist any changes to the system even though their track record of success was not impressive since 1550.

All efforts to reform the system were blocked by the men who had passed the test.

The obvious reforms were:

1. Increase the number of men who passed.

2. Staff the Yamens (the government offices) with all the new men who passed the test. Instead, the Yamens were filled with men who inherited their positions. The Yamen staff were hardly paid, were not official, and had no formal training - yet they actually ran the government at the local level.

3. Have different tests for different parts of government. People going into the Ministry of Works should have passed a test on mathematics and engineering - NOT poetry. People working in the Ministry of War should have had proven knowledge of warfare, having served in command of military units, and led men into battle - NOT poetry.

4. Set up a new ministry of foreign affairs. Set up language schools to study other languages. Set up embassies in other nations. Test for knowledge of the outside world - NOT poetry.

5. Allow people to enter the government based on proven ability in the real world. Passing a test should never have been superior to actually doing something useful -like winning a war, or traveling to Europe and back.

None of these things were done.

This goes a long way to explaining why China was regarded as a dysfunctional state by the Europeans in the 1800s.

For the counter-view - that the Imperial Exam system was a net-positive - see the companion essay: the Good Aspects of the Imperial Exam.