The Good Sides of the Chinese Imperial Exam

There were many

(Pictured: Two Chinese scholars composing poetry - a Tang Dynasty painting.)

The Sonoma Sage described the bad sides of the Chinese Imperial exam. In this essay the Sage explains some of the reasons why it worked.

Chinese Poetry is Not Like European Poetry

The men who passed the Imperial exam had to be great poets. This sounds ridiculous given that their future jobs in government would seem to have nothing at all to do with writing poetry.

In Europe and the the US, poetry is emotional, fanciful, or dramatic. We place poetry on the opposite side from reason, logic, or math. Chinese poetry is very different - classical Chinese poems were rigorous in their character count, their rhyming patterns, the use of opposing concepts on pairs of lines, as well as rules for the tonal quality in successive characters.

It has been estimated that a highly educated Chinese scholar knew 8,000 characters, with an additional 2,000 idiomatic expressions. Creating a classic Lushi poem was like creating a puzzle, or a logical syllogism. You placed your characters in a sequence with many rules. The poem also had to be completely accurate, there was no such concept as poetic license in Imperial China (for an example of this see the highly amusing story Wang Anshi Baffles Su Shu by Feng Menglong, from Stories to Caution the World).

The Sage likens Chinese poetry to a 3D Chess match. One can write pages explaining what is going on in 35 character poem. The ideal Chinese poem has multiple layers of meaning and additional meaning can be gained by examining the juxtaposition of characters which are physically next to the character, but on different lines. Further, most Chinese characters contain as many as six sub-elements which in turn suggest hidden meanings to the poem. The Sage asserts that no English translations of Chinese poems captures the depth and nuances of classical Chinese poems.

The result being: the Chinese scholars who passed the Imperial Exam were puzzle solvers. They saw connections everywhere, in language and in the world at large. The Imperial exam’s emphasis on creating good poems was test of logical reasoning, pattern matching, and problem solving. The men who passed the exam were not starry-eyed romantics. Quite the opposite. As a group they were cold and strict. They loved to study and were dedicated to learning all their life. As a rule they lived long and rather boring lives; they were fastidious in their diet and daily habits. As a group, they were nearly the exact opposite of all famous European poets.

There was Truth to the Idea that the Exam Winners Could Learn Anything

The Jinshi (the men who passed all the levels of the Imperial Exam) as a group, were capable of picking up any book, reading it, and knowing it after a single reading. Time after time, men with no background in a field were given books on a new subject when they joined a ministry, and after a short period of study, they knew everything on the topic.

The Jinshi had near photographic memory, they could write fast and clearly. Their minds were sharp, their knowledge of Chinese history tended to be excellent. In a sense, they often knew too much. They knew what had been tried before and they rarely attempted doing something which had failed in an earlier time - even though technology had changed and better leadership might succeed where earlier men had failed.

Example 1 - The Grand Canal

The Grand canal was first built during the Sui Dynasty around 610 CE. The basic idea was to connect the Yellow river region with the Yangtze river region using rivers, lakes, and canals. Maintaining the canal system in the face of silt build-up, floods, and erosion was a massive job. This was one of the core tasks of the Ministry of Works and the provincial governors that the canal passed across. The fact that the canal functioned quite well for much of the next 1,300 years is a testament to the skill of the men who worked for the ministry of works. None of these men were hydraulic engineers by training. They had to learn the job from books and from interviews with the more experienced staff. By and large the canal remained useful from 610 CE to 1850 CE.

Example 2 - Controlling the Yellow River

The Yellow River is both the source of Chinese civilization and a curse. It is constantly fooding, changing its course, and depositing silt everywhere it goes. Chinese civilization was spurred into existence by the need to control the Yellow River with dams, dikes, and levees. Trying to control the Yellow River was a major task for every Chinese Dynasty. The typical solution has been to build levees along the river and dams on the tributary rivers so as to maximize the land available for farming.

Because the Yellow River carries so much silt (hence the name) it is usually the case that the Yellow River is flowing along a river channel which is higher than the farmland around it! Once the levees break, the Yellow River carves a new path and usually, it cannot be forced back into the original path.

Despite the many floods in Chinese history, the Yellow river has been managed pretty well by the Chinese.

That the Chinese Scholars Never Studied War meant that China Tended to Avoid Wars

To a very real degree, the Chinese adopted their anti-war policies deliberately. They knew that if they put men of talent and ambition into their military, such men would wish to exorcise their skills by waging wars on China’s neighbors. Further, they knew that if very talented men were successful in their wars, then these same men would pose a threat to the stability of the Chinese state - to the detriment of everyone. (For real-world examples of this exact issue, see the history of the Eastern Roman Empire from 550 AD to 900 AD).

The Sage asserts that the Chinese deliberately put stupid men in command of their armies, and they deliberately kept the best men away from the Ministry of War.

China - from 600 CE onwards - usually fielded the largest armies in the world. They could easily have waged war on all their neighbors. For a time they did just that. The second Huangdi of the Sui waged war on the state of Goguryeo. Li Shimin (AKA Taizong of Tang) waged wars on both the Easter and Western Turks and then against the state of Silla. The negative example of several of these wars was not lost on the scholar officials. Their conclusion, reinforced by the disaster of the An Lushan rebellion, was that wars were a waste of time, effort, and lives. Nothing good resulted from wars of aggression.

The standard belief from 850 onwards was: China should expand to control it’s own people, but not expand further. Let other nations rule themselves. So long as they left China alone, China would leave them alone. This was the policy of the Song Dynasty, and the Ming. The Qing maintained this same policy except with regard to the Mongols, who they - rather dishonestly - regarded as disloyal subjects whenever they fought each other.

To reduce the chances of waging wars of aggression, the Chinese military was kept large, but ineffective. The Chinese loved building walls around their cities and the Ming built the famous Long Wall in the north, but they resisted the temptation to create a fast, powerful, and effective army which could be used to attack neighboring states. The Chinese built a navy which was only suitable for coastal defense. The huge ocean-going ships of the Yongle Emperor’s rule were dismantled after his death and (later) even the plans for making those ships were destroyed.

The Chinese army was characterized as large masses of soldiers who guarded the borders of China. Chinese soldiers were equipped with simple weapons, trained to kill and collect heads as proof of their prowess, and kept away from civilian life as much as possible. The dregs of society joined the Chinese military. The Chinese military was viewed as a necessary evil.

A few Chinese scholar officials were able - in times of national crisis - to become effective generals. One of the most effective was Qi Jiguang who was actually born into one of the Ming’s odd hereditary military families. His life was beautifully described in a chapter of Ray Huang’s magnum opus 1587 - A Year of No Significance. As was typical for both the Song and the Ming Dynasties, even the best generals were dismissed from power after they had won major victories (see Yue Fei).

The Exam System produced men who Worked together with relatively little Conflict

Because all the winners of the exam had studied the same material, they were all experts with the same knowledge base and they understood each other at a very deep level. Most modern governments are plagued by infighting between various branches of the government. In the USA, the Department of Defense - staffed by members of the US armed forces - has a long-standing distaste for the Department of State, largely staffed by civilian experts in foreign languages. The Department of State and the Department of Commerce - largely staffed by people beholden to big business - are constantly undercutting each other. There are many other rivalries in the US government. The Sage believes that every department in the US government has a hated enemy agency which they would like to see defunded.

We don’t see this type of animosity between the six ministries in the Chinese government. It seems that the various members of the ministries liked one another and were bound together by a very strong sense that they all had passed the exam and they were each other’s intellectual equals.

The most bitter rivalry in the Chinese government was between the exam winners who staffed the ministries and the eunuchs of the palace who lived and worked closely with the Huangdi. The conflict between the inner palace staff and the scholar-officials was vicious and it was always present in every dynasty from the first, to the last.

Exam Winners Who Didn’t Travel outside of China Had No Desire to Rule Other Nations

The British, the French, and later the Americans, had a strong desire to take over the savage nations they visited starting in 1500. The Chinese scholars told a cautionary tale about one of their number who went on foreign mission to see if the Han state could find allies for its war against the Xiong-Nu. His name was Zhang Qian who, at Wu of Han’s orders, went west in 138 BCE. His journey lasted 14 years, many of which were spent as a prisoner. When he returned, his report encouraged the Huangdi Wu of Han to send an army all the way to the Fergana Valley - which succeeded in its mission of collecting a great quantity of the best horses in the world.

However, this was regarded by later Chinese scholars as a mistake! The Chinese scholars appear to have reasoned that the less the Huangdi knew about China’s neighboring nations, the less inclined he would be to order Chinese armies to take over these neighboring nations. So, the Chinese scholar’s reluctance to learn about the rest of the world seems to have been - at least in part - a deliberate policy to reduce the scope of the ambitions of their ruler.

This may seem hard to believe and for many years the Sage resisted this interpretation of events. However, as of 2022 the weight of evidence now tells the Sage that the Chinese scholars deliberately did not travel outside of China. Of course, the Chinese scholars could have explored all of Asia as Chinese merchants routinely sailed south all the way to Java and west all the way to coastal cities of Tamil-Nadu, India. It would have been simple for a scholar to board one of the many Chinese merchants ships and sail to Korea, Japan, Vietnam, the Ryukyu islands, Siam, Sumatra, Java, and India but - so far as we know - they did not. The Sage believes this was not simply the belief that everything was better in China, it was also born from the notion that the more one learned about the world, the more trouble one was likely to cause.

The detailed history of the troubles the Ming Treasure fleets got into certainly supports this notion.

Conclusion

The Imperial exam system had strengths and weaknesses. On balance, it clearly worked throughout the Song and Ming Dynasties. Whether it was still useful during the first part of the Qing Dynasty is debatable. That the Imperial Exam was a net-negative in the 1800s is undeniable. The last Imperial Exam was held in 1905, just six years before the Qing Dynasty gave up power over China in 1911.

See the companion essay: How the Imperial Exam System Destroyed the Chinese Government.