The examination system, also known as “civil service examinations” or “imperial examinations”—and, in Chinese, as keju科舉, keju zhidu科舉制度, gongju貢舉, xuanju選舉 or zhiju制舉—was the imperial Chinese bureaucracy’s central institution for recruiting its officials. Following both real and idealized models from previous times, the system was established at the beginning of the 7th century ce evolving over several dynasties into a complex institution that prevailed for 1,300 years before its abolition in 1905. One of the system’s most salient features, especially in the late imperial period (1400–1900), was its meritocratic structure (at least in principle, if not necessarily in practice): almost anyone from among the empire’s male population could sit for the examinations. Moreover, candidates were selected based on their performance rather than their pedigree. In order to be accessible to candidates anywhere in the empire, the system’s infrastructure spanned the entire territory. In a long sequence of triennial qualifying examinations at the local, provincial, metropolitan, and palace levels candidates were mainly required to write rhetorically complicated essays elucidating passages from the Confucian canon. Most candidates failed at each level, and only a couple of hundred out of a million or often more examinees attained final examination success at the metropolitan and palace levels. Due to its accessibility and ubiquity, the examination system had a decisive impact on the intellectual and social landscapes of imperial China. This impact was reinforced by the rule that candidates were allowed to retake examinations as often as they needed to in order to reach the next level. It was therefore not uncommon for individuals in imperial China to spend the great part of their lives, occasionally even until their last breath, sitting for the competitions. Indeed the extant sources reveal, by their sheer quantity alone, that large parts of the population, not only aspiring candidates, were in fact obsessed with the civil service examinations in the same way that modern societies are fascinated by sports leagues. To a great extent, it was this obsession, along with the system’s centripetal force constantly pulling the population in the different regions toward the political center in the capital, which may have held the large territory of imperial China together, providing it with both coherence and cohesion. Modern Historiography has tended to have a negative view of the examination system, singling it out, and specifically its predominantly literary curriculum, as the major cause for traditional Chinese society’s failure to develop into a modern nation with a strong scientific and technological tradition of its own. In the late 20th and early 21st century, this paradigm has become gradually more nuanced as historians have begun to develop new ways of approaching the extant sources, in particular the large number of examination essays and aids.
John Fryer and the Shanghai Polytechnic: making space for science in nineteenth-century China
