section_path: Administration and politics/Imperial examinations
section_name: Imperial examinations
paragraph_text: Imperial examinations
  
  Students of Confucian studies were candidates for the imperial examinations, which qualified their graduates for appointment to the local, provincial, and central government bureaucracies. Two types of exams were given, mingjing (明經; 'illuminating the classics') and jinshi (進士; 'presented scholar'). The mingjing was based upon the Confucian classics and tested the student's knowledge of a broad variety of texts. The jinshi tested a student's literary abilities in writing essays in response to questions on governance and politics, as well as in composing poetry. Candidates were also judged on proper deportment, appearance, speech, and calligraphy, all subjective criteria that favored the wealthy over those of more modest means who were unable to pay tutors of rhetoric and writing. Although a disproportionate number of civil officials came from aristocratic families, wealth and noble status were not prerequisites, and the exams were open to all male subjects whose fathers were not of the artisan or merchant classes. To promote widespread Confucian education, the Tang government established state-run schools and issued standard versions of the Five Classics with commentaries.
  
  Open competition was designed to draw the best talent into government. But perhaps an even greater consideration for the Tang rulers was to avoid imperial dependence on powerful aristocratic families and warlords by recruiting a body of career officials having no family or local power base. The Tang law code ensured equal division of inherited property amongst legitimate heirs, encouraging social mobility by preventing powerful families from becoming landed nobility through primogeniture. The competition system proved successful, as scholar-officials acquired status in their local communities while developing an esprit de corps that connected them to the imperial court. From Tang times until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1912, scholar-officials served as intermediaries between the people and the government.
  
  Yet the potential of a widespread examination system was not fully realized until the succeeding Song dynasty, when the merit-driven scholar official largely shed his aristocratic habits and defined his social status through the examination system.
  
  The examination system, used only on a small scale in Sui and Tang times, played a central role in the fashioning of this new elite. The early Song emperors, concerned above all to avoid domination of the government by military men, greatly expanded the civil service examination system and the government school system.