2012 December 02 Sunday How Well Did Chinese Imperial Exam
System Work? How well did China's imperial examination system
work at selecting the most talented for the imperial civil
service? Mark Elliott, a history prof at Harvard, says the
imperial civil service competition was effectively open to less
than a tenth of Chinese society. Over the last 20 years,
research has shown that the keju was far from the “ladder of
success” it was long widely reputed to be. We know that in the
Ming dynasty (1368-1644), for instance, merchants’ sons were not
allowed to take the examinations at all, and that in the Qing
(1644-1911), as Benjamin Elman, a scholar from Princeton
University, has decisively shown, “the content of the civil
service competition clearly excluded over 90 percent of China’s
people from even the first step on the ladder to success.” In
other words, to have any kind of reasonable shot at passing the
exams, you needed to come from a family with an established
tradition of classical literacy, meaning a fam