How China's emperors selected their civil servants

Senior civil servants in the United Kingdom (and possibly elsewhere) are often referred to as Mandarins, and Mandarin is the most widely-spoken dialect of Chinese. Is there a connection? There certainly is!

The Qin emperors of China, who ruled from 221 BC to 206 BC, were the first to establish a civil service to enable the emperors to administer their territories. Subsequent Chinese dynasties refined the process of selecting the people who would take up positions in the civil service, and by the time that the Song dynasty was in power (AD 960-1279) a system of competitive examinations was well established. The Song emperors refined the process to make sure that successful candidates were selected without fear or favour and entirely on merit.

A candidate would begin by taking a local test which would qualify them for progressing to the second stage in the provincial capital. Only those who cleared this hurdle would be allowed to travel to the imperial capital to sit the final exam, after which the best candidates would be awarded the “Jinshi” that signified their admission to the civil service. Only about one in a hundred candidates would get all the way through, and there was a three-year wait before one was able to try again, which many people did.

The Song emperors instituted a marking system according to which three examiners would mark each paper independently and the name of the candidate would not be made known to the markers, thus ensuring that nobody could win the Jinshi through favouritism or corruption. 

A later development, under the Ming emperors who ruled from 1368 to 1644, was to make the candidates write an essay of limited length that was split into eight sections, each with a specific function. 

The Song tradition of competitive examination was so successful in getting the best people into high office that it was still in use up to the end of imperial China in 1912. That was why it was copied by western governments, including that of the United Kingdom.

However, the subject of the examinations was very different when the system was taken up by Europeans. Chinese civil servants had to be extremely well versed in the philosophy of Confucius, who flourished in the 5^th century BC, and his later interpreters.

© John Welford