How did a written exam pick China's officials for 1,300 years?

For more than a thousand years, China chose many of its officials with a written exam. The imperial examination was a civil service examination system in Imperial China, used to select candidates for the state bureaucracy. The idea of choosing bureaucrats by merit rather than by birth began early, and the first earnest use of written examinations for recruitment came under the Sui dynasty. Before that, most posts were filled through recommendations based on qualities such as social status, morals and ability.

The Tang dynasty held exams on a relatively small scale at first, then extensively expanded them under Wu Zetian. The hardest category, the jinshi degree, tested not only the Confucian classics but also history, official documents, treatises, memorials and poems. Passing was rare: in the Tang, only 1 to 2 percent of the thousand or more jinshi candidates passed in a year the exam was held.

Under the Song, exams became the primary method of recruitment for official posts. The emperors expanded them partly to counter the influence of military aristocrats, giving four to five times as many degree holders as the Tang. Studies of degree-holders in 1148 and 1256 found that about 57 percent came from families with no official in the previous three generations, though most did have some relative in the bureaucracy. Yet studying was costly and time-consuming, and most candidates still came from the wealthy land-owning scholar-official class.

The system was abolished in 1905, during the late Qing reforms. It had inspired imitators: reports by European missionaries and diplomats encouraged France, Germany and the British East India Company to use similar methods to select staff.