(Photo : The Outer Court of Forbidden City in Beijing China)

How would you find the right people to manage the administrative affairs for a large country as China, or the ancient China? The Chinese ancestors tried different ways before the imperial examination was created. Then in Sui Dynasty the imperial examination was initially established to fulfill the talent demand along with the country's development. Although the imperial examination has been criticized and identified for a long time, no one can doubt its tremendous impact on China.

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Compared with the ways used before Sui Dynasty, the Imperial Examination turned out to be the most suitable approach to select the intellectuals at that time. Before the Imperial Examination, some other methods were applied to find the right talents, such as selected the people from the official families, or justify the personal characteristics like honest, filial and justice. These were important but far from enough to take care of the political affairs. Besides, some people who were from the farmer family probably would not have the chance to get interview or reference. It was possible that a few of them were talent, humble, knowledgeable, and capable to handle the work.  After Sui, all the talents had the chance to take the exams.

The Imperial Examination System was created in Sui Dynasty by Emperor Yangdi. It was developed in the following dynasties. The range was board, including various topics from math, writing skills, political sense and etc. In the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the main content was from these books: the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mea, the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius, which were known as The Four Books; and the Five Classics, Book of Songs, Book of History, Book of Changes, Book of Rites, and the Spring & Autumn Annuals. The candidates were required to write the "Eight-legged Essay". They had to state their statement and provided evidence to support their claims. They evidence was from those books mentioned above. There were four levels of the exams, the local exam, provincial exam, the academicals and the palace exam. The person who got the highest scores of the entire examinations was granted Zhuangyuan , the second was Bangyan, and the third was Tanhua.