The measures were administrative and their consequences were civilizational. In 136 BCE academicians were established for each of the Five Classics, the texts on ritual, poetry, documents, changes and chronicle that the tradition traced to antiquity. In 124 BCE an imperial academy was founded to train students in them, with examination and appointment to office at the end of the course. Recommendation of candidates on the grounds of filial conduct and integrity became a route into the bureaucracy. Taken together these turned a body of texts into a career, and a career into a hereditary intellectual culture.
The thinker most associated with the change is Dong Zhongshu, whose memorials argued that the ruler should honour one tradition and set the others aside, and whose reading of the classics tied the conduct of the emperor to the behaviour of the natural world through the correspondences of yin, yang and the five phases. On that account an eclipse, a flood or a failed harvest is a comment on government, which gave the classicists a permanent instrument of criticism as well as a permanent role.
Modern scholarship has qualified the older picture of a single decisive establishment of Confucianism in this reign. The court continued to employ legalist administrators and to run a state economy on frankly coercive lines, the canon itself was not fixed in the form later ages assumed, and the classicists competed with other specialists for imperial attention throughout. What is not in doubt is the direction: after this reign, mastery of a defined body of ancient texts was the recognized qualification for governing China, and it remained so, with interruptions, until 1905.