Emperor Yang of Sui Creates the Jinshi Examination

Four hundred and thirty years after Emperor Ling approved the Xiping Stone Classics in 175, carving the Confucian canon into stone to fix its text against scribal corruption, and twenty five years before Tang Emperor Taizong ordered a Confucian temple built in every prefecture in 630, both already recorded here, the newly reunified Sui state changed how China chose its officials. Emperor Wen of Sui had already begun testing candidates for office on their command of the Confucian classics after abolishing the aristocratic Nine Rank system that had long favored birth over learning, but in 605, the first year of his son Emperor Yang's Daye era, the court added a further category to these classicist examinations: the jinshi, or presented scholar, degree, testing literary composition and judgment on current affairs alongside command of the classics. The jinshi became the most difficult and most revered of the examinations that followed it, and the institution it began, refined and expanded across the Tang dynasty and every dynasty after it, endured for roughly thirteen hundred years as the primary channel through which the Chinese state selected officials on demonstrated Confucian learning rather than aristocratic birth, tying the canon Emperor Ling had fixed in stone four centuries earlier directly to the temple network Emperor Taizong would order raised a generation later.