A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China

In this monumental work, Benjamin Elman successfully challenges the one-sided view that the Chinese civil service examination system was an "unrelenting imperial hegemony" by showing the intimate give and take between courts and their highly educated elites in maintaining a stable "partnership" of interests for the better part of a millennium. He goes far beyond the received scholarship to show that the exam system was more than a governmental institution of consequence for those candidates who succeeded and became officials: while the system itself continually was affected by changes in its political and intellectual environments, conversely it affected enormously the schooling, literary practices, cognitive patterns, mobility strategies, social identity, and, indeed, the dreams and dreads of the best-educated men—whether successful or not as exam candidates— in late imperial China. This book certainly will be read to great profit by all who are interested in the history of China's later dynasties and generally in Chinese institutional, social, intellectual, and cultural history, and one hopes that it will be widely noted by non-sinologists who study the dynamics of elitestate relations in premodern and modernizing civilizations. But the big winners in its readership surely will be Ming specialists, since the Ming period is the pivot in Elman's portrayal of the long-term evolution of the civil examination system and it is a major source of his discussion of its cultural implications. Since even a lengthy review such as this one cannot do justice to the wealth of information and viewpoints in this book (645 pages of text and footnotes, 91 pages of tables and timelines, and a 78-page bibliography, not to mention an extensive index), here, in service to the readership of this journal, I concentrate on those matters that are most pertinent to Ming studies. (And, in accord with the style preference of this journal, I convert Elman's Wade-Giles usage to pinyin.)