Michael Nylan

As a teacher of Chinese history, I must protest: your factoid, that the civil service examinations in the Han dynasty tested knowledge of the Confucian Classics, is wrong. In Han there was no broad civil service examinations (as there came to be in the eleventh century), only testing of candidates for office who had already been recommended for various entry-level posts. The content of those tests was unlikely to have been the Five Classics (often misidentified as the "Confucian" classics, though they were the common cultural coin of the realm). Seeing how well the candidates could compose essays and work with numerical calculations was the main purpose of the Han examinations, and depending on how candidates did, they would then be assigned to offices at court or in the commanderies. Michael Nylan (History, UC-Berkeley)