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A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China. By BENJAMIN A. ELMAN. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. xlii, 847 pp. $75.00 (cloth).
This admirably erudite and extremely useful book breathes new life into the nearly moribund field of the study of China's civil examinations. It is very likely the most exhaustive study of the subject and to my knowledge the first history of the late imperial examination system in a Western language. This history-of Dickensian length-is guided by two paradigms: cultural reproduction and internal reform. According to the first paradigm, from 1400 to 1900, the civil-examination system was a perfect masterpiece of political, social, and cultural reproduction. According to the second, from the late eighteenth century on, civil examinations were modernized from within, specifically through a shift from the first round's eight-legged essay to the policy questions in the third round. Through these two paradigms-which are at times mutually antagonistic-this book becomes a narrative in four tempi structured in eleven chapters covering 1,250 years of res gestae. The first tempo-alkgro, since it is rather eventful-recounts in two chapters the evolution of the examination system, from its beginnings to its final form in late imperial China. The second and longest tempo (chaps. 3-8) provides the reader with a both detailed and holistic overview of the Ming-Qing examination regime and curriculum, culminating in a fascinating descent into the maelstrom of emotional anxiety and dreams of success among the examinee population. The speed is molto lento: history has come to a stop, the examination has reached its state of reproductive perfection, and the narrative becomes descriptive and sometimes fortuitously anecdotal. The third tempo, which turns out to be rather andante due to the gradual emergence of "inner reform," unfolds in the two penultimate chapters, and its main topic is the curricular evolution of civil examinations from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. Expectedly molto presto, the final tempo describes and illuminates in one chapter the process preceding and leading to the final breakdown and eventual abolition of the examination system in 1905.
Rather than just containing a long narrative, Benjamin Elman's magnum opus is in fact an encyclopedia of civil examinations. This encyclopedic dimension is particularly evident in the extremely useful appendices (pp....