Education Bookcast

Chinese culture has the concept of the "four great inventions" (四大發明) - inventions from ancient China that are points of pride in Chinese history, and symbolic of Chinese technical and scientific sophistication. The inventions in question are the compass, gunpowder, the printing press, and paper. One could say that there is one "invention" that is conspicuously absent. During the Sui dynasty (581-618 AD), the emperor was concerned that the aristocracy held too much power, in particular by occupying all of the positions in the government bureaucracy. In a shrewd political move, the emperor decided to start holding examinations, open to all males regardless of class, to recruit for positions in the civil service. At first regarded with contempt by the aristocrats, they were eventually won over, and after some decades started sending their own boys to be educated in order to pass the government exams. The Chinese civil service examination system (科舉) was born. The system persisted in China for over a millenium,