A second civil service test added
The civil service examination system was developed in this period
by an enactment that the Superintendant of the Imperial Household
should rank the imperial retinue yearly according to a set of Confucian
virtues (9: 7a & n. 7.5). Since the commonest way of entering the
bureaucracy was for prospective officials to spend a term as members of
the imperial retinue (cf. 5: n. 9.9), in order that the emperor might become
acquainted with them, and since the Superintendant of the Imperial
Household was in charge of such persons at the imperial court, this
development was logical. The bureaucracy had grown to such a size
that even an industrious emperor could no longer know individually all
the prospective officials. Hence this second and moral test was added
after the first and literary examination.
