F-YEAH HISTORY

Chinese civil service examination halls, examination hall with 7500 cells, Guangdong, 1873 The imperial examination (Chinese: 科舉; pinyin: Kējǔ; Wade–Giles: K'o1-chü3) was a civil service examination system in Imperial China designed to select the best potential candidates to serve as administrative officials, for the purpose of recruiting them for the state's bureaucracy. The tests were designed as objective measures to evaluate the educational attainment and merit of the examinees, as part of the process by which final selections and appointments to office would be made. 

Candidates could receive the jinshi (chin-shih), and other degrees, generally followed by assignment to specific offices, with higher level degrees tending to lead to higher ranking placements in the imperial government service. Theoretically testing and selecting candidates for merit, this system had a huge influence on both society and culture in Imperial China and was partly responsible for changes in the power balances of the Tang (including the interim reign of Wu Zetian) and Song Dynasties, changes involving long-term shaping of societal structure, even lasting beyond the dynastic limits of the particular dynasties administering the examinations. 

At times, the result of the examination system was replacement of what had been relatively few aristocratic families with a more diffuse and populous class of typically rural-dwelling, landowning scholar-bureaucrats, organized into clans. Neighboring Asian countries such as Vietnam, Korea, Japan and Ryūkyū also implemented similar systems, both to draw in their top national talent and to maintain a tight grip on that talent's time, resources, and ideological goals, as well as encouraging literature and education. As the operations of the examination system were part of the imperial record keeping system, the date of receiving the jinshi degree is often a key biographical datum for the Tang and later dynasties: sometimes the date of achieving jinshi is the only firm date known for even prominent historical persons.

Japanese marines at Guangdong in the Battle of Wuhan in 1938 during the Second Sino-Japanese War The Battle of Wuhan, popularly known to the Chinese as the Defence of Wuhan, and to the Japanese as the Capture of Wuhan, was a large-scale battle of the Second Sino-Japanese War. More than one million National Revolutionary Army troops were gathered, with Chiang Kai-shek himself in command, to defend Wuhan from the Imperial Japanese Army led by Yasuji Okamura.