Imperial examination in Chinese mythology

With the avowed purpose of testing and selecting candidates for merit, the examination system markedly influenced various aspects of society and culture in Imperial China, including Chinese mythology.

The actual examination process developed together with various related philosophical, religious, and narrative concepts to produce a distinct mythological motif.

A common mythological motif provides a religious type of sacredness to later social institutions by projecting their origins back to a time when deities and culture heroes were credited with having divinely or miraculously created them, thus giving them an aura of greater-than-human qualities, and a justification for their existence and structural qualities with an implication that these are things which mere mortals should not question (as well as avoiding giving credit for their institution to a preceding rival dynasty).

The first instance tantamount to an idea of imperial examination is mentioned in the Shang shu ("Yao dian" 堯典), long before a whole bureaucracy of testing was developed.

Despite this evidence of his virtue, and the recommendation of Four Mountains, Yao decided that in order to recruit a replacement for the highest of the civil service offices, that of emperor himself, it would only be prudent to instigate a series of tests.

Shun is also credited with a universal gathering of his nobles and subjecting them to imperial examination every 3 years, in order to decide about promotions, demotions, or retaining of the current status in the governance structure.

The tradition behind the Shijing poetry anthology was that the reason that poems (and presumably accompanying musical scores and choreography, now lost) were collected, polished, and brought to court for presentation to the emperor, was to inform him of the thoughts, feelings, and conditions of the various peoples in different parts of the empire.

That tradition that Confucius himself served as the editor-in-chief of the Shijing provided great prestige to this concept, together with several explicit comments commending the results in the Confucian classics.

Traditional Chinese-source scholarship regarding ancient China typically involves a dual tradition: a historicizing tradition that results in scholarship such as K. C. Wu's, which removes the unicorns from the writings of Confucius by implying that this was merely an artifact of his final senile descent towards death, saying that when this prime example of a mythological beast appeared in the works of Confucius, it caused him to "lay down his pen and write no more" and that "[h]e died two years later" (Wu, 6); and to go on to similarly strip other mythological elements out of the ancient writings in order to provide a history of the rise of the Zhou dynasty which lacks much from the preserved accounts (that is, it preserves the historical—especially that confirmed by the oracle bones and other archeology—and rejects the embedded mythology); and, also there is the mythologizing and popular culture versions such as that the Ji family that founded the Zhou dynasty was the result of Jiang Yuan's supernatural conception of Houji or the Fengshen Yanyi version that allows the rise of Zhou to revolve around the interactions of the goddess Nüwa, a fox spirit with nine tails that is a thousand years old, a nine-headed pheasant, a jade pipa (a musical instrument capable of assuming human form), and so on.

King Wen of Zhou (the name and title "king", wang, were posthumously conferred) was also known as the Literate Duke of Zhou, and he is credited in the dual tradition as the founder of many Chinese institutions, including the Biyong academy with a teaching staff of 3 elders plus 5 various others and a system of universal recruitment into service based upon merit which involved examinations, posthumously regarded as "imperial" (Wu, 256).

The system of testing was designed according to the principle of a society ruled by men of merit, and to achieve this by objectively measuring knowledge and intelligence of vatious candidates.

Many people afraid of traveling on roads and paths that may be haunted by evil spirits have worshiped Zhong Kui as an efficacious protective deity (Christie, 60, and picture, 58).