Confucianism becomes state doctrine
The Han make classical learning the route to office.
- When
- Known to
- ± 10 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
From around 136 BCE Emperor Wu establishes the Confucian classics as the official curriculum and creates an imperial academy to train officials in them. The examination system that eventually grows from this makes literary and philosophical education the path to power, tying the ruling class to a shared body of texts for two thousand years — and giving China a bureaucracy recruited substantially on demonstrated learning rather than birth, long before anywhere else.