The Chamber of Diligent Government was a small, quiet study deep within the private quarters of the Forbidden City. For centuries, it was here that emperors had met with their most trusted advisors to discuss the most delicate matters of state. It was a room that smelled of old books, ink, and the immense, silent weight of history. Today, however, it was the stage for a revolution.
Before the Emperor sat two men, their ancient bodies all but lost in their voluminous silk robes. They were Grand Secretary Shixu and High Chancellor Weng, the two most powerful figures in the vast, labyrinthine bureaucracy of Chinese education. For sixty years, they had been the guardians of the Imperial Examination system, the gatekeepers of the Confucian tradition that was the very soul of the scholar-gentry class. Their faces were etched with the serene, intellectual arrogance of men who believed they were the custodians of civilization itself.
Qin Shi Huang let them finish their tea before he spoke. When he did, his words were quiet, but they landed with the force of a battering ram against the ancient gates of their world.
"The Imperial Examination," the Emperor stated, his voice devoid of any ceremony, "is obsolete."
The two old men blinked, the statement so outrageous, so profoundly heretical, that for a moment they did not fully comprehend it.
"A man who can spend twenty years memorizing the Analects and write a perfect eight-legged essay on the harmony between heaven and man," the Emperor continued, his voice as cold and sharp as a shard of ice, "cannot forge a cannon. He cannot design a steam engine. He cannot compound an explosive. The Empire has a surplus of poets, gentlemen, and a deficit of engineers. This will change."
The shock on the officials' faces curdled into horror. The Grand Secretary, Shixu, was the first to find his voice, which trembled with a mixture of disbelief and outrage.
"Your Majesty," he stammered, "the Examination is the bedrock of the Great Qing. It is the ladder of merit that has elevated the wisest and most virtuous men for a thousand years! It is the very soul of our civilization! To abandon the Classics…"
"Is to abandon moral cultivation for mere technical skill!" the High Chancellor finished, his voice rising with passion. "You would create a generation of clever barbarians, technicians with no understanding of propriety, loyalty, or righteousness! It would be the end of the Confucian world!"
The Emperor listened to their panicked protests, his face impassive. He was not here to debate. He had seen the end of their world. He had lived through the wreckage it had created.
"The Confucian world, as you call it, is being dismantled by men who understand metallurgy and chemistry," he said flatly. "Righteousness is a fine shield, but it will not stop a steel shell. The world has changed. So shall we."
He announced his plan. "In six months, the state will hold a new, special examination. We will call it the 'National Examination for the Imperial Institutes.' It will be open to all Our subjects, regardless of their age, their background, or their family. And the results will determine who fills the ranks of our new scientific academies."
He paused, letting the weight of his words settle. "This examination will not feature a single question about poetry, history, or philosophy. Its sections will be as follows: Mathematics, from basic arithmetic to the principles of calculus. Physics, including mechanics, thermodynamics, and optics. And Logic, a series of complex puzzles designed to test not what a man has memorized, but how a man thinks."
The two scholars stared at him, their faces slack with incomprehension. Calculus. Thermodynamics. These were foreign, alien words, the crude jargon of Western tinkerers, not the elegant concepts of civilized men. Their entire universe of knowledge had just been declared worthless.
To illustrate his point, the Emperor gestured to an aide, who placed a sheet of paper on the table before them. On it, the Emperor himself had written a sample question, designed from the fragments of knowledge he retained from his life that had ended in the 21st century.
It was a complex physics problem: An artillery shell with a mass of 20 kilograms is fired from a cannon at an angle of 35 degrees with an initial velocity of 500 meters per second. Calculate its range, accounting for a crosswind of 10 meters per second from the west and the rotational effect of the Earth at a latitude of 40 degrees north.
Below the question was a nightmarish forest of symbols and equations: integrals, derivatives, vectors, and trigonometric functions.
The Grand Secretary and the High Chancellor stared at the paper as if it were a venomous snake. Their world was one of beautiful, elegant calligraphy, of nuanced allusions to ancient texts. This was a brutal, alien language. They could not even begin to comprehend the question, let alone conceive of an answer. Their authority, built on a lifetime of mastering the most complex body of knowledge they knew, had been utterly and completely shattered in a single instant. They were, he had just proven, ignorant men.
"This," the Emperor said quietly, gesturing to the paper, "is the new literacy. This is the language of power in the world to come."
He then delivered his ultimatum, his voice leaving no room for negotiation. "You have a choice. You two, as the most respected scholars in the Empire, will oversee the creation and administration of this new examination. You will lend it your prestige. You will adapt. You will learn this new language, or you will find men who speak it. That is your first option."
He leaned forward slightly. "Your second option is to stand aside. To cling to your obsolete traditions. In which case, your Hanlin Academy and all its affiliates will be defunded. Your titles will be rendered purely ceremonial. And you will be allowed to gracefully retire into utter irrelevance. You may either preside over the death of your world, or you may die with it. Choose."
The two old men sat in stunned, broken silence, the choice an impossible one.
The scene shifts. The dust of the grand chamber dissolves into the thick, humid air of a poor, muddy village in rural Hunan province, a thousand miles and a thousand years away from the power struggles of the court. An Imperial Decree, freshly printed and smelling of ink, has been posted on the town's central notice board.
A crowd of illiterate farmers and laborers in patched, homespun clothes has gathered around it. They listen, mouths agape, as the village elder, the only man who can read, struggles to sound out the strange, unfamiliar words on the page. He stumbles over terms like 'thermodynamics' and 'calculus,' pronouncing them as meaningless, magical incantations.
At the very back of the crowd, leaning against a crooked fence, is a skinny, dirt-smudged teenage boy named Chen Jian. He is regarded as a strange boy in the village, always quiet, always tinkering with things, having taught himself arithmetic from a merchant's discarded abacus. His family despairs of him; he is a poor farmer with a head full of useless numbers.
But as he listens to the elder read the proclamation, his life changes. The incomprehensible jargon is, to him, music. He hears the words "Mathematics," "Physics," "Logic." He hears the promise that the examination is open to all, regardless of birth.
A look of impossible, electrifying hope dawns on his young face. It is a look of pure, unadulterated opportunity. The Emperor's grand, revolutionary strategy, conceived in a silent, gilded room, has just sent a tremor across the entire continent, reaching down to the lowest, most forgotten rungs of society. It has offered a ladder to a boy who never even knew he was living at the bottom of a well. And in the minds of a million boys like him, the seeds of a new China were beginning to sprout.