Who Was the Most Consequential Emperor in Chinese History?

Hint: it is someone, whom you probably have never heard of, who might have played a role in China’s AI takeoff

If you had to name the most consequential emperor in Chinese history, you would probably start with, Qin Shi Huang (259–210 BCE), China’s first emperor and the founder of Qin dynasty (220 BCE-207 BCE). He unified China and built a centralized imperial state. He standardized the writing system, the currency, weights and measures, and the roads; he ruled harshly and crushed opposition. In the West he is best known for the Terracotta Army that guarded his tomb and for the early Great Wall.

If you are a bit of a cognoscenti on Chinese history, you might pick Han Wudi, Emperor Wu of Han who reigned from 141–87 BCE. He expanded the empire and strengthened centralized rule. His famous 134 BCE edict promoted Confucianism as the empire’s dominant political ideology, established the Imperial Academy, and made the Confucian classics central to the training and selection of officials. This ideological unification gave the Han state a common moral and political language.

These are reasonable guesses, partly because this is how Chinese history is usually taught, and partly because both emperors fit the picture we have of China today: a single political and ideological order, a strong central government, and rule by a strongman.

But consider a simple measure. Between 221 BCE and 581 CE, the ratio of years when China was ruled by one unitary dynasty to years when it was fragmented was about 1.2. But from 581 CE and 1911 CE, that ratio rose to 17.8. China’s truly unitary character is a development after the sixth century, not one of 221 BCE or of the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE).

So what happened in the sixth century? This is when the man you have never heard of arrived. His name was Yang Jian (541–604), better known as Emperor Wen. He founded the Sui dynasty in 581, and in 589 he reunified a China that was—in my 2023 book’s description—“China’s European moment: ” more than three centuries of political, territorial, and ideological division, much like the Europe that followed the collapse of Rome.

He was not the first man to reunify China after the Han. Sima Yan (236–290) had done that, founding the Western Jin, but that dynasty lasted only 56 years, barely longer than the life of its founder. What Yang Jian created was a system that outlived him, outlived his short dynasty (581–618), and then ran through the rest of imperial history and beyond. You can still see much of it in China today. It is called Keju (科举) — and you have probably never heard of that either.

Keju is the imperial civil service examination, established in 587 by the founding emperor of the Sui. If I had to name one thing that separates Chinese civilization from European civilization, I would name Keju. It is the first theme in my 2023 book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline.

So what was Keju, and why did it matter so much? It was, first of all, remarkably systematic. It was a standardized, multi-stage examination — held at the provincial, metropolitan, and palace levels — open in principle to men across the empire, and it ran for some thirteen centuries. A candidate could sit for Keju again and again over his lifetime.

Its content was narrow and was built on memorization. There was something like 300,000 to 400,000 characters of classical text that a candidate could try to commit to his memory. Boys as young as 3 or 4 already began the preparation to capitalize on this memorization advantage associated with youth and, because child rearing was done by women, Keju also boosted literacy of mothers.

Over time the curriculum shrank to a single subject — Confucianism, and after the Song and Yuan dynasties, the Neo-Confucian annotations of Zhu Xi, a brand of Confucianism that is textually tight and deferential to autocracy. Candidates filled in missing words from the classics. It was standardized testing in its purest form.

This did two things at once. It let the court monopolize the country’s best minds: the ablest and most ambitious people spent their lives competing for a place in the state. And it taxed their time and mental energy. In one dataset of Ming candidates, the average age of final success was 32, and the oldest was 59, at a time when the average life expectancy was probably in the 40s. For many men, passing the exam was the work of a lifetime. Energy, cognitive processing, and mental capacity that might have gone into commerce, invention, or new ideas went into the exam instead.

Its deepest effect was political. Because all talent and ambition flowed into one state channel, little was left to build anything outside of the state. Yes, Keju raised China’s literacy, but no independent intelligentsia formed; nothing like a Chinese Royal Society or an independent Cambridge University came into being. Commerce was overshadowed, and rival ideas — Legalism, Daoism, Buddhism — were crowded out. Keju preempted alternative ideas and ideologies before they could organize.

It was, to be sure, meritocratic. As the historian Ho Ping-ti argued, it allowed real upward mobility by talent rather than by birth and bloodline, in a sharp contrast to the aristocratic Europe. But it was, at bottom, an anti-mobility mobility channel by packing all the upward mobility into the single channel of the state and demolished everything else in its path. Mobility into and inside channels such as religion, commerce, academia, and—God forbid—political opposition was decimated. The meritocracy worked out well and too well that it swallowed the entire society.

Many of the things we associate with China today—as a political system and as norms and culture of the average Chinese—are rooted in the cognitive habits this system had incubated in its 1,300 years of operation. There was this axiomatic respect for and deference of state, viewing strongman as a solution rather than as a problem, an absence of any rights consciousness. There is also a cognitive impact, such as an extraordinary work ethic, high verbal and numerical literacy, and, beneath the collective veneer, an intense individualism and a fierce competitive spirit, and the “tiger mom” culture. Is it an exaggeration to say that Chinese AI capabilities and the trophies won at the Math Olympia came from of 1,300 years of doing problem sets again and again? I do not think so. You can credit, or blame, much of this to the Yang Jian you have probably just heard of for the first time.