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Eighteen accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist?The Imperial Confucianism stream of the Confucianism timeline.
Streams: All of Confucianism Classical Confucianism Imperial Confucianism Neo-Confucianism New Confucianism
Emperor Wu of Han, acting on the counsel associated with Dong Zhongshu, set Confucian learning above the other schools at court and founded an imperial academy with erudites for each of the Five Classics and fifty disciples. The academy made classical study the road to office, and the road widened for two thousand years: the examinations abolished in 1905 descend from this foundation.
Dong Zhongshu, the Han dynasty's great Confucian statesman, wove the master's ethics into a cosmology of Heaven, Earth, and humanity answering one another, and taught that Heaven warns a failing emperor through portents and disasters. His memorials urged the throne to dismiss the hundred schools and honor Confucian learning alone, and the imperial academy rose on his argument.
The Mongol Yuan dynasty, restoring the civil examinations in 1313, decreed that candidates be tested on the Four Books in Zhu Xi's commentaries. The decree fixed one man's reading of the classics as the empire's standard for the next six hundred years, and it made Neo-Confucian orthodoxy the official teaching of China through the Ming and Qing.
The Ming ruled China through the examination orthodoxy Zhu Xi had defined, and inside that order Wang Yangming raised the tradition's last great challenge, teaching that principle is found in the heart itself and that knowledge and action are one. His school split the late Ming world between the Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy of the examiners and the intuition of the heart, a division the Qing inherited.
The Manchu Qing kept the Confucian state whole: the examinations, the imperial cult of Confucius, and the sacred edicts read to every village. Within the order, evidential scholars turned philology against Song metaphysics, and Dai Zhen charged that principle, as the examiners used it, had become an instrument of oppression. The dynasty was the Confucian empire's last and longest late form.
In 1905 the Qing court, pressed by reformers who held the old curriculum responsible for China's weakness before the West, abolished the civil examinations outright. The decree ended the thirteen-hundred-year system that had joined Confucian learning to state power since the Sui and Tang, and it severed the classics from the road to office in a single year.
The revolution of 1911 ended the imperial system itself, and with it the political order Confucian teaching had served and shaped for two thousand years. The republic that followed blamed the tradition for China's humiliations, and the May Fourth generation raised the cry to smash the Confucian shop. The teaching survived the empire, as books, as family ethics, and as a question China's thinkers kept returning to.
