The imperial examination was formally established from the first year of the Sui Dynasty, and was used to select candidates from the cold door to enter the dynasty as officials, but the imperial examination system was not gradually improved until the Tang Dynasty period, and the real heyday of the imperial examination system should be the Ming Dynasty period, and the Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang was originally a disciple of the Cold Door.
After the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, there were Confucian students led by Zhu Sheng, Song Lian, and Liu Ji to advise him, and in 1367, Zhu Yuanzhang set up the Second Section of Wenwu and Wu, requiring local officials at all levels to select talents and pay tribute to the Beijing Division.
At the first reform, 120 outstanding Confucian students such as Wu Bozong were admitted, but in the thirty years of Hongwu, there was a "big case" of the imperial examination, and the three-year examination of the three-year imperial examination of Hongwu in the thirtieth year (February 1397) began, and Liu Sanwu, a bachelor of the Hanlin Academy, was the main examiner, and the imperial list was issued in early March, but within a few days, a large number of candidates went to the ceremonial department to "beat the drum and sound the injustice".
It turned out that the 51 candidates in the list this time were all southerners, not a single northerner, and even the chief examiner Liu Sanwu was also a southerner, which made the northerners feel that the main examiner had leaked questions to the southerners, and after this matter was reported to Zhu Yuanzhang, it also made him very angry and vigorously investigated.
He personally reviewed the examination papers, and also summoned 51 southern candidates to let them take the exam again, and as a result, Zhu Yuanzhang found that these 51 southern candidates were outstanding in learning, while the northern candidates' examination papers were not well-reasoned.
This made Zhu Yuanzhang even more angry, so he sent Liu Sanwu and the officials involved in the case to the frontier, and cancelled this examination, and held a new examination, this time without exception all northerners, since then, the Ming Dynasty's imperial examination system has been divided into "north and south lists".
In the "North-South List", a total of 100 jinshi were selected, of which 60 places were provided to the south, 40 places were provided to the north, and in the five years of Jingtai, the number of places changed again, the southern people were 55 people, the north was 35 people, and the remaining 10 were allocated to remote areas.
As an economic and cultural center, the south has always been very developed in education, and in the Warring States period, there were "chudi multi-talented people", and in Jiangnan Province, the hometown of fish and rice, there are: half of the world's talents, out of Jiangnan, since the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the examination paper in Jiangnan Province is the most difficult, and the south is also according to the degree of economic and cultural development to stipulate the difficulty of the test paper.
As for the north has always been known as the land of barbarians, the economy is naturally not as good as the south, all the examination papers are relatively easy, and the Ming and Qing dynasties, from Nanjing began to move the capital to Beijing, the north has become the political center, although the Qing Dynasty abolished the examination system, but still continues the examination system for selecting talents, because of the difference between the north and the south, the examination papers naturally can not be unified.