Introduction In imperial China’s long history, government was traditionally in the hands of scholar-officials – the Confucian-educated mandarins selected through rigorous civil service examinations. For centuries, these scholar-bureaucrats formed the backbone of state administration and upheld a meritocratic ideal of governance . By the mid-19th century, however, this elite class and the centralized bureaucracy they … Continue reading The Fall of the Scholar-Officials: Bureaucratic Decline and the Rise of Provincial Power (1860s–1900s)