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170 C. Bei

classics was thoroughly incorporated into historiography as an academic disci-
pline, and thoroughly unraveled in value.” (Chen, 2014, p. 142)
Elman’s study on the Imperial Civil Examination System unfolds a fuller pic-
ture of this disintegration process. The changing themes of the Imperial Civil
Examination System show that historians had begun to detach themselves from
the Confucian Classics during the Qing, when they gradually refused to recognize
the authority of canonical texts. The process also presages that historical studies
would eventually dismantle the orthodox discourse that had been constructed for
thousands of years, before they finally swallowed up traditional Classics
scholarship.
The vicissitudes of themes for the Imperial Civil Examination System had
forewarned the unprecedented cultural upheaval to occur during the Qing Dy-
nasty. Even the Imperial Civil Examination System, which were designed for
shaping mainstream ideology, could not escape the disintegration of values of the
traditional Neo Confucianism by textual research and by historical trends of
thought. In comparison, the abolition of the Imperial Civil Examination System at
the end of the Qing (1905) only meant the complete collapse of the legitimacy of the
Qing as an imperial regime. Elman observed:
“The abolition of the system put an end to the nation-wide imperial orthodoxy
of more than 500 years as well as the faith of belief and values by cultural elites and
men of letters for thousands of years” (Elman, 2010, p. 154). The end of the Imperial
Civil Examination System was a close causal event to the dynastic replacement of
Qing rule. As a system for inculcating Confucian ideas into the minds of millions of
households, its fate determined the fate of imperial ideology of the Ming and the
Qing and even the future of Chinese civilization. From that point on, China
underwent a tremendous change accompanied by social and political upheavals.

4 Conclusion

As the Li School of Confucianism represented authoritative intellectual discourse
in the Ming and the Qing, the Imperial Civil Examination System embodied its
institutional fortresses that served to safeguard such ideologies. Behind the
challenges and quandaries encountered by both of them lies a hidden logic for
their necessary fate: philological learning of evidential research as a philosophical
critique was day by day eroding the authority of the Li School of Confucianism,
while the change of themes for the Imperial Civil Examination System questions
time and again announced the irrevocable demise of such authoritative discourse
until, in the end, the abolition of the Imperial Civil Examination System brought
the downfall of an imperial ideology. The findings of Elman’s study of Ming–Qing