I understand that testing was an important part of entering civil service. What were these tests actually like? Essay-writing, fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice? Who wrote them? Were they standardized throughout the empire?
And how would someone prepare for them? Beyond just reading the Chinese classics, were there classes I could take?
There were generally two versions of the imperial exam one could take. The first would be analysis of the Five Classics, while the second would be poetry composition. There would generally be two things people taking the test would want to write to. First, one's analysis would not only need to be of a quality that spoke their ability to understand the text, but it would also need to conform to the prevailing interpretation of the times. The preeminence of different schools of Confucian thought and their preferred interpretations of the classics was often a contentious thing within the government bureaucracy, and there was considerable controversy over issues such as which version of the classics should be the basis of exams, most notably the running battle between advocates of the "old text" versus the "new text." Second, one would need to be very mindful of grammatical structure and composition. Chinese academic culture took the idea of the gentleman scholar very seriously, and poetic ability indicated one's acculturation. More practically speaking, the fact that there were so many exam takers meant that evaluators tended to focus on superficial things like grammatical errors as a way of weeding out applicants. As much as the examination system was something of a marvel of meritocratic principles for the time, it still paid to be a bit of a pedant.
There were numerous academies that could prepare students for the exams. There was the Imperial Academies (Taixue/Guozixue) and prefecture level schools supported by the state that were meant to prepare people for the civil service. There were also private Confucian academies (Shuyuan) that were set up in the later Neo-Confucian movements, which encouraged such types of civic activism. These were meant broadly as a refuge for scholarly pursuits but could also act as places for exam preparation. There were also private tutors and schools that would prepare students beyond this. Generally speaking there was a much higher emphasis on rote memorization of the classics and literature than we'd consider good practice today, and the lower quality the tutor/school the more superficial it would be.
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