The gruelling exams in imperial China that hold valuable lessons today

For over 1300 years, anyone who wanted to become a civil servant in imperial China had to pass the same exam, the keju. The gruelling tests were an egalitarian route to officialdom, but critics say they stifled innovation as they became more about loyalty than about learning. Today the Communist Party is drawing on the keju’s history to boast that China remains a meritocracy.

David Rennie, our Beijing bureau chief, visits the Imperial Examination Museum of China to look at how the keju is remembered and revered. Together with Alice Su, our senior China correspondent, they ask if President Xi Jinping is forgetting the lessons of the keju system’s decline.