Eurasian Social Hierarchies (6)

In Classical China, bureaucrats represented the cultural and social elite of the chinese civilization for almost 2,000 years. As the Han Dynasty established its authority in China, they required every province to send men to the capital where the would be examined and chosen for an official position depending on their performance. This system eventually evolved to become the worlds first professional civil service. In 124 B.C.E, emperor Wu Di established an academy where potential officials were trained as scholars and immersed in Chinese classical texts that dealt with history, literature, art, and mathematics, with emphasis on Confucian teachings. By the time the Han dynasty had ended it had enrolled almost 30,000 students, who had gone through a series of written examinations to select officials of various grades. This system favored those who came from wealth families that were wealthy enough to pay for an education system that provided the years of education that was required to at least pass the lower level exams. Those who made it into the bureaucracy entered a realm of high privilege and enormous prestige. Even the lower officials were distinguished by their polished speech, cultural sophistication and their political authority. At one point in time most of China was held by peasants. Nature, the state and landlords combined to make living nearly impossible. They were taxed by the state every year for one month’s labor on various public projects and during the Han dynasty pesants were forced to sell their land to landlords and worked as tenants or share croppers. In india the Caste system was belived to have happend to racially define the encounter between light skinned aryan and darker- hued native peoples. By the beginning of the classical era (500 B.C.E) there  was an idea that society was divide into four classes better known as Varna. Everyone was born into and remained within one of those classes for the rest of their life.