Civil service exams and social status

The regular civil exam was held every three years and passed exactly 33 people, a number said to come from the 33 heavens of Buddhist cosmology.

Joseon was run by officials who had passed written exams. The idea came from China and had been used in Korea since the Goryeo period, but Joseon made it the main path into government. Exam success decided careers and family prestige for five centuries. Yet the exams sat inside a society divided by birth, and who could realistically sit them is a different question from who was allowed to on paper. This unit covers both.

Three kinds of exam

There were three main exams. The munkwa, or civil exam, chose scholar-officials and was by far the most prestigious. The mugwa, or military exam, chose officers through archery, horsemanship and some reading of military texts. The japgwa, or technical exams, chose specialists in four fields: interpreting foreign languages, medicine, astronomy and geomancy, and law. Before the civil exam came a pair of preliminary tests, the saengwon exam on the Confucian classics and the jinsa exam on poetry and prose, each passing 100 candidates.

Three rounds and 33 names

The regular exam, called the singnyeonsi, was held every three years. Special exams were added for occasions such as a royal celebration, and by the 1500s they were frequent. The regular civil exam had three rounds. In the first round, provincial tests in the eight provinces chose 150 candidates, the capital chose 40 and the national academy, Seonggyungwan, chose 50. The second round in the capital cut those 240 down to 33. In the final round, held before the king, nobody failed; the palace exam only ranked the 33 who had already passed.

The military exam followed the same three-round pattern and passed 28 people in the regular session, although in later centuries it often took far more. These figures come from the law code Gyeongguk daejeon, finally issued in 1485, which fixed how the government worked for the rest of the dynasty.

Two legal classes, four real ones

By law, Joseon society had only two categories: free commoners, called yangin, and the unfree, called cheonmin, which included slaves. In principle any free person could sit the exams. In practice society was layered more finely. At the top were the yangban, families of officials and scholars. Below them came the jungin, a middle group of technical officials such as interpreters and doctors, together with local clerks. Then came the sangmin, the ordinary farmers, craftsmen and merchants who paid most of the taxes and did military service. At the bottom were the cheonmin.

The yangban used many means to keep the civil exam for themselves. Preparing for it took years of study that farming families could not afford, and the sons of yangban by secondary wives faced restrictions. The jungin, for their part, were largely limited to the technical exams, and those posts tended to pass from father to son. The exam system rewarded learning, but learning itself depended on where you were born.