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I have a giant hole in my understanding of the world where an understanding of Chinese history ought to be. Any recommendations?
I have the vague impression that it led to a stable but fairly stagnant society. It also seems potentially relevant that bureaucrats were a mid-level class and usually ruled over by warlords, who presumably had little patience with excuses.
I can’t read Dutch, but I‘m sure @Nantafiria’s recommendation is superb.
For my own…sorry, I’ve been meaning to type a response out for a couple days now, but I‘ve had long shifts recently. I can quote a previous post of mine on the same matter.
Are there any particular questions you‘d like to ask? I’m happy to answer to the best of my ability.
Onto the topics on discussion.
Regarding stagnancy — I would caution against the idea that China was a stagnant and stable society, as @Nantafiria does as well. The history of China is punctuated by periods of terrible internecine and interstate warfare as well as many, many rebellions e.g. the Taiping Rebellion that is contemporaneous with the American Civil War. China is also home to many social revolutions; the first print culture in the world started in the Tang dynasty (618-907), for example; while the Song dynasty (960-1279) embarked in an economic revolution that is often eeriely similar to early modern European growth (and produced a massive quantity of e.g. steel that wouldn’t be exceeded until centuries later in Europe), and which resulted in a large, rich mercantile class. (This would unfortunately be undone by the following Yuan (Mongol) and Ming dynasties.)
I would however not try to oversell the instability of China. Although it is undeniable that the Chinese heartland is astonishingly fertile ground, along with great natural barriers acting as physical borders (and comparatively weaker states and less numerous peoples in Southeast Asia coming by sea, especially after the colonization and consolidation of southern China under imperial control), China is probably the closest thing the world has to a civilisation-state, whatever that means, and I think this at least is partly due to an enduring social and political culture.
Regarding the status of mandarins.
Confucian bureaucrats in China, especially towards from mid-Imperial times onwards, had great power and prestige, would fill the most important and most powerful roles in the empire’s bureaucracy, and certainly were not a mid-level class in comparison to military men. In fact, towards the end of Imperial China, it would often be bureaucrats who were spearheading military operations (e.g. Li Hongzhang/Hung-Chang lead troops against the Taiping, and the Huai army and Beiyang fleet that lost the first Sino-Japanese war were under his command), and bureaucrats were often well-read and educated on military matters.
There were also military versions of the imperial examinations, but the civil service exams were unquestionably more prestigious.
Regarding the civil service examinations.
There are early traditions of evaluation-based examination systems and tests of skill in China’s predynastic and early dynastic history, including small-scale bureaucratic exams in the Han dynasty; but the first systematic establishment of a large-scale, recurring examination system that was de jure open to all (well, not quite, but significantly more than purely aristocracy) occurs during the Tang dynasty (perhaps more accurately during the Southern Zhou dynasty, in Wu Zetian’s reign).
Initially there were different examinations for different specialities (e.g. legal scholars and mathematicians would take different exams), but over time this homogenized into one route. Also, while there is something of a meme about how the imperial examinations had an overwhelming emphasis on the Confucian classics and thus did not prepare the mandarins properly, there were in fact sections of the exam requiring analysis or critical responses regarding current affairs or governmental policy.
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