Travel literature in which authors wrote about their trips and about various destinations became popular perhaps because the texts could be cheaply bought. The Confucian Classics were codified and used as test material for the entrance examination into the elite bureaucracy, advanced scientific texts and atlases were published, and important poems were written.
The Four Books and Five Classics The Confucian Classics were important in China’s history because from the Song Dynasty onwards, they were the texts people needed to know in order to pass an examination for the bureaucracy of China.
These Confucian Classics were the Five Classics that were thought to have been penned by Confucius and the Four Books that were thought to contain Confucius-related material but were compiled during the Southern Song era. The Four Books and Five Classics (四書五經) were basically memorized by those who did the best on the exams.
In this way, Confucianism, as codified during the Song era, became the dominant political philosophy of the several empires until modern times.
Since the bureaucrats all studied the same works on social behavior and philosophy, this promoted unity and the normalization of behavior throughout each empire and during dynastic changes. The scholar-bureaucrats had a common base of understanding, and they passed on these ideas to the people under them. Those who passed the difficult exams were highly respected even if they didn’t receive a ruling post. High education in this system was thought to produce nobility.
The Five Classics and Four Books were written in the written Classical Language.
