What Was Ancient China’s Hardest Exam Like?

Imagine an exam where you eat, sleep, and write in the same tiny room, for three days at a time. In ancient China, that was the road to power. Follow Wen, a young scholar in Ming-dynasty China, through the hardest test of his life: the imperial examination. You'll learn how boys memorized hundreds of thousands of characters, what the strange eight-legged essay was, what the exam hall looked like with its thorn walls and brick cells, how people tried to cheat (and how they got caught), how the grading system hid names and copied papers in red ink, and what happened to the people who failed. CHAPTERS 0:00 The impossible test 1:01 Why China invented the exam 2:11 The boy who memorized 3:40 The books 5:10 Who paid for all this? 6:02 The ladder 7:24 The eight-legged essay 8:32 The great hall 9:58 The search 11:22 The cell 12:46 Session one 14:02 Between the sessions 14:44 The last round 15:39 Behind the curtain 16:53 The list QUESTION FOR YOU Could you survive nine days in that cell? Or would you quit on day two? Tell me in the comments.