Privilege and power in old Korea, more than in China, were very largely hereditary, a matter of blood and not of mere wealth. Only men born into families recognized as belonging to the class of yangban had access to the higher posts in society, both civil and military. Even when penniless, a self-respecting yangban would never work with his hands. Work in the national administration was the only acceptable activity. Since the Han dynasty (c. 150 B.C.) in China, entry to the ranks of the administration was by examination. In Korea, the name "gentleman-scholar" (sonbi) was applied to a member of the yangban class who had received a basic education, and who had taken or hoped to take the government service examination. The term kunja was also used, it designated one of the great ideals of Confucian society, the "true gentleman" or "man of virtue" who had attained through study and self-discipline the wisdom required to help govern the country.
Confucian teaching stressed that those governing a country should be "men of virtue". This was tested by the examinations designed to see who had mastered the Chinese Classics, since they offered the essential key to the Way of virtue. The system of examinations, first introduced into Korea from China in A.D. 958, was originally designed to enable any talented young man from even a humble class to enter the administration. As time passed, however, successful candidates were increasingly limited to those born into yangban families.
There were two stages in the preliminary, licenciate stage of the literary examination, one "literary" and one "classical," after which a far smaller number of candidates went on to take the main examination which opened the doors to the higher echelons of power. These examinations included the writing of texts we would consider to be poetic: evocations of nature or epigrammatic expressions of conventional wisdom on governing the state and living in a virtuous manner, illustrated by references to figures found in the records of past history.
