Fan Zhongyan's Qingli Reforms Establish Prefectural Schools Across Song China

In 1044, four hundred fourteen years after Tang Emperor Taizong ordered Confucian temples built in every prefecture in 630, already recorded here, and one hundred thirty five years before Zhu Xi rebuilt the White Deer Grotto Academy in 1179, also recorded here, the Song reformer Fan Zhongyan, acting on the ten point reform memorial he had submitted to Emperor Renzong the previous year, secured an imperial decree ordering prefectures and counties across the empire to establish government schools built around the Confucian classics. The reforms required officials seeking advancement to have studied at a prefectural school for a minimum period, reduced the weight the civil service examinations gave to ornamental poetry in favor of essays on the classics and statecraft, and created an Imperial University in the capital to educate the sons of commoners and lower officials alongside the aristocracy. Between 1035 and 1046 Fan and his allies personally helped establish some sixteen schools, and although conservative opposition forced Fan from office in 1045 and rolled back much of the wider reform program, the school system and the shift in what the examinations rewarded proved durable, reshaping Confucian education in China for the rest of the imperial period.