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In the early 1900s, a Chinese Daoist named Wang Yuanlu appointed himself guardian of some of the Mogao Caves. Wang discovered a walled up area behind one side of a corridor leading to a main cave. Behind the wall was a small cave stuffed with an enormous hoard of manuscripts dating from 406 to 1002 CE. These included old hemp paper scrolls in Chinese and many other languages, paintings on hemp, silk or paper, numerous damaged figurines of Buddhas, and other Buddhist paraphernalia.<br/><br/> The subject matter in the scrolls covers diverse material. Along with the expected Buddhist canonical works are original commentaries, apocryphal works, workbooks, books of prayers, Confucian works, Daoist works, Nestorian Christian works, works from the Chinese government, administrative documents, anthologies, glossaries, dictionaries, and calligraphic exercises. Wang sold the majority of them to Aurel Stein in 1907 for 220 pounds.
The imperial examination (Chinese: 科舉; pinyin: Kējǔ; Wade–Giles: K'o-chü) was a civil service examination system in Imperial China designed to select the best potential candidates to serve as administrative officials, for the purpose of recruiting them for the state's bureaucracy.<br/><br/> The tests were designed as objective measures to evaluate the educational attainment and merit of the examinees, as part of the process by which final selections and appointments to office would be made. Candidates could receive the jinshi (chin-shih), and other degrees, generally followed by assignment to specific offices, with higher level degrees tending to lead to higher ranking placements in the imperial government service.