Gwangjong introduces civil service examinations in Goryeo

Gwangjong, the fourth king of Goryeo (949–975) and a son of Wang Geon, inherited a throne surrounded by the great families whose private armies had helped his father reunify Korea. He set out to strengthen royal power. In 956 the Slave Review Act freed people who had been enslaved during the wars of unification, depriving the magnates of servants and soldiers and giving the crown taxpayers.

In the same year a Later Zhou embassy came to invest the king, and with it came Shuang Ji (Ssang Gi in Korean), a former judge of the Zhou Court of Judicial Review, who stayed behind because of illness. Gwangjong valued his talents, asked the Zhou to let him serve in Goryeo and quickly raised him to the rank of Hallim academician; some accounts date his arrival to 957 or 958. According to the Goryeosa it was Shuang Ji who proposed the examinations. In the fifth month of 958 the king ordered him to select candidates, and on 5 June, at the Wibong pavilion, the first list was announced: two men headed by Choe Seom passed the literary examination, in poetry, rhapsody, eulogy and policy essays, three that in the Confucian classics and two that in divination. Shuang Ji presided over later examinations too, and the official history credits him with a revival of letters; the statesman Choe Seung-no later complained that from the time the king employed Shuang Ji he had lavished favours on the literati.

Modelled on the Chinese examinations and based on the Confucian classics, the gwageo were in principle open to free-born men, but in practice only sons of the educated gentry could prepare for them. In 960 Gwangjong introduced robes of different colours for the official ranks and began a bloody purge of the old meritorious families. The examinations outlived him and were held in Korea for more than nine centuries, until they were abolished in the Gabo Reforms of 1894.