had themselves held military positions before becoming Buddhist monks.
As we have seen, martial arts skills were common throughout Chinese
society at this time. Most men whether commoner or elite would have had
some skill with weapons, particularly in the frequently fought over area
around Luoyang. The Shaolin leadership was fortunate to have helped out
the winning side in the struggle for empire. Li Shimin’s endorsement pro-
tected the monastery’s lands and the monastery itself from future Tang
governmental seizure; the monastery was keen to demonstrate its imperial
connection, and so the document and ultimately stelae inscription were
prominently displayed.
Military Exams
Afinal innovation of the Tang period was the introduction of military
exams. The formal and recognizable system of military exams was insti-
tuted in 702 during the reign of Wu Zetian. Technically, this occurred
during Wu Zetian’s reign as emperor of the Zhou dynasty, rather than
the Tang Dynasty. Wu had been empress with Tang emperor Gaozong
(r. 649 – 83 ), and then regent and empress dowager for Tang Zhongzong
and then Tang Ruizong, before overthrowing the Tang dynasty to form
her own Zhou Dynasty, with herself as emperor. She was the only woman
to rule as emperor in Chinese history. She was herself overthrown in 705 ,
and the Tang house restored.
There was a Sui precedent for the military exam, but up until 702 most
officers achieved their positions either from battlefield exploits or because
they came from a family of officers. A few men were recommended to the
throne directly by officials for their military talents, but this was a limited
route to command positions. Although several subsequent dynasties used
military exam systems for varying amounts of time, military families
remained the most important source of officers. Nevertheless, the exam
system offered Wu Zetian an important recruiting avenue. Her position as
usurper left her politically vulnerable and in desperate need of loyal
military commanders. The exam system offered the possibility of bringing
in men who would owe her their positions. Some of those men would be
local strongmen who lacked connections at court. Not only did it allow her
to recruit such men but it also removed them from recruitment by her
enemies. Wu Zetian herself explained the reasons for the exam as she was
“afraid of people’s forgetting war.”^22
There was an earlier military test from 638 , which required a man to be
six feet tall and able to carryfive bushels of rice thirty paces, in addition to
Military Exams 109