Designing Heaven’s Will: The Job Assignment in the Chinese Imperial Civil Service

We study the evolution of entry-level civil service job assignment in imperial China from the tenth to the early twentieth century. The procedures were sequential, irrevocable, and publicly verifiable, relying increasingly on lots-drawing and operating under constraints that limited which posts candidates could fill and where they could be posted. Using a unified matching framework, we compare procedures by their ability to maximize the number of filled posts and to assign higher-ranked jobs to higher-degree candidates. We show that reforms intended to improve these outcomes can instead reverse them once constraints interact, a failure driven by greedy sequential matching. Building on the structure of the final historical procedure, we describe minimal extensions of public lots-drawing mechanisms that guarantee maximum matchings under compatibility constraints.