[Imperial Examinations + Transmigration + Rise from Poverty + History + No Golden Finger]
Fan Xiaohao has failed the civil service exams for three years. While grinding through practice questions, he reads The Scholars and Their Successes and is overcome with emotion. When he opens his eyes, he has transmigrated to the prosperous Tang dynasty, inhabiting the body of a fifteen-year-old tenant farmer.
His family pressures him to marry a girl his age from the neighboring household. Remembering modern laws, he refuses on the spot. His declaration, “How can I start a family before I’ve made my mark?” leaves his relatives dumbfounded, and he vows to pass the imperial examinations and make something of himself. His parents call him crazy, but his seventy-year-old great-grandfather gives him every last coin he has saved for his funeral, doing all he can to pay for the boy’s education.
He plans to use his knowledge of modern equations to take the less difficult Mingjing examination. But just then, the powerful Zhang family in town tries to seize the neighboring girl and make her a concubine for their second son. Fan Xiaohao steps in to stop them, only to be beaten by their servants. In public, the Zhang family’s second young master sneers that a tenant farmer’s son has no business taking the imperial exams.
Enraged, Fan Xiaohao decides on the spot to take the most difficult examination of all: the Jinshi!
At the entrance examination for the village school, the students are asked to recite passages from The Book of Songs. They all make mistake after mistake, but Fan Xiaohao writes the whole thing down flawlessly from his modern-day memory. The teachers and classmates stare in shock: how can the son of a humble tenant farmer be so eloquent?
Think again! He won’t rely on memorized poetry to pose as a prodigy. Armed with the four-part essay template from modern civil service exams and a logical memory technique, he’ll outclass every scholar in the Tang dynasty.
Watch a modern civil service exam candidate use exam strategies to fight his way from a village school through the entire Tang imperial examination system!
