If this is interesting to you, I also recommend Ray Huang's "1587, a Year of No Significance": https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/815857.1587

I'm only halfway through the book but it's been an informative and entertaining read so far. It delves into the bureaucracy that this kind of examination system produces and describes how individuals struggled in vain to turn things around during the last years of the Ming dynasty. Even the Emperor can be powerless against a vast bureaucracy, at least in pre-modern times.