The Song-dynasty philosopher who reinvented Confucianism into a single grand system and then shaped Chinese elite learning for nearly six centuries — the synthesizer of Neo-Confucianism who chose and annotated the Four Books, made his commentaries the basis of the civil-service examinations from 1313 to 1905, and so shaped how educated East Asia thought about reality, virtue, and learning.
For nearly six hundred years, almost every man who passed China's civil-service examinations had studied the classics through one commentator. Not Confucius himself, but a Song-dynasty scholar who had told the world what Confucius meant. Zhu Xi chose four short texts as the heart of learning, wrote the notes that explained them, and from 1313 those notes were the answer key for the exams that selected the empire's officials. To hold office in China, Korea, or Vietnam, you learned reality through his eyes: a world of perfect underlying pattern clouded by coarse matter, which patient study could clear. He died with his teaching officially condemned as ‘false learning.’ Within decades his reading was orthodoxy, and it stayed orthodoxy until the examinations were abolished in 1905.