Wei Yijie

Wei Yijie (; August 19, 1616 – April 27, 1686) was a prominent Han Chinese scholar and official serving in the early Qing Dynasty, during the rules of the Shunzhi Emperor, Oboi, and the Kangxi Emperor and was known for his focus and advocacy of the reformation the Examination system.

Early career Wei Yijie was from Baixiang, in western Zhili. He passed the 1646 Jinshi examination and gained a reputation for his focus on the examination system. Wei served in his first administrative position in 1648 when he was the placed as the principal examiner for the Shanxi province. In the same year, he wrote about his views on how to best reform the examination system, particularly the examination used by the military, raising it to a level more closely in line with the civil examination, the banning of the publishing of examination essays by non-governmental entities, and the publication and introduction of the Xiaojing into a regular rotation of questions based on the Classic in examinations. In 1655, Wei was promoted to the post of principal vice censor-in-chief and was responsible for the administration of the metropolitan military examination in that year. In 1659, Wei made a petition to the emperor critical about infanticide and the drowning of little girls in the southeastern provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi, and Fujian. The Shunzhi Emperor agreed with Wei and issued an edict against Infanticide.

Sometime between 1659 and 1661, Wei left his position as censor and held no position in office. When the Shunzhi Emperor died in 1661, Wei was recalled to serve as censor during the regency period of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor. Wei is known to have compared Christianity and Confucianism in a positive manner in a testimonial on the seventieth birthday of the Jesuit missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell.