📋The Greats

Wang's 1071 examination reform dropped the traditional poetry and rhapsody sections that had dominated the jinshi degree for centuries and replaced them with essays on the Confucian classics' meaning and policy questions on real administrative problems — irrigation, taxation, frontier defense. Conservative scholar-officials, some of whom had built entire careers mastering the old poetic forms, protested that the change would produce officials skilled at opinion but ignorant of literature; the reformed curriculum nonetheless stayed largely in place for the rest of the dynasty.

In 1401, serving as Cairo's chief Maliki qadi (judge), Ibn Khaldun rode out with the Mamluk sultan's delegation to negotiate with Timur, then besieging Damascus. Ibn Khaldun was lowered over the city walls in a basket to meet the conqueror directly, and the two men spent over a month in conversation, with Timur reportedly questioning him closely about the history and geography of North Africa — an encounter Ibn Khaldun later described in his own autobiography.

Appointed in February 1809 after Prussia's defeat by Napoleon convinced the government it needed better-educated officials, Humboldt drafted a national curriculum, founded the University of Berlin, and overhauled teacher training, then resigned in April 1810 after repeated clashes with conservative ministers who thought his reforms too sweeping — leaving office having reshaped Prussian, and eventually German, civil administration for a century, in barely more than a year in the job.

As the Treasury official responsible for Irish famine-relief policy from 1846, Trevelyan insisted relief be limited and tied to strict conditions, warning against aid that might make the Irish poor dependent on government support. Roughly a million people died of starvation and disease during the Great Famine his office administered relief for — a record historians still weigh against his later reform legacy when assessing his career.

Sharp joined the civil service in 1926, when married women were routinely barred from permanent posts, and stayed unmarried her entire career rather than face automatic dismissal under the marriage bar then in force. Housing minister Harold Macmillan later credited her, more than himself, with the drive behind the government's pledge to build 300,000 houses a year in the early 1950s, a target the department hit under her direction.

Moses used his authority as head of the Triborough Bridge Authority to build the Long Island parkway system with overpasses deliberately built low, according to Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 biography The Power Broker, restricting buses — and so, disproportionately, poorer New Yorkers who relied on them — from reaching the public beaches those parkways led to, a claim later contested by some historians but still the most cited illustration of how an unelected official's infrastructure choices can encode social policy.

Appointed acting Minister of Health in April 2003 after China's initial SARS cover-up was exposed, Wu Yi publicly acknowledged the government had understated case numbers, replaced the health minister and Beijing's mayor within days, and ordered a rapid, transparent case-count system and the emergency Xiaotangshan hospital built in about a week — a sharp reversal from the secrecy of the outbreak's first months, widely credited with helping bring the epidemic under control.