Zhu Xi did three things that made him the most institutionally consequential philosopher in history. He selected the Four Books — Analects, Mencius, Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean — out of the older Five Classics and made them the core curriculum, with his own commentaries attached. He built the metaphysical synthesis of li, principle, and qi, vital force, that gave Confucianism a cosmology capable of competing with Buddhism. And he wrote the Family Rituals, a practical manual for capping, marriage, funerals and ancestral rites that is still the working reference for Korean jesa. From 1313, when the Yuan restored the examinations, until their abolition in 1905, candidates were tested on his readings — meaning that for nearly six centuries the entire governing class of China, Korea and Vietnam was selected by its mastery of one man's commentaries. In his own lifetime he was less fortunate: his teaching was condemned as false learning in 1196, his followers were purged, and he died with the ban still in force.