Abstract: During the Xianfeng and Tongzhi reigns, the Qing court enacted a policy of enlarging the imperial examination quotas in return for contributions in order to extract more resources from localities. This policy was implemented to alleviate the financial crisis created by the Taiping Rebellion and other large scale peasant revolts. At the same time the central government also empowered local authorities to increase the enrollees for the local examinations and the number of examinations at the provincial level to repay the contributors. Raising these quotas created greater interest in obtaining degrees; however, the availability of seats for these two exams was not considered so precious that people were willing to donate blindly to increase them. At the peak of this policy’s implementation we find local governments, with the central government’s eager encouragement, utilized a variety of methods and expenditures to increase quotas. Although the central government set limits and guarded against a runaway increase in quotas, the damage to the quota system had already occurred. In twenty years the rate of growth in the number of enrollees in the exam was astonishing. In the interplay between the central and the local Governments, the local governments conveyed its loyalty and the central government rewarded this loyalty. In this way the system for distributing examination quota was changed.