From AD 594 onwards, books in China were printed by rubbing paper against the inked surface of woodblocks. The imperial state in China was, for a very long time, the major producer of printed material. China possessed a huge bureaucratic system which recruited its personnel through civil service examinations. Textbooks for this examination were printed in vast numbers under the sponsorship of the imperial state. From the sixteenth century, the number of examination candidates went up and that increased the volume of print. By the seventeenth century, as urban culture bloomed in China, the uses of print diversified. Reading increasingly became a leisure activity. Women, revolutionaries, poets and even merchants used print in everyday life.