For the first millennium of its life the Analects had a curious status: universally read, used to teach children literacy and morals together, but ranked below the Five Classics, which were the texts a serious scholar commented on. It was a primer and an aid, not the centre of the curriculum. It was carved among the seven texts of the Xiping Stone Classics at Luoyang between 175 and 183 CE, and among the twelve of the Kaicheng Stone Classics in 837.
That changed in the twelfth century. Zhu Xi, the systematiser of Neo-Confucianism, grouped the Analects with the Mencius and with two chapters extracted from the Book of Rites, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, publishing them in 1190 as a set with his own commentary. These Four Books were shorter than the Five Classics, and Zhu Xi argued they should be read first and in a fixed order, the Great Learning to lay out the programme, then the Analects, then Mencius, then the Doctrine of the Mean. He was not demoting the older classics so much as putting a new gateway in front of them, but the practical effect was to make the Analects the first and most intensively studied of all Confucian texts.
In 1313 the Yuan court made the Four Books with Zhu Xi's commentaries the core of the reinstated civil service examinations, and they remained so until the examination system was abolished in 1905. For nearly six centuries every man who sought office in China had memorised the Analects and learnt one authorised way of reading it. No other book has been so thoroughly bound to the machinery of a state.