For Two Boys, a Test of Spirit and Loyalty : THE EXAMINATION <i> by Malcolm Bosse</i> ; Farrar, Straus & Giroux $17, 296 pages

Believe it or not, there once was a society that valued smart boys as much as we value boys who can dunk a basketball or throw touchdown passes. It was 16th-Century China, under the Ming Dynasty. Boys smart enough to pass examinations at the local, provincial and national levels won respect and acclaim, tax exemptions, the glances of marriageable girls and offers of top government jobs.

Rich city boys had the edge, of course, as they always do. (Rich girls had their feet bound and were condemned to be merely decorative.) But China was enough of a meritocracy so that even poor country boys, if they were smart enough, had a chance.

Malcolm Bosse’s latest novel makes heroes of two such boys, the Lao brothers. Skinny, dreamy Chen is the scholar. Brilliant enough to overcome being the son of a drunkard in remote rural Sichuan, he begins the triumphant progress that will take him to the Forbidden City in Beijing for the ultimate exam in the presence of the emperor.

Robust, practical Hong, the younger brother, is smart in a different way. He is Taoist rather than Confucian at heart: a man of action and instinct rather than an intellectual. Hong figures that if he can protect Chen from the dangers and temptations that await them as they journey across China, his fortunes will rise along with his brother’s.

This was about the time in history when China began to fall behind Europe. Bosse shows us some reasons why. Hong meets soldiers who have guns but disdain them in favor of “close-contact weapons.” Chen meets a gifted inventor whose science is still tangled up with alchemy. Political reformers plot to overthrow tyrants but can’t conceive of changing the system. The grip of the past is too strong.

To pass the exams--to demonstrate his competence to help rule the country--Chen has to display mastery of a remarkably limited and arcane body of knowledge based on the Confucian classics:

“Each form of essay involved special rules. A rule governed the number of words in a paragraph, the number of paragraphs and their length, the type of language used--either highly formal or conversational. A dozen rules determined the stages of argument to be developed according to patterns of debate a thousand years old.

“Chen understood that not only must a young scholar have a splendid memory but his handwriting must be elegant in five different styles. . . . His poetry had to display competence in the use of three modern and two ancient rhyme schemes.

“Because science and math were not required . . . Chen hardly learned to count.”

Bosse has written 14 books for adults (“The Vast Memory of Love”) and for young people (“Deep Dream of the Rain Forest”). This novel is probably aimed at youth. Its style is straightforward, its form frankly that of an adventure story. Bosse uses Western dates and measurements to convey a huge amount of information about China that isn’t restricted to what his teen-age heroes might be expected to know.

Most important, Chen and Hong are heroes who brave all perils and maintain their mutual loyalty.They travel thousands of miles on foot and by riverboat, through battle, flood and a plague of locusts. Pirates capture them, separate the brothers and threaten Hong (who has joined a secret revolutionary society, the White Lotus) with the dreaded Death by a Thousand Cuts. Would-be mentors and jealous rivals try to distract Chen from his chosen path, to no avail.

Still, there is subject matter here for grown-ups to chew on, as well. Few stories have weighed the active life and the contemplative life with such evenhanded respect.

The harrowing sights Chen sees on the journey humanize him, force his abstract Confucianism to address the problems of the real world. He learns from Hong enough shrewdness to sidestep the snares of the imperial court.

Hong, destined for a military career, learns from Chen the power of idealism. Enough of the rich culture that has sustained China through centuries of calamity seeps into his consciousness so that his life will be more than a mere struggle to survive.

Neither brother “wins.” Life itself is the examination, Bosse seems to say; there is more than one way to pass.