Did ancient rulers attach importance to calligraphy?

Ancient rulers attached great importance to calligraphy. In ancient times, most officials were admitted to the imperial examination. When emperors and examination officials found out who had a bad font when marking papers, then this person was directly filtered down. When candidates took the exam, if the font was not good-looking, misspelled, smeared and unclean, then this person's article would not get in the exam no matter how good it was. Therefore, when ancient scholars began to learn, calligraphy was a compulsory course.