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Students smile when they went to schools to familiarize themselves with the test rooms in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province June 6, 2006. [newsphoto]

BEIJING - Cui Weiping had become an adept cotton farmer and tractor driver in a bleak east China village in 1977 when college entrance exams were restored after the 10-year Cultural Revolution.

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"It was a profound turning point in my life," said 51-year-old Cui, now a professor at the Beijing Film Academy.

Underground reading on the farm helped make Cui one of the 220,000 lucky ones -- out of a staggering backlog of 5.7 million candidates -- to get through that year's hastily held exams.

"We would get up to jog and study so early that the stars were still in the sky," she said of her life at Nanjing University. "Everybody wanted to win the lost time back."

This year, a record 10 million Chinese youngsters will sit the two-day National College Entrance Exam, starting on Thursday, vying for about half that number of university places.

The entrance exam -- commonly known as "gaokao" in Chinese -- is credited as the backbone of China's remarkable reform-era growth in the 30 years since it was restored, despite mounting criticism that it encourages rote learning and puts too much pressure on overburdened adolescents.

Nevertheless the annual rite, during which virtually the whole nation holds its breath, has turned people's lives around, for better or worse, over generations.

For students like Lai Yumei, gaokao is her best chance to climb the social ladder in an increasingly stratified country with widening rich-poor and urban-rural gaps.

The sophomore at the medical school of the prestigious Peking University is from a mountain village in South China.

Her father died when she was young leaving her mother to raise her and her younger brother on earnings from a plot of rice in the impoverished southeastern province of Jiangxi.

"Since that time, relatives and neighbours told me to study hard and that getting into a university is the way out," Lai, 22, said.

That way out is only for the lucky few.

A study by Yang Dongping, an education expert at the Beijing Institute of Technology, found that the chance of a rural child making it to college could be a third of that of his or her urban peer, as the best teachers and resources in China's primary and secondary education are concentrated in the cities.

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