Gu Jiegang

Gu Jiegang a Chinese historian of the twentieth century (1893-1980), the founder of the critical school of Chinese historiography known as the school of doubters of antiquity and one of the most influential scholarly figures of his generation. He subjected the traditional accounts of ancient China to systematic criticism and organised one of the great scholarly projects of the modern era, the critical study of the classical texts.

Early Life and Education

Gu Jiegang was born on 8 May 1893 in Suzhou, in Jiangsu province, into a scholarly family with a strong tradition of classical learning. He was educated in the classics from an early age and showed an independent and questioning turn of mind, developing doubts about received accounts of antiquity even as a student. His family background gave him both a thorough acquaintance with the sources and a habit of critical examination.

He studied at Peking University, the centre of the intellectual ferment of the period, where he was exposed to the new currents of thought and to the developing methods of modern historical scholarship. He was attracted to the study of the classics and to the question of how much of the traditional narrative of ancient China could be accepted as historical.

His university years brought him into contact with the leading figures of the academic and cultural life of the day, and with the debates over science, democracy and the critique of tradition that dominated the era. He took part in these debates with energy, and he began to formulate the ideas that would define his career.

The Doubters of Antiquity

Gu Jiegang is best known for the critical approach to the early Chinese past that he helped to establish. In a series of essays he argued that the traditional accounts of the earliest ages, with their sequences of sage kings and emperors reaching back into remote antiquity, had been progressively built up by later writers rather than preserving genuine historical memory. He showed how the image of the golden age had expanded over time as each age projected its own ideals onto the distant past.

His central method was to trace the growing complexity and enrichment of the legends across the surviving texts, arranging the sources in chronological order and examining how figures and events came to be attached to ever earlier periods. From this analysis he concluded that the conventional account of ancient China was a layered construction and that many of its details could not be treated as reliable history.

The approach, which he named by the image of doubting the ancient past down to the ruler Yu and beyond, challenged the most venerable assumptions of the tradition. It provoked intense controversy, but it also established a new standard of critical rigour in the study of the classics and opened the way for the scientific investigation of early Chinese history.

The Critical Study of the Classics

Gu Jiegang was the driving force behind a famous series of studies devoted to the critical examination of the ancient books. The project gathered scholars from several fields and set out to establish, for each classical text, its date, its authorship, its authenticity and its transmission. The volumes that resulted became a central monument of twentieth-century Chinese scholarship and remained in progress for many years.

He wrote extensively on the history of the classical texts and on the methods by which they had been transmitted, edited and interpreted across the centuries. He examined the textual history of the annals and the ritual books, the development of the schools of classical interpretation and the influence of political and social circumstances on the editing of the canon.

His work on the criticism of the texts was informed by a broad vision of the history of Chinese scholarship, and he wrote a celebrated survey of Chinese historiography that traced the major schools and their methods from antiquity to his own day. He insisted that the historian must know how history itself had been written and how the sources had come into being.

Historical Geography and Folklore

Gu Jiegang's interests extended well beyond the classics. He was a pioneer in the study of Chinese historical geography, writing studies of the early frontier, of the shifting courses of the great rivers and of the distribution of ancient peoples. His work on the geography of the ancient world helped to clarify questions about the location of early states and the movements of populations.

He was also among the first Chinese scholars to take the study of folklore seriously as an academic discipline. He collected popular songs, legends and stories, and he argued that the study of living popular tradition could illuminate the way in which narratives were transmitted and transformed. His folklore research connected with his critical work, since it showed how stories grew and spread within a culture.

He saw the study of popular culture and of the newer disciplines as a way of enriching and correcting the written record. His openness to material outside the classical canon, whether songs and tales or geographical and archaeological data, distinguished his scholarship and anticipated the wider source base of later historical research.

Influence and Legacy

Gu Jiegang's critical method reshaped the study of ancient China. It established that the traditional accounts of the earliest ages had to be examined with the same scepticism applied to any other source, and it opened the way for the modern reconstruction of Chinese antiquity on the basis of evidence rather than inherited narrative. His approach became standard practice among scholars of early China.

He trained many students and organised large collaborative projects that brought the methods of text criticism to a wide range of materials. He held senior positions in the leading research institutes and universities and was honoured as the dean of a new and more rigorous historiography, even by those who qualified or disputed his conclusions.

He died on 25 December 1980. He is remembered as a scholar of immense energy and intellectual courage who dared to question the foundations of his own tradition and who built in their place a more critical and evidence-based study of the Chinese past. His name is associated with one of the great scholarly revolutions of modern China.

See also

• Chinese historiography
• Classical Chinese texts
• Historical geography of China
• Qian Mu