Gu Yanwu

Imperial examinations

Resenting both modern scholarship and the imperial examination system, Gu Shaofei did not initially focus Gu's studies around preparation for the examinations. However, on the advice of a family friend, he began training him for this. In 1626, Gu passed an examination at Suzhou and became a shenyuang [zh] (student scholar). Around this time, he purportedly joined the Fushe [zh], a literary and political revival movement.^[11][12]

Gu's biological father, Gu Tongying, died that year. He went into the traditional period of mourning and did not take the 1627 examinations. However, his position as a shenyuang required him to attend later (ostensibly) annual examinations to reconfirm his status.^[11] The following year, the Commissioner of Education took sick leave and left during the grading process, and his results were not released.^[11] In 1630, he passed the preliminary examinations, but later in the year failed the triennial examinations in Nanjing to become a juren (a higher rank of scholar). The following year, he married a woman with the surname Wang from Taicang and changed his name to Gu Jiang.^[12]

Gu repeatedly took examinations throughout the 1630s. He often achieved the first (highest) rank in the annual examinations, but achieved only the third (lowest) rank in the higher-level preliminary examinations. He failed the triennial examinations for a second time in 1639.^[12] Taking Gu Shaofei's advice, he began to shift his focus from exams to private studies. He later wrote: "Realizing the many grievous problems with which the state was faced, I was ashamed of the meager resources which students of the Classics possessed to deal with these problems."^[13] He took notes as he read through the Twenty-One Histories and various local gazetteers. He later noted 1639 as the year he began collecting notes for his geography works.^[13]

Wandering

In 1646, Gu sent a servant to the court of the Prince of Tang, a Southern Ming imperial claimant in Fujian. The servant returned with a summons to the prince's court. Gu did not go, partially because he had not yet officially buried his mother. Additionally, the servant described the prince as having difficulties establishing a firm control over the region.^[14][21] However, he wrote a poem entitled "A Messenger from Yanping Has Arrived" (延平使至; Yanping shizhi) in honor of the occasion.^[22] As the Southern Ming's resistance against the Qing conquest continued, many of Gu's friends and relatives were killed due to their Ming loyalist activities. He wrote a series of poems to honor them, although no evidence directly links him to participating in resistance activities.^[23]

For unclear reasons, Gu traveled along the coast of northern Jiangsu and Zhejiang in the autumn of 1647, visiting the city of Wuxing that winter alongside his friend Gui Zhuang [zh].^[14][25] In late 1647, seeing little hope for a Ming restoration (likely due to intelligence gathered during his travels), Gu held a formal funeral for his mother in Kunshan. He returned to Yulianjiang near the end of the year.^[14][21]

After spending much of 1648 in mourning for his mother, Gu began to travel again that autumn. He first went to Suzhou, and then traveled south. In 1651, he returned to Nanjing to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of the Ming founding emperor Hongwu. He lived in Nanjing from 1652 to 1654 while his wife stayed in Kunshan. To help facilitate his frequent pilgrimages to Hongwu's tomb, he purchased a secondary residence on Shenlie Mountain.^[26]

Further travels

Gu spent much of his time traveling, although his reasons for doing so and his methods for financing his increasingly lengthy journeys are unclear. The American historian Willard J. Peterson described him as having a "predilection for being on the move", and noted that other potential reasons for his travel – such as political activities, visiting friends, and research for his historical scholarship – would only partially explain his itinerancy. Gu described himself as spending half his year staying at inns, and rarely staying in a single location for more than a couple months.^[29]

Gu's family's landholdings in Kunshan were likely the source of most of his income.^[30] However, he also gained some income through purchasing and renting out farmland, his scholarly work, and gifts from friends and Qing officials.^[31] In 1658, he traveled to Tai'an and climbed Mount Tai before traveling across Shandong to visit the Temple of Confucius and Temple of the Duke of Zhou [zh] at Qufu and the Temple of Mencius [zh] at Zouxian.^[32] He lived intermittently around Jinan from 1657 to 1659. During this time, Gu may have purchased a mortgage on a farm owned by his friend, who had been indebted to him. Over the following decade, Gu intermittently used this farm, located east of Jinan in Zhangqiu, as a staging ground for his travels in northern China. He left the farm to be managed by others, only staying on it for a few months at a time.^[33]

In 1659, Gu continued north, visiting Shanhai Pass and the Ming tombs of Shisanling. In autumn, he traveled south to visit Yangzhou before returning north to Tianjin. Around this time, he visited the ruined Lingyan Temple near Jinan and obtained a number of Tang-era inscriptions.^[32] For unknown reasons, he traveled south the following year; he went to Nanjing and Jiangnan in 1660, before visiting Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Shaoxing in 1661. Peterson theorizes that he may have intended to evaluate the Qing government's control over the region.^[32][34]

During the early 1660s, the Zhuang Tinglong case resulted in the execution of many historians who were associated with an unauthorized history of the Ming dynasty, greatly upsetting Gu and forcing him to abstain from writing about Ming history.^[35] He returned north in 1662, visiting various locations in Shanxi and Shaanxi over the next two years. After visiting Henan and parts of Shandong, he returned to Jinan in 1665 and fully took control of the farm in Zhangqiu. In 1667, he made his final trip south to Jiangnan.^[36]

The following year, while staying at a monastery in Beijing, Gu was told that he was implicated in a trial in Shandong. Upon his arrival in Jinan, he learned that he was one of a group of scholars accused of creating texts which slandered the Qing dynasty in favor of the Ming. He was arrested for sedition and imprisoned for about six months before he was exonerated and released later in 1668.^[36][37] He resumed travel the following year, making trips between Shandong and Beijing.^[36] A young scholar named Pan Lei traveled from Shanyang in Shaanxi to join Gu at Jinan. Pan was his only student.^[38]

In 1670, Gu published the eight-juan first edition of his collected essays, Rizhilu [zh] (日知錄; 'Record of Daily Knowledge').^[36] The Qing official Xiong Cili summoned him to Beijing in 1671 and asked him to work on the compilation of the History of Ming, the Qing government's official history of the Ming. Gu refused to help,^[39] wishing to maintain his lifestyle and honor his adoptive mother's wishes that he never serve the Qing. He never served the Qing government in any capacity, although he maintained good relationships with many Qing officials, as well as his nephews Xu Yuanwen and Xu Qianxie, who served as advisors at the court of the Kangxi Emperor.^[40] He traveled to Taiyuan, Shanxi, where he helped edit a commentary on the Book of Han. The following year, he twice traveled between Shanxi and Beijing, staying at the capital with Xu Yuanwen. He continued frequent travels through the northern provinces in the following years.^[39]

Later life and death

In 1675, Gu began studying in a house built for him in Qi County, Shanxi, living there alongside a concubine. The house was built by his friend Dai Tingshi (戴廷栻), who collected art and sponsored Ming loyalists from his residence in Shanxi. Some 19th-century sources in Shanxi describe Gu and his friend Fu Shan [zh] as founding figures of the province's banking industry.^[41]

Gu Yanwu had one biological son, Yigu, who died at the age of four. As such, he had no heir for much of his life.^[42] In 1676,^[a] he summoned Gu Yansheng, the son of one of his distant cousins, from Wujiang. The two met at Dezhou, and Gu performed a ritual to recognize Yansheng as his son.^[44][42] Later, he adopted Gu Shishu – the grandson of his biological younger brother Gu Shu – as the heir to his deceased son Yigu and thus his own grandson.^[42] This was a controversial and unusual adoption at the time, as the adoption of heirs to sons who died before adulthood was prescribed against in prior Confucian doctrine.^[45] The adoption was later used as an example in Qing legal discourse of adoption.^[46]

Gu refused to accept any position within the Qing government. In 1678, he refused to participate in a set of special scholarly examinations [zh], an offer to work with a magistrate in Fuping County, Shaanxi, and an invitation to work with the son of a prominent military commander in Gansu.^[47][48] He learned of the death of his wife in 1680, who had stayed in Kunshan during his period of travel. Gu did not return south, but carried out his period of mourning at the residence of a friend in Fenzhou, Shanxi.^[47]

After a journey to Quwo in 1681, Gu fell ill and began having difficulties walking. He completed the adoption rites of Gu Yansheng while staying with a friend in Quwo, and arranged his marriage to the daughter of an influential local family. Gu's health began to improve by the start of the following year. Shortly thereafter, he slipped and fell off his horse while attempting to mount it, and died the following day at the age of seventy. Two months later, Gu Yansheng arrived to obtain his coffin, which he took home to Kunshan for burial.^[47]

Rizhilu

Gu published an eight-juan edition of the Rizhilu in 1670. After his death, Pan Lei edited a full 32-juan version of the anthology and published it in Fujian in 1695. The expanded edition included many edits, some improvements suggested by scholars such as Yan Ruoqu, while others were made to avoid Qing literary censorship.^[48]

Described by scholar Jao Tsung-I as Gu's magnum opus, the Rizhilu is an edited anthology of Gu's notes compiled over a period of thirty years.^[48][57] The expanded edition is divided into sections about the classics, government, social customs, the examination system, historiography, and geography in addition to smaller sections on various other topics.^[19] It critiques mistakes in ancient works^[58] and expresses many of Gu's historiographical ideas.^[55] Although anti-Manchu elements of the work were downplayed in order to evade censorship, Gu intended the work to advise on the resumption of Chinese statecraft after the end of Qing rule.^[19]

Yinxue wushu

Gu's Yinxue wushu (音學五書; 'Five Books on Phonology') analyzes the phonology of Old Chinese as it was spoken at the time of the compilation of the Chinese classics. He adapts the phonological method of the Ming dynasty writer Chen Di to dispute modern readings of classical poetry.^[59][60] The five books total 38 juan in length. The first section, Guyin biao (古音表), serves as a catalogue of sounds in Old Chinese. Yiyin (易音) studies the phonetics of the I Ching, while Shi benyin (詩本音) analyzes the phonetics of the Shijing. Tang yunzheng (唐韻正) compares the phonology recorded in Tang dynasty–era Middle Chinese to Old Chinese. The last book, Yinlun (音論), presents a general overview of Chinese historical phonology.^[59]

Gu's heterodox views on phonology were upsetting to some of his contemporaries; his friend Gui Zhuang [zh] wrote to him in 1668 that "I suspect that as your learning widens, it will grow stranger, which may not be limited to the field of phonology. If your other opinions are similar to these, would it be too abstruse and eccentric?"^[61] Gu responded with a series of six poems entitled "Coming to the East" (赴東; Fu dong), declaring that "My heart's principle will endure with constancy, / And like mountains and rivers does not ever change".^[61]

Poetry

Many Ming loyalists and former Ming officials wrote highly emotional poetry during the early Qing period, often recalling Tang-era poets such as Bai Juyi and Du Fu.^[62] Gu greatly admired Bai Juyi's allegorical poetry, believing that it captured poetry's fundamental purpose of expressing melancholy and critiquing elements of society.^[63]

Much of Gu's poetry focuses on contemporary events, such as his 1644 poem Daxingai (大行哀; 'The Death of the Emperor'), made in mourning for the Chongzhen Emperor.^[64] The first collection of his poetry was published by Pan Lei later in the Kangxi era. Following editions were subject to censorship due to Qing literary inquisitions, often resulting in the removal or alteration of taboo characters. The six-juan collection of poetry was reduced to five or four juan in later editions due to state censorship.^[57]

Governance

Gu argued that rulers should not try to change the moral and political values of a country, but that they should seek to constantly adjust the functions of state in order to adapt to new circumstances. He noted that the Qin dynasty's abolition of the fengjian (hereditary governance) system of governance in favor of junxian (prefectural governance) was a wise decision. However, he wrote that it was only from the prior decay of the old system that a new system was able to be implemented.^[68]

Conceptualizing Tianxia (天下; Tiānxià; '[everything] under Heaven'; a concept centering the world on China) as both the moral foundations of Chinese civilization and Chinese civilization itself, Gu argued that it endured despite the rise and fall of successive dynasties. He warned of the potential for the "collapse of civilization" (亡天下; wáng tiānxià) as distinct from the fall of a dynasty, arguing that such a state would reduce humans to an animalistic existence.^[69]

Writing that the junxian system itself had grown obsolete, Gu argued that a new system which combined elements of both systems, featuring both a strong central authority and local devolution of power.^[70] He wrote that political centralization impaired the ability for local government to effectively govern, ultimately weakening central authority, and that magistrates should be allowed to hold hereditary control over their home territory. According to him, this would incentivize them to aid the stability and security of the region out of their own rational self-interest.^[65] He argued that a true autocracy was futile to impose, and that a wise ruler should instead seek to rule through the "rule of many", emphasizing the status of local clans and familial lineages across the empire.^[71]

In one section of his Rizhilu, Gu disputes the idea that the emperor's sovereignty emerges from the Mandate of Heaven (the concept that heaven bestows legitimacy onto virtuous rulers and dynasties). He argues that the emperor's position is ultimately in service of the populace, and that there is no fundamental difference between the emperorship and any other political position besides rank.^[72] He praised the Ming dynasty's founding Hongwu Emperor, writing that he attempted to devolve power to local government. This was in contrast to many other scholars, who saw the Hongwu Emperor's rule as despotic.^[73]

Gu wrote that the growing power of eunuchs and administrative clerks were symptoms of an over-reliance on regulation. He contrasts regulation (例; lì) with law (法; fǎ), arguing that laws and legal systems which emphasize the public good were essential for the survival of a dynasty.^[74] In contrast to Western conceptions of the "rule of law", Gu saw law as a mechanism by which the ruler attempted to curtail his own officials. He wrote that this could be beneficial, but that over-reliance on legal and administrative codes unintentionally delegates decision-making power to corrupt officials, eunuchs, and clerks.^[75]

Although he criticized Qin Shi Huang (the first Chinese emperor) for his autocratic rule, he praised the Qin dynasty for establishing an administrative and legal system which continued to the present day. Gu's defense of the Qin and of law more generally ran strongly against conventional Confucian doctrine, leading to some later scholars denouncing him as a Legalist. His approach was inspired by the 12th-century scholar Chen Liang [zh], who implemented some elements of Legalist doctrine and opposed Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism.^[74]

Historiography

Gu outlined a method of historical writing centered on the collection of many distinct primary sources. He criticized his contemporaries for relying too heavily on secondary sources, comparing this to minting new coins by melting down old ones. Gu described his experience of finding previously unknown primary sources as leaving him "so overjoyed that he could not sleep".^[54] He emphasized the importance of corroborating sources with external evidence and viewing no one source (including classical histories such as the Spring and Autumn Annals) as infallible. He also prescribed the use of citations for all quotations, including the mention of both authors when a quotation comes from a secondary source, describing it as a matter of respect for past generations.^[76]

Gu opposed the pursuit of knowledge purely for its own sake, writing that "historical books are composed to mirror what happened in the past so as to provide lessons for the present", illuminating the Tao through descriptions of state affairs and the livelihoods of the people.^[76] He believed that poems such as those collected in the Shijing could provide useful insight into the past. Criticizing scholars who objected to the inclusion of love poems alongside moral and philosophical poetry in the Shijing, Gu wrote that "people's customs are shown through verses and one may learn from them the growth and decay of a certain country".^[77]

Sima Qian, the Han dynasty author of the Shiji, was Gu's model for proper historical research. He took additional inspiration from the medieval scholars Sima Guang and Ma Duanlin due to their lifelong dedication to historical research.^[78] He viewed history as a cyclical process, although he viewed some aspects of society, such as morality, as fundamental and unchanging.^[69]

Influence and evaluation

Gu's works were read by many early Qing scholars, including both Ming loyalists and Qing officials.^[40] Zhang Xuecheng, writing in the late-18th century, considered Gu the founder of the "western" school of studies. He described Gu and his intellectual followers as more inspired by classical studies and Zhu Xi's works than the "eastern" school in the tradition of Huang Zongxi, which he described as emphasizing historical studies and the work of Ming philosopher Wang Yangming.^[83] Modern scholars have credited Gu with founding the philological field of Hanxue ('Han learning').^[84]

The discussion of Gu Yanwu's political philosophy was limited until the waves of crises faced by the dynasty during the mid-19th century.^[85] In 1843, He Shaoji led a group of scholars to construct a temple to Gu in Beijing [zh]. This became a community of scholars who met annually at the temple to honor Gu from 1843. One of these scholars, Zeng Guofan, declared Gu one of the "two sages" of the Qing dynasty alongside the 18th-century thinker Qin Huitian [zh].^[86][48] Alongside his contemporary Ming loyalists Wang Fuzhi and Huang Zongxi, Gu had his name added to the Beijing Temple of Confucius in 1909.^[86]

The writer and activist Liang Qichao, one of the founders of the New Culture Movement of the early 20th century, sought to elevate the importance of Gu's work. Liang argued that Gu incorporated the scientific method in his work, describing him as among the primary founders of the Kaozheng, an empiricist school of thought on textual criticism.^[85] One of Liang's contemporaries, the philologist Zhang Binglin, praised Gu for his resistance to the Qing dynasty and his denial of the dynasty's legitimacy, seeing his thought as applicable to the resistance to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s.^[85][86]

Up to the late 20th century, little in-depth scholarly attention was given to Gu's historiography. The Japanese sinologist Naitō Konan briefly summarized Gu's thought in his studies on Chinese historiography. During the mid-20th century, Chinese historians Ch'ien Mu and Hou Wailu [zh] evaluated Gu's philosophy, but only gave cursory attention to his historical work. The American historian Willard J. Peterson wrote a biography of Gu in the 1960s, emphasizing his historiographical thought.^[87]