The Collapse of Ming and the Birth of Loyalist Scholarship

When the Ming dynasty fell in 1644, Gu Yanwu was thirty-two years old—an age when most scholars would have been establishing their careers in the imperial bureaucracy. But for Gu, the collapse of his native dynasty marked not an end but a radical new beginning for Chinese intellectual life. His adoptive mother, a woman honored by the Ming court for her chastity, starved herself to death over thirty days following the dynasty’s fall, leaving her son with a final command: never serve the new Qing regime. This act of principled resistance shaped Gu’s entire intellectual trajectory, transforming him into one of China’s most influential “leftover subjects” (yimin) of the fallen Ming.

Unlike many loyalists who retreated into Buddhist monasteries or committed suicide, Gu chose a different path of resistance—the life of a traveling scholar committed to practical, statecraft-oriented learning. Leaving his native Kunshan in Jiangsu province, he spent decades traversing northern China, particularly Shandong and the northwest frontier regions. His research method was characteristically hands-on: two horses and two mules carried his books as he journeyed, allowing him to consult texts on the spot when encountering strategic mountain passes or river crossings. He would seek out retired soldiers to understand local topography, creating an empirical foundation for his scholarship that stood in stark contrast to the abstract philosophizing of Neo-Confucian academics.

The Critique of Empty Learning: Gu Yanwu’s Intellectual Revolution

Gu Yanwu’s disdain for Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism was no mere academic preference—it was a visceral reaction to what he saw as the intellectual failures that had contributed to the Ming collapse. In his famous “Letter on Learning to Friends,” he launched a scathing attack:

“For over a hundred years, those calling themselves scholars have spoken endlessly of ‘mind’ and ‘human nature,’ yet remain utterly confused about their meaning… They gather hundreds of disciples to discourse on mind and nature, abandoning the Confucian injunction to ‘learn widely and remember carefully’ in favor of seeking some ‘connecting thread.’ They ignore the poverty of the realm while debating abstruse doctrines about the subtle differentiation of principle… This is not learning as I understand it.”

For Gu, true scholarship had just two requirements: practical learning (shixue) and practical action (shixing). His concept of “broad learning in culture” encompassed not just literary study but all matters from personal cultivation to state governance. He devoted himself to researching institutional history, regional administration, military strategy, and economic conditions—precisely the areas Neo-Confucians had neglected in their obsession with metaphysical speculation.

Gu’s methodological innovation was equally revolutionary. He advocated a scientific approach to classical studies beginning with philology: “To study the Nine Classics, start with textual criticism; for textual criticism, begin with phonology. The same applies to all texts of the various philosophers.” This emphasis on linguistic analysis as the foundation for understanding ancient texts would become a hallmark of Qing evidential research (kaozheng xue).

His analysis of a disputed character in the Book of Documents exemplifies this approach. When Tang Xuanzong claimed the character “po” (颇) should be emended to “bei” (陂) for rhyming purposes, Gu demonstrated through multiple textual examples that “po” was correct—the ancient pronunciation of “yi” (义) rhymed perfectly with “po.” Such rigorous evidentiary argumentation represented a seismic shift from the speculative interpretations of Neo-Confucian commentators.

The Farmer-Philosopher: Yan Yuan’s Radical Empiricism

If Gu Yanwu began the Qing critique of Neo-Confucianism, Yan Yuan (1635-1704) took it to its logical extreme. Born into poverty in Zhili province, Yan’s early life was marked by trauma—his father disappeared with Manchu troops when Yan was four, and his mother remarried when he was twelve. Raised by an adoptive Zhu family (his original surname was Yan), he dabbled in Daoist longevity techniques and examination essays before settling into the life of a village teacher and physician.

Yan’s intellectual breakthrough came through personal tragedy. At thirty-four, while mourning his adoptive grandmother according to Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals, he observed the three-day fast, wept morning and evening, and slept on straw with a clod for a pillow. After three months of this extreme mourning, his body covered in sores, an old man revealed he wasn’t actually the Zhu family’s grandson. This revelation—and his physical collapse from following Zhu Xi’s prescriptions—led Yan to reject Song Learning entirely.

In 1669, Yan established his mature philosophy in two works: Preserving Human Nature and Preserving Learning. His central insight was devastatingly simple: the Neo-Confucians had fundamentally misunderstood Confucius. Ancient Confucianism had been practical and embodied; Song Confucianism was abstract and disembodied, more akin to Chan Buddhism than classical learning. As Yan memorably put it: “What passes for principle-learning today is actually Chan Buddhism. Instead of drawing from the Five Classics, they rely on recorded sayings—easier than examination essays!”

Practice Over Theory: Yan Yuan’s Educational Vision

Yan Yuan’s educational philosophy was radical in its emphasis on physical practice. He compared Neo-Confucians to medical students who read countless texts but never diagnosed illness or prepared medicine:

“Suppose there’s a fool who just reads medical texts, memorizing and explaining them, considering himself a master physician—while dismissing pulse diagnosis, medicine preparation, acupuncture, and massage as crude techniques unworthy of study. As books proliferate and knowledge seems to deepen, one person advocates this, the whole world follows. Soon the land is full of medical theorists while people lie sick and dying in piles. Can this be called understanding medicine?”

For Yan, real learning meant mastering the “six arts” of ancient Confucianism: rites, music, archery, charioteering, writing, and mathematics. His proposed curriculum at the Zhangnan Academy included practical subjects like mathematics, astronomy, and military strategy alongside classical study—a far cry from the bookishness of Neo-Confucian academies.

Yan reserved particular scorn for the Neo-Confucian emphasis on “not doing laborious things.” He contrasted this with Confucius’s injunction to “lead and labor,” asking pointedly: “If Confucian scholars don’t labor, who will?” The Neo-Confucian preference for “reading books to illuminate principle” and “quiet sitting to nurture nature” was, for Yan, fundamentally un-Confucian—and explained China’s weakness against foreign invaders.

The Scientific Turn: Dai Zhen and the Evidential Research Movement

By the eighteenth century, the anti-Neo-Confucian currents Gu and Yan had initiated coalesced into the evidential research (kaozheng) movement. Dai Zhen (1724-1777), its greatest philosophical mind, applied rigorous philological methods to dismantle six centuries of Neo-Confucian metaphysics.

Dai’s central insight was that the Neo-Confucians had smuggled Buddhist and Daoist concepts into Confucianism by positing a transcendent “principle” (li) separate from material force (qi). In his masterwork, An Evidential Study of the Meaning of Terms in the Mencius, Dai argued that “principle” was simply the natural patterns in things themselves—not some mystical entity inhering in the mind. This had profound ethical implications: rather than “preserving heavenly principle and eliminating human desires,” Dai argued that proper desires were themselves principled. The sage kings had “embodied human feelings and satisfied human desires”—exactly the opposite of Neo-Confucian asceticism.

Dai’s most famous formulation—that Neo-Confucianism “kills people with principle”—condemned the social consequences of abstract moralism. When “principle” becomes divorced from actual human needs, it justifies atrocities like widow suicide or filial oppression in the name of “heavenly principle.” For Dai, true morality emerged from careful study of actual conditions, not imposition of abstract rules.

Legacy: From Anti-Neo-Confucianism to Modern Science

The practical scholarship tradition represented by Gu, Yan, and Dai marked a decisive turn toward empiricism in late imperial Chinese thought. Gu’s philological methods laid groundwork for modern linguistics; Yan’s emphasis on practice anticipated twentieth-century pragmatism; Dai’s critique of Neo-Confucian metaphysics cleared space for materialist philosophies.

Yet their legacy remains contested. While the evidential research movement dominated Qing academia, Neo-Confucianism retained cultural prestige. The twentieth century saw both attempts to revive Confucianism and renewed attacks on its “feudal” aspects. Modernizers like Hu Shi championed Gu and Dai as proto-scientific thinkers, while traditionalists accused them of undermining Confucian spirituality.

What remains undeniable is these thinkers’ courage in challenging orthodoxy when orthodoxy had failed China. In an age of crisis, they rejected abstract speculation in favor of practical solutions—a lesson with enduring relevance. As Gu Yanwu wrote: “When the empire is in extreme poverty, to remain silent about it while discoursing on the subtle and minute—this I cannot comprehend.” Their insistence on grounding thought in concrete reality remains their greatest contribution to Chinese intellectual history.