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| Gu Jiegang's Argument over Liu Xin's Forgery of the Old Text of Confucian Classics |
| Fan Jingjing |
| Department of History, Tsinghua University, Beijing 10084, China |
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Abstract In the textual criticism of the first half of the 20th Century, Gu Jiegang adopted the argument that Liu Xin forged the old text of Confucian classics, which was strongly advocated by the scholars such as Kang Youwei in the Late Qin Dynasty. He used it as a premise to argue and authenticate the dating of Pre-Qin texts. For this reason, Gu Jiegang’s academic status has been highly controversial. Only by placing his academic work within the internal logic of academic development can a realistic determination be made. To accomplish this task, the argument he adopted should be undoubtedly the first to be evaluated.This article reviews in detail Gu Jiegang’s published writings, reading notes, and diaries. It reveals that his argument serves as a foundational premise for many of his conclusions regarding the authenticity of ancient texts, which explains why he has often been seen as a fellow traveler of scholars advocating the new text study of Confucian classics in the Late Qin. However, the idea that Liu Xin tampered with ancient texts was not exclusive to the new text study of Confucian classics scholars in the Late Qin. Dating back to the Song Dynasty, scholars such as Hu Hong and Hong Mai had expressed similar views. By the Mid-to-Late Qing Period, Liu Fenglu had further emphasized this argument in his study of the authenticity of the Zuoshi Chunqiu (《左氏春秋》). Kang Youwei, in his Xinxue Weijing Kao (《新学伪经考》), offered a comprehensive and systematic argument through comparative analysis of Historical Records (《史记》) and The History of the Han Dynasty (《汉书》), making the argument widely accepted in the era of carved-text literature. In the transitional period from traditional to modern scholarship at the turn of the 20th Century, Gu Jiegang was educated in the classical study of the Four Branches of Literature. Moreover, his early academic interests were deeply rooted in traditional bibliography which stresses chronological ordering of texts. Against this background, it was natural for Gu Jiegang to accept the argument of Liu Xin forging the old text of Confucian classics, since it offered a compelling explanatory framework for the formation and transmission of Pre-Qin texts within the context of carved-text literature. His adoption of this argument thus reflected the natural progression of internal scholarly reasoning, instead of a deliberate alignment with the new text study of Confucian classics.This article further examines whether the argument retains academic value in the present era when large numbers of ancient texts on bamboo and silk manuscripts are discovered. Since the 1990s, the rapid increase in excavated manuscript materials has led scholars to abandon the carved-text era’s assumptions about the transmission of Pre-Qin and Qin-Han texts. The newly recognized complexity and diversity of manuscript transmission have, in turn, altered many long-held conclusions about the authenticity of ancient texts. In this context, Gu Jiegang’s core argument concerning Liu Xin’s forgeries has come under increasing scrutiny. However, if one sets aside the ontological question of the historical accuracy of the argument, as well as the conclusions it generated about textual authenticity, and instead focuses on its epistemological and historiographical significance, it is still legit to say that the argument of Liu Xin forging the old text of Confucian classics has exerted profound influence on the development of the 20th-Century Chinese historiography. On the one hand, it encouraged scholarly attention to the question of how the Pre-Qin and Qin-Han texts were produced and transmitted, laying an intellectual foundation for later studies of excavated manuscripts. On the other hand, it helped shift historians’ perspectives from a historical ontology to an epistemology of historical knowledge, thereby broadening and renewing the historical research in the 20th-Century China. In this light, revisiting and re-evaluating this issue remains both necessary and significant.
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Received: 27 February 2025
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2025, Vol. 55 
