ABSTRACT
The Qing dynasty Han learning was by no means a resurrection of the scholarly tradition of the Western and Eastern Han dynasties, as suggested by the Han scholars themselves in the Qianlong period. Already in the early sixteenth century, before the Jesuit missionaries had entered China, the fortress of the ruling intellectual orthodoxy had produced its own heterodoxy, that is, the neo-Confucianism of Wang Shouren. In contrast to the tolerance of Wang Yangming’s school in the Ming, the Qing dynasty purposely propped up the Song school and suppressed that of the Ming. In Chinese history, the eighteenth century just happens to be the very period of the height of Qing prosperity. The southern culture, which radiated from its center in the Jiangnan region, took the form of Han scholarship in the eighteenth century. Precisely during the eighteenth century, in Qing dynasty scholarly circles a movement for the revival of antiquity was rearing its head more and more insistently.
