Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.5, 2021

The Reconstruction of the Tang and Song Prose Canon in Early Qing

(Abstract)

Guo Yingde

During the first half century of the Qing dynasty, due to the advocacy and practice of scholar-officials, the proses of the Tang and Song dynasties gradually overtook that of the Qin/Han and Six Dynasties to become their enthusiastically advocated ones in terms of stylistic orthodoxy, model of writing and composition techniques. During the early Qing, the scholar-officials, by calmly reflecting on the Tang-Song school’s theories and writings of the Ming dynasty, profoundly revealed the distinctive features of the Tang and Song proses as originating in the Way, emerging from the heart, and being refined through technique. They thus intellectually reconstructed the “generally orthodoxy” canon of them. In view of the fact that the Tang and Song style proses easily engender the faults of vacuity and superficiality, early Qing scholars strongly advocated a writing approach based on classical learning that formed a distinctive individual style. This was done with a view to purifying and sublimating the Tang and Song prose model with the aim of raising it to a level of purity and elegance. This model, reconstructed in the course of their interaction with society and culture, was in line with general trends in early Qing scholarship. The model became an effective vehicle for writing to the benefits of the country, not only highlighting the scholars’ intellectual expectation that they were inheriting and carrying on a civilization, but also assisting the imperial court’s promotion of its Confucian cultural policy. In consequence, it became the orthodox form of prose writing throughout the Qing.