Doubting Antiquity School

The Doubting Antiquity School or Yigupai () refers to a group of scholars and writers in Chinese academia, starting during the New Culture Movement (mid-1910s to 1920s), who applied a critical historiographical approach to Chinese historical sources. They put forward theories doubting the authenticity of texts and narratives that, in traditional Chinese historiography, were often accepted as authentic. Hu Shih studied in the West and was deeply influenced by Western thought. He then argued in Peking University that Chinese written history was not credible before Eastern Zhou without critical examination. This view was accepted by his students Fu Sinian and especially Gu Jiegang, who further advanced "our traditional knowledge of Chinese antiquity was built up in successive strata, but in an order exactly the reverse of the actual occurrence." Most of their criticism concerns the authenticity of pre-Qin texts and deals with questions put forward by the past dynastic writers, as well as other subjects. Hu Shih initiated the critical movement, with his pupil Gu Jiegang and his friend Qian Xuantong continuing this school of thought. Their writings also had influence on many western sinologists, including Bernhard Karlgren and Samuel Griffith. In a more specific way, the Doubting Antiquity School was represented by Gushibian 古史辨 (Debates on Ancient History), the scholarly movement led by Gu Jiegang, centered on the magazine of the same name. Seven issues of the magazine, 1926-1941, contain about 350 essays. Major critics of the Doubting Antiquity School were historians associated with the Critical Review, a journal founded in 1922. The historians included Liu Yizheng, Liang Qichao, Wang Guowei, Chen Yinque, and Miao Fenglin. In the atmosphere of critical re-evaluation of traditional culture and learnings of the early 20th century, the Doubting Antiquity School found great influence. Some of their conjectures cast doubt on the authenticity of historical narratives about Chinese antiquity as presented in traditional texts that have been accepted as authentic for millennia.