| This is a study of the diversity and complexity of the 17th-century North China's intellectual and social changes as manifested in the scholarships of Sun Qifeng, Li Yong, and Yan Yuan. Among the major findings, there were a variety of intellectual developments in North China. The textual scholarship was not yet a national obsession. Until around the end of the 17th century, northern scholars either ignored or denounced southern scholars' thesis that kaozheng was the only path to the truth of Confucian teaching. Second, in 17th-century North China, we see a renewed and increased emphasis on moral cultivation. Northern scholars never negated the moral component in their learning and in applying their academic endeavors to the socio-institutional reality of the time. Third, the state had by and large left many local scholarly activities in the hands of the participants, lacking applicable or effective means to impose the imperial Neo-Confucian orthodoxy on the district level. The three scholars openly disputed and criticized the philosophical and socio-institutional implications of the state orthodoxy. Fourth, northern scholars engaged themselves in active dialogue through a variety of communications networks, inter-personal, intra-regional, and inter-regional, on a level more animated and on a scale more widespread than present-day historians have acknowledged. Finally, a national integration of Qing Confucianism occurred during the 1750s, a new paradigm which was based on the intellectual persuasion and methodology of South China's kaozheng scholarship.;To conclude, much of the current historiography of Qing thought must be modified to include the important features of Confucian learning in the northern region. North China, being an integral part of the Qing political entity, was also an indispensable component of Qing China's profound cultural and intellectual transformation. |
