Gu Yanwu (, 16131682) was a Chinese historian, philologist, and poet. After failing to pass the civil service examination and after surviving the upheaval of the Qing conquest of the Ming dynasty, he became an itinerant scholar, traveling across much of imperial China while collecting notes for his work.
Born to a family of scholar-officials in the village of Qiandun in modern Kunshan, Jiangsu, Gu was adopted as the grandchild of his paternal uncle as an infant. He was tutored in the Chinese classics by his adoptive family, and began to pursue advancement in the imperial examination system. After the death of his adoptive grandfather, he passed preliminary examinations in 1626, but repeatedly failed to advance to the rank of . He abandoned the exams in 1641. He became a Ming loyalist after the Qing conquest, changing his personal name from Jiang to Yanwu ('warlike and blazing'), but declined any political position in the Ming rump state, after which he began traveling across China, likely financed by his family's landholdings in Kunshan.
The most notable of Gu's works was the (), an edited collection of his notes on various topics, most mainly related to statecraft and historiography. He was critical of Neo-Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. He criticized political centralization and reliance on law codes, arguing this ultimately reduced central authority by delegating power to clerks and officials. He advocated for historical study centered on primary sources. Only two of his works – the first edition of the and his phonology treatise () – were published during his lifetime; the rest of his surviving works, including a variety of poetry, geographical texts, and notes, were published by his lone disciple Pan Lei after his death. Many of his works were lost.
Gu's thought influenced scholars throughout the Qing period, and 19th-century scholars such as He Shaoji venerated him at a Beijing temple constructed in his honor. Later, revolutionaries such as Liang Qichao praised his work, stressing his empiricism and resistance to Qing rule.
Early life and education
In 1613, Gu Yanwu was born under the name Gu Jishen () in the village of Qiandun. This was about 24 (about 14 kilometers or 9 miles) south of the city of Kunshan, in what was then the province of Jiangnan. Gu's ancestors had lived in the area for several centuries; he traced his roots to a man named Gu Qing who settled in the Yangtze Delta during the fall of the Northern Song around 1127. Gu's family had been wealthy scholar-officials (the educated class of government officials in Imperial China) since around 1524, when his family first settled in Qiandun.
Gu's father, Gu Tongying, was born in 1585. Orphaned at a young age, he became a minor scholar-official, but failed the provincial examinations seven times. However, he gained some local renown as a poet, like his father Gu Shaofu and eldest son Gu Xiang. He married a woman with the surname He (), and had five sons with her and at least five daughters. Gu Jishen was the second of their sons.
Gu Tongying's paternal uncle was a scholar-official named Gu Shaofei. Shaofei did not progress far in the examination system, but purchased a scholarly rank from the Imperial Academy. His only son Gu Tongji had died at the age of eighteen in 1601, while betrothed to a woman with the surname Wang (). Wang remained unmarried due to traditional customs and lived in relative seclusion with her would-be husband's family. As Jishen was Tongying's second son, he was adopted as the heir of the deceased Tongji, indirectly serving as an heir for Shaofei. Wang thus became his adoptive mother. Gu had little contact with his birth parents, and scarcely mentioned them in his works.
Gu was often sick as a child. At the age of three, he contracted smallpox, permanently disfiguring one of his eyes. Wang tutored him during his early childhood, using the works of the Song philosopher Zhu Xi. He then began attending a local school when he was seven. As part of his education, he read the Confucian Four Books and the philosophical treatise . His adoptive grandfather Gu Shaofei had him read various historical texts, such as the , the , and the . When Gu was eleven, his grandfather had him read the Song chronicle , telling him that understanding "one hundred (chapters) by Ming authors is not as good as understanding one from Song times".
Imperial examinations Resenting both modern scholarship and the imperial examination system, Gu Shaofei did not initially focus Gu's studies around preparation for the examinations. However, on the advice of a family friend, he began training him for this, wishing to receive a high rank and a government stipend for his studies. In 1626, Gu passed an examination at Suzhou and became a shengyuan, or student scholar. Around this time, he purportedly joined the , a literary movement which sought to revive the philosophy and writing style of Chinese antiquity.
Gu's biological father, Gu Tongying, died that year. He went into the traditional period of mourning and did not take the 1627 examinations. However, his position as a required him to ostensibly attend later annual examinations to reconfirm his status. The following year, the Commissioner of Education took sick leave and left during the grading process, and Gu's results were not released. In 1630, he passed the preliminary examinations, but later in the year failed the triennial examinations in Nanjing to become a (a higher rank of scholar). The following year, he married a woman with the surname Wang from Taicang and changed his name to Gu Jiang ().
Gu repeatedly took examinations throughout the 1630s. He often achieved the highest rank in the annual examinations, but achieved only the lowest rank in the higher-level preliminary examinations. He failed the triennial examinations for a second time in 1639. Taking Gu Shaofei's advice, he began to shift his focus from exams to private studies. He later wrote: "Realizing the many grievous problems with which the state was faced, I was ashamed of the meager resources which students of the Classics possessed to deal with these problems." He took notes as he read through the Twenty-One Histories and various local gazetteers. He later noted 1639 as the year he began collecting notes for his geography works.
Career
In 1641, Gu Shaofei died, and Gu returned home to mourn. After this, he no longer took part in the examinations. The next year, his older biological brother Gu Xiang died, and Gu became the head of the household. Financially burdened by the funerals of both his brother and Gu Shaofei, he was forced to mortgage part of his family estate to a prominent local scholar-official, Ye Fangheng, beginning a property dispute. Shaofei's death also created turmoil within his family, as Shaofei's nephews objected to the legitimacy of Gu's adoption. They unsuccessfully attempted to force Gu and his adoptive mother Wang to leave the family estate by setting fire to their home.
The invading Manchu Qing dynasty captured the Ming capital of Beijing in 1644 and continued south, threatening the rest of China. Gu and his family moved several times over the following months, as the local government began to break down across China. They briefly returned to their family residence at Qiandun, where they were robbed. After this, near the end of the year, they settled at a village named Yulianjing between Kunshan and Changshu.
The Southern Ming, a rump state of the Ming, was established in Nanjing under the rule of the Hongguang Emperor in 1644. Gu was recommended as an official by the magistrate of Kunshan, Yang Yongyan, and in early 1645 was called to Nanjing to serve in the office of the Ministry of War. After he departed for Nanjing, the Manchu captured Kunshan, killing two of Gu's younger biological brothers and injuring his biological mother. In the sixth month of the year (in the Chinese calendar), the Qing forces captured Nanjing and killed the Hongguang Emperor, forcing Gu to return home to Yulianjing before he had taken up office.
Gu's adoptive mother, Wang, allegedly killed herself through starvation in response to the Manchu conquest. In late 1645, Gu temporarily buried his mother at the family's burial ground in Kunshan, waiting for a potential Ming restoration to give her a proper funeral. Following the conquest, he changed his personal name to Yanwu (, 'warlike and blazing' or 'fervent militancy') and destroyed all his prior poetry. His new name likely represented his devotion to protect China from the Manchu. The death of his mother greatly affected his emotional state. Gu's contemporary Wang Gen later wrote that he had "survived profound suffering, and was committed to glorifying the memories of his mother", but that his "sentiments concealed during those decades hardly ever found a chance to be expressed in full".
Wandering In 1646, Gu sent a servant to the court of the Prince of Tang, a Ming prince who claimed the throne after the Hongguang Emperor was captured. The servant returned with a summons to the prince's court. Gu did not go, partially because he had not yet officially buried his mother. Additionally, the servant described the prince as having difficulties establishing a functional government. However, Gu wrote a poem entitled "A Messenger from Yanping Has Arrived" () in honor of the occasion. As the Southern Ming's resistance against the Qing conquest continued, many of Gu's friends and relatives were killed due to their Ming loyalist activities. He wrote a series of poems to honor them, although no evidence directly links him to participating in resistance activities.
For unclear reasons, Gu traveled along the coast of northern Jiangsu and Zhejiang in the autumn of 1647, visiting the city of Wuxing that winter alongside his friend . In late 1647, seeing little hope for a Ming restoration (likely due to intelligence gathered during his travels), Gu held a formal funeral for his mother in Kunshan. He returned to Yulianjiang near the end of the year.
After spending much of 1648 in mourning for his mother, Gu began to travel again that autumn. He first went to Suzhou, and then traveled south. In 1651, he returned to Nanjing to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of the Ming founding emperor Hongwu. He lived in Nanjing from 1652 to 1654 while his wife stayed in Kunshan. To help facilitate his frequent pilgrimages to Hongwu's tomb, he purchased a secondary residence on Shenlie Mountain.
Dispute with Ye Fangheng In 1655, one of Gu's former servants, Lu En, had begun working for Ye Fangheng, the landowner with whom Gu had a property dispute. Lu sought to discredit Gu, and told local officials that he had connections to Ming loyalists in Fuzhou. Because of this, Gu returned to Kunshan and led a group of his friends and relatives who captured Lu, and either beat him to death or drowned him. Gu was arrested afterwards and (due to a bribe by Ye) held in confinement under the watch of men associated with Ye. Gu was sentenced to forced labor, but was able to secure a second trial due to the support of two of his friends. After this, he had his sentence reduced to a beating. He was released in early 1656 and returned to Kunshan.
Shortly after Gu returned to Kunshan, his biological mother died. While traveling to Nanjing, he was attacked by an assassin sent by Ye. Gu fell from a mule he was riding and suffered a head injury, but was able to run away and escape further injury with help from a bystander. Later in 1656, his house was robbed by men under Ye's employ. Feeling that he would be unlikely to secure a legal victory over Ye, Gu began to travel further outside of his home region.
Further travels