Gu Temple Festival Study (1843-1922)

Soon after the First Sino-British Opium War, scholars like Zhangmu and He Shaoji initiated the worship toward the renowned late-Ming scholar Gu Yanwu, they established a shrine under his name, as well as organized various related activities which attracted a great number of officials to attend during the next eighty years afterwards. With their efforts in republishing Gu’s masterpieces and compiling a chronicle of his life, Gu Yanwu’s previous image as a master in textual criticism altered into a statecraft scholar, the flourishing of Gu Yanwu’s shrine was a consequence of this whole progress and closely interrelated with the politics during the40s of the nineteenth century.A group of Han officials turned Gu Yanwu further into a representative of political ethics and obligation after the failure of the Opium War. The late-Ming Qingyi tradition had been recovered through the network of the worshippers of the Gu Yanwu Shrine, where the officials associated with each other to criticize the government, encourage ethnics and promote loyalty. This association could be viewed as a method for the Han officials to strive for their political capitals, and later motivated them to endeavor for the suppression of the Taiping Uprising and the reconstruction of local social order.Gu Yanwu’s magnetism was also due to his enormous academic achievement and equitable educational attitude, which converged with the trend of thoughts that conciliates the scholarships of the Han and Song and those highlighted pragmatism during the Daoguang period. The Shrine of Gu Yanwu hold scholars with different aptitude, though they were mainly against the the textology of the Qianlong and Jiaqing periods and tended to bring pragmatic ideas back.Moreover, some of the worshippers of the Gu Yanwu’s Shrine were interested in History-Geography of Northwest. Xu Song, Wei Yuan, Zhang Mu, He Qiutao, etc. formed a research union on frontier history. Like Gu Yanwu, they followed the method of textology and were independent researcher in political geography either. Their identity as Han official, combined with their enthusiasm in politics, brought the knowledge of northwest borderland into the mainstream of Han culture. That knowledge was widely circulated via the networks of Gu’s shrine, and contributed to the worshippers’ identification and imagination of the Qing empire.After Xianfeng’s reign, the tide of thoughts started to absorb western ideas, and the circle of thinkers moved from Beijing to the southeast, Gu Yanwu’s shrine correspondingly declined, the flourishing time during the Daoguang and Xianfeng periods has become memories. During the late Guangxu period, Gu’s shrine was used as Temple of deceased Local elite of Jiangsu people. In the May4th Movement of1919, conservative scholars recommenced activities in the Gu’s Shrine for a while, Gu Yanwu then became a symbol of old ethics in contrast to New Culture. My study traced the history of this worshipping space--through the continuous interpretation of Gu Yanwu, officials and scholars gathered academic and political ideas and made the transition of culture and thoughts possible.