Late Qing Dynasty "kingship" Research

King’s System or Wangzhi is one of the forty-nine chapters of The Book ofRites,containing "the rules of ennobling, giving official salary, worshiping and restingthe aged of the former kings". It was a perfect statement of system’s compose whichreflected Confucian ideal and was regarded as a complete set of policy outline whichdrew attention of many scholars in history.Traditional research was mainly carriedout within the range of Classical Studies.During late Qing dynasty, with the domestic turmoil frequently happened aswell as foreign invasion, China’s national power declined inevitably. Before19thcentury,the Old Text School dominated academia for a long time in Qingdynasty,when the ever greatest change came to shock scholars,the New Text Schoolrevived and gradually dominated since the Old Text School failed to respond to thewestern challenge.Although they still tried to derive the ideological resources fromthe Six Classics as before,it showed the emergence of a new trend and the influenceby western learning.Based on the reality of growing social crisis,the New Text School scholarsendeavored to save the the empire, inheriting the strategy of Sublime Word withDeep Meaning from Former Han dynasty and applying the Classics’theories intopolitics.Study of Wangzhi in this period was significant,however,it has always beenless concern among scholars nowadays.This thesis plan to discuss it from the point ofview of the history of ideas, and even the history of philosophy,mainly focus on howand why Wangzhi evoked the conflict between the Old Text School and the New TextSchool scholars,and how it could reflect contradictions and struggles betweenhistorical theory of cycle and historical evolutionism in which we can see about thenew trend of Classical Studies and a new paradigm emerging.The thesis is divided into five parts, consisting of introduction, four chapters.The introduction will be a brief description of the research status of the Wangzhi inthe late Qing Dynasty.Chapter One will review the development of the Classic Studies in late Qing Dynasty. Chapter Two will present the the research status of the Wangzhi based onthe New Text School’s perspective.Chapter Three will present the the researchstatus of the Wangzhi based on the Old Text School’s theory. In Chapter Four I willtry to explore the new trend of development of the Classic Studies from the researchof the Wangzhi in the late Qing Dynasty.