Chapter 65 Section 16 The Qianjia School and Its Influence on Science

Emperor Yongzheng, who succeeded Kangxi, changed the policy of the Kangxi period. Except for a very small number of missionaries left by Qin Tianjian, the rest of the missionaries were all expelled to Macau and not allowed to enter the mainland.Since then, China has closed itself to the outside world and began a period of 120 to 30 years of isolation, almost cutting off contact with the outside world.This period was the period when Western science and technology advanced by leaps and bounds and developed rapidly, while the Chinese intellectual circles fell into a state of digging through piles of old papers, chewing words, and citing classics, and were in an extremely dull style of study.During the Qianlong (AD 1736-1795) and Jiaqing (AD 1796-1820) years, this style of study reached its peak, so it is called the Qianjia School.As a result, the distance between China's science and technology and the world trend is getting wider and wider, and it is left far behind.

The emergence of the Qianjia School was a product of the historical and political atmosphere at that time.In the Qing Dynasty, Yongzheng and Qianlong promoted literary inquisitions, implemented the policy of confinement and cultivation, and advocated the study of knowledge with textual research.As a result, a group of intellectuals studied ancient books behind closed doors, abandoned the academic direction of "practical application" in the early Qing Dynasty, and created the fashion of textual research.In order to control and win over intellectuals, the Qing government also organized a large-scale collation of ancient books.Among them, there are large-scale catalogs and reference books compiled during the Kangxi period, such as "Ancient and Modern Book Integration", "Peiwen Yunfu", etc. During the Qianlong period, the Siku Quanshu Library was opened to compile the "Siku Quanshu".It was against this academic background that the Qianjia School occupied an absolute dominant position in the cultural and academic circles at that time, and had a great influence on subsequent academic research and academic thought.

The research scope of the Qianjia School is centered on Confucian classics, and it extends to the aspects of text phonology, exegesis of famous objects, historical geography, astronomy and calendar, epigraphy and rhythm, collation and collection of lost records, etc.Because of its admiration of Han Confucian classics annotations, it is also called Sinology or Qing Dynasty Classics, and there are also those who are simple and unpretentious in their academic style and research methods, so they are called simple studies. In the activities of textual research and sorting out ancient classics, the Qianjia School also involved many classics related to natural science.They not only collated and annotated existing scientific and technological documents, but also recompiled or discovered many lost scientific and technological books.These works are of great help in reading difficult ancient books and correcting mistakes in the circulation of ancient books, and they are preserved and circulated through sorting for future generations to study, which has a certain positive significance.

However, this style of study based on textual research, although it also invented some original knowledge when commenting, but generally speaking, it is from ancient books to ancient books, from history to history, divorced from production practice, and lacks scientific knowledge. Experiments violate the spirit of science and the law of scientific development, thus causing a great negative impact on science and technology.This is one of the important reasons for the backwardness of modern science and technology in China.