The Doubting Antiquity School or Yigupai refers to a group of scholars and writers in Chinese academia, starting during the New Culture Movement, who applied a critical historiographical approach to Chinesehistorical sources. They put forward theories doubting the authenticity of texts and narratives that, in traditional Chinese historiography, were often accepted as authentic. Most of their criticism concerns the authenticity of pre-Qin texts and deals with questions put forward by the past dynastic writers, as well as other subjects. Hu Shih initiated the critical movement, with his pupil Gu Jiegang and his friend Qian Xuantong continuing this school of thought. Their writings also had influence on many western sinologists, including Bernhard Karlgren and Samuel Griffith. In a more specific way, the Doubting Antiquity School was represented by Gushibian 古史辨, the scholarly movement led by Gu Jiegang, centered on the magazine of the same name. Seven issues of the magazine, 1926-1941, contain about 350 essays. Major critics of the Doubting Antiquity School were historians associated with the Critical Review, a journal founded in 1922. The historians included Liu Yizheng, Liang Qichao, Wang Guowei, Chen Yinque, and Miao Fenglin.
Evaluation
In the atmosphere of critical re-evaluation of traditional culture and learnings of the early 20th century, the Doubting Antiquity School found great influence. Some of their conjectures cast doubt on the authenticity of historical narratives about Chinese antiquity as presented in traditional texts that have been accepted as authentic for millennia. It is these conjectures that gained the greatest popular interest in the non-academic media, such as:
Yu the Great was originally an animal or deity figure used as a motif on bronzeware, and the veneration of bronzeware led to Yu being recast as a historical but super-human figure from antiquity;
Nevertheless, the Doubting Antiquity School's more important legacy was the critical approach to sources they pioneered. The central tenet of their approach was that the history of Chinese antiquity was created iteratively. Ancient texts have been repeatedly edited, reorganised, tampered with or even completely fabricated, so the historical narrative of antiquity as presented in traditional texts was different at different points of time. As time went on, the history of antiquity became longer and more complicated, characters acquired more features, including more supernatural attributes. This means that it is not always possible to identify the "authentic" version of events from antiquity, only the narrative as stated in a text at a particular time. Some of the conjectures put forward by the Doubting Antiquity School were later challenged or disproved, with new archaeological findings supporting the authenticity of the historical texts that the Doubting Antiquity School posited as inauthentic. Joseph Needham wrote in 1954 that many scholars doubted that classic texts such as Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian contained accurate information about such distant history, including the thirty kings of the Shang dynasty listed by Sima. Many scholars argued that Sima could not have had access to written materials which detailed history a millennium before his time. However, the discovery of oracle bones at an excavation of the Shang capital at Anyang matched 23 names of the 30 Shang kings listed by Sima. Needham writes that this remarkable archaeological find proves that Sima Qian "did have fairly reliable materials at his disposal—a fact which underlines once more the deep historical-mindedness of the Chinese." In 1993, scholar Li Xueqin made an influential speech in which he called for historians to "leave the 'Doubting Antiquity' period", which became the manifesto of the "Believing Antiquity" movement. Scholars of the "Believing Antiquity" viewpoint argue that archaeological discoveries of recent decades have generally substantiated Chinese traditional accounts rather than contradicted them, rendering the doubts of the Doubting Antiquity School largely obsolete. For instance, manuscripts discovered in tombs have proved the authenticity of several texts long thought to be later forgeries, including the Wenzi, the Kongzi Jiayu, the Heguanzi, parts of the Yi Zhou Shu, and many others.
