Gu Yanwu investigated geography, customs, and institutions widely, valuing both written sources and firsthand observations. His works include Record of Daily Knowledge. His scholarship emphasized concrete knowledge and practical questions. It held an important place in the development of Qing evidential scholarship and influenced later research methods.
Historical background
Gu Yanwu 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 juren. He abandoned the exams in 1641.
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" (Yanping shizhi) 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.
Gu spent much of his time traveling, although his reasons for doing so and his methods for financing his increasingly lengthy journeys are unclear. The American historian Willard J. Peterson described him as having a "predilection for being on the move", and noted that other potential reasons for his travel – such as political activities, visiting friends, and research for his historical scholarship – would only partially explain his itinerancy. Gu described himself as spending half his year staying at inns, and rarely staying in a single location for more than a couple months.
Gu's family's landholdings in Kunshan were likely the source of most of his income. However, he also gained some income through purchasing and renting out farmland and from his scholarly work. He received gifts and scholarly commissions from friends and Qing officials due to his growing reputation. In 1658, he traveled to Tai'an and climbed Mount Tai before traveling across Shandong to visit the Temple of Confucius and Temple of the Duke of Zhou at Qufu and the Temple of Mencius at Zouxian.
Works
Gu read and wrote frequently throughout his life, purportedly bringing an additional horse with him while traveling to carry his books and study materials. He frequently sought out inscriptions when traveling near historical and religious sites. He published only two works during his lifetime: the phonology text Yinxue wushu ('Five Books on Phonology') and the first edition of his collected notes, Rizhilu ('Record of Daily Knowledge'). Much of his unpublished work was lost after his death, while some survived only as manuscripts. Pan Lei collected some of his poems and letters and published them for the first time in the collection Tinglin yishu huiji ('Collected Posthumous Writings of Gu Tinglin').
Gu published an eight-juan edition of the Rizhilu in 1670. After his death, Pan Lei edited the full 32-juan version of the anthology and published it in Fujian in 1695. The expanded edition included many edits, and some improvements suggested by scholars such as Yan Ruoqu, while others were made to avoid Qing literary censorship. The expanded version contains over a thousand essays; the smallest is less than a single column of text in length, while the largest is over 121 columns.