Inspired by the precious - A life of indignation

Author: Jian Nan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-10-01
Features: Gong Zizhen (1792—1841), also known as Gong Gongze, styled Shenren, and styled Dingzhou, was a native of Renhe, Zhejiang (now Hangzhou). He passed the imperial examination in the ninth year of the Daoguang reign (1829) and served as an assistant in the Ministry of Rites. At the age of forty-eight, he resigned from his post and returned south, where he died suddenly two years later at the Yunyang Academy in Danyang. In his youth, he studied textual criticism under his maternal grandfather, the renowned scholar Duan Yucai. At the age of twenty-eight, he switched to studying the Confucian classics under Liu Fenglu, specializing in the school of the Spring and Autumn Annals (Gongyang Commentary). He often used this knowledge to "criticize current politics and oppose autocracy" (Liang Qichao, General Outline of Qing Dynasty Scholarship). He was highly learned, proficient in classics, history, the school of the hundred schools of thought, textual criticism, phonology, and epigraphy. He deeply researched the history and geography of the northwest, and in his later years, he developed an interest in the Tiantai school of Buddhism. He was also renowned for his poetry, ci, and prose, being both a sharp and profound thinker and a passionate and imaginative writer.