- A Life of Indignation

Author: Jian Nan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-10-01
Features: Gong Zizhen (1792—1841), also known as Gong Gaozai, styled Shenren, and styled Dingyi, 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 a chief clerk 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 College 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 Jinchuan 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 a scholar of vast knowledge, proficient in classics, history, the Hundred Schools of Thought, textual criticism, phonology, and epigraphy. He delved deeply into the history and geography of the northwest. In his later years, he developed an interest in the Tiantai sect of Buddhism. He was also renowned for his poetry, ci, and prose, being both a perceptive and profound thinker and a literary figure rich in passion and imagination.