Huì Dòng 惠棟
Style name Dìngyǔ 定宇, also styled Sōngyá 松崖. Native of Yuánhé 元和 / Chángzhōu 長洲 prefecture (modern Sūzhōu 蘇州). Grandson of Huì Yǒushēng 惠有聲 and son of Huì Shìqí 惠士奇 (1671–1741), in a three-generation line of Hàn-learning specialists; the founding figure of the so-called Wú school 吳派 of Qīng kǎozhèng 考證 evidential scholarship. Never held office; spent his life in study at Sūzhōu, supported by a small estate and by his teaching circle.
The defining intellectual project of his career was the systematic recovery of the lost Hàn Yì tradition (Mèng Xǐ 孟喜, Jīng Fáng 京房, Yú Fān 虞翻, Zhèng Xuán) against the Wáng Bì–Chéng Yí–Zhū Xī interpretive line that had dominated since the Northern Sòng. His four principal Yì monographs — Zēngbǔ Zhèng shì Zhōuyì 增補鄭氏周易 (= KR1a0004), Zhōuyì shù 周易述 (KR1a0105), Yì Hàn xué 易漢學 (KR1a0106), Yì lì 易例 (KR1a0107) — together constitute the most influential Qīng programme on the Yì and the foundational corpus of the Wú school. Beyond the Yì, his Jiǔjīng gǔyì 九經古義 (Old Meanings of the Nine Classics, 1758) extends the same source-recovery method across the rest of the canon, and his Hòu Hànshū bǔ zhù 後漢書補注 augments Lǐ Xián’s commentary.
His intellectual orientation — that Hàn-period commentaries are categorically closer to the canonical text than later Sòng readings — became the methodological premise of the eighteenth-century Hàn xué movement and influenced both Qián Dàxīn 錢大昕 and (by way of Wáng Mínshèng 王鳴盛) the Yangtze-delta evidential network. Benjamin Elman places him at the inflection point of the “philology turn” in late-imperial Chinese learning.