Zhāng Xuéchéng 章學誠 (1738–1801), zì Shízhāi 實齋, hào Shàoyán 少巖. Native of Kuàijī 會稽 (Shàoxīng, modern Zhèjiāng); one of the principal Qing thinkers of the Zhèdōng xuépài 浙東學派 (Eastern-Zhè school) succession from Huáng Zōngxī 黃宗羲, Wàn Sītóng 萬斯同, Quán Zǔwàng 全祖望. Jìnshì of Qiánlóng 43 (1778) at age 41, after multiple failed metropolitan attempts; never held substantive office. Lived a precarious career as a private tutor, gazetteer compiler, and patron-seeker, dying in poverty.
His career was shaped by the Eastern-Zhè school’s jīngshǐzhīxué 經史之學 commitments — the integration of Classics and history against the Hànxué pài 漢學派 evidential mainstream then dominant in the Sìkù circle — and by his own search for steady employment. He compiled gazetteers for Hézhōu 和州 (1774), Yǒngqīng 永清 (1779), Bòzhōu 亳州 (1789), and the partial Hú-bĕi 湖北 provincial gazetteer (1790s); served as private secretary to several governors and provincial officials, most importantly Bì Yuán 畢沅 (1730–1797) the HúGuǎng Governor-General. His acute personal financial pressure and recurring conflict with the Hànxué mainstream produced one of the most original, and most embittered, intellectual personalities of the late eighteenth century.
His chief works are the KR2o0025 Wénshǐ tōngyì 文史通義 — the second great Chinese treatise on historiography, modelled on Liú Zhījǐ’s Shǐtōng; the parallel Jiàochóu tōngyì 校讎通義 (general principles of textual criticism); the Fāngzhì lüèlì 方志略例 (notes on gazetteer compilation); and the Zhāngshì yíshū 章氏遺書 collected works (compiled posthumously by his eldest son, first published 1832). His magnum opus the Wénshǐ tōngyì’s working drafts were stolen in Qiánlóng 46 (1781); he reconstructed them from memory over the next two decades, with partial publication in 1796 and full posthumous publication in 1832.
The work’s most-cited tag — liù jīng jiē shǐ yě 六經皆史也 (“the Six Classics are all history”) — and its development of the doctrines of zhuān jiā 專家 (specialism), shǐdé 史德 (the historian’s virtue), fāngzhì as serious history, and jiàochóu as a coordinate discipline, were largely unread in his own lifetime; he was rediscovered by Liáng Qǐchāo and Hú Shì at the end of the nineteenth century and elevated into one of the principal pre-modern East-Asian thinkers about history. CBDB id 65634 confirms 1738–1801.