Gu Yanwu (Chinese: 顧炎武; pinyin: Gù Yánwǔ, 1613 – 1682) 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. He became a Ming loyalist after the Qing conquest, changing his personal name from Jiang to Yanwu ('warlike and blazing'), but declined any political position in the Ming rump state, after which he began traveling across China, likely financed by his family's landholdings in Kunshan.
The most notable of Gu's works was the Rizhilu (日知錄; 'Record of Daily Knowledge'), an edited collection of his notes on various topics, most mainly related to statecraft and historiography. He was critical of Neo-Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. He criticized political centralization and reliance on law codes, arguing this ultimately reduced central authority by delegating power to clerks and officials. He advocated for historical study centered on primary sources. Only two of his works – the first edition of the Rizhilu and his phonology treatise Yinxue wushu (音學五書; 'Five Books on Phonology') – were published during his lifetime; the rest of his surviving works, including a variety of poetry, geographical texts, and notes, were published by his lone disciple Pan Lei after his death. Many of his works were lost.
Gu's thought influenced scholars throughout the Qing period, and 19th-century scholars such as He Shaoji venerated him at a Beijing temple constructed in his honor. Later, revolutionaries such as Liang Qichao praised his work, stressing his empiricism and resistance to Qing rule.
In 1613, Gu Yanwu was born under the name Gu Jishen (顧繼紳) in the village of Qiandun. This was about 24 li (about 14 kilometers or 9 miles) south of the city of Kunshan, in what was then the province of Jiangnan. Gu's ancestors had lived in the area for several centuries; he traced his roots to a man named Gu Qing who settled in the Yangtze Delta during the fall of the Northern Song around 1127. Gu's family had been wealthy scholar-officials (the educated class of government officials in Imperial China) since around 1524, when his family first settled in Qiandun.
Gu's father, Gu Tongying, was born in 1585. Orphaned at a young age, he became a minor scholar-official, but failed the provincial examinations seven times. However, he gained some local renown as a poet, like his father Gu Shaofu and eldest son Gu Xiang. He married a woman with the surname He (何), and had five sons with her and at least five daughters. Gu Jishen was the second of their sons.
Gu Tongying's paternal uncle was a scholar-official named Gu Shaofei. Shaofei did not progress far in the examination system, but purchased a scholarly rank from the Imperial Academy. His only son Gu Tongji had died at the age of eighteen in 1601, while betrothed to a woman with the surname Wang (王). Wang remained unmarried due to traditional customs and lived in relative seclusion with her would-be husband's family. As Jishen was Tongying's second son, he was adopted as the heir of the deceased Tongji, indirectly serving as an heir for Shaofei. Wang thus became his adoptive mother. Gu had little contact with his birth parents, and scarcely mentioned them in his works.
Gu was often sick as a child. At the age of three, he contracted smallpox, permanently disfiguring one of his eyes. Wang tutored him during his early childhood, using the works of the Song philosopher Zhu Xi. He then began attending a local school when he was seven. As part of his education, he read the Confucian Four Books and the philosophical treatise Huainanzi. His adoptive grandfather Gu Shaofei had him read various historical texts, such as the Guoyu, the Zuo Zhuan, and the Shiji. When Gu was eleven, his grandfather had him read the Song chronicle Zizhi Tongjian, telling him that understanding "one hundred juan (chapters) by Ming authors is not as good as understanding one juan from Song times".
Resenting both modern scholarship and the imperial examination system, Gu Shaofei did not initially focus Gu's studies around preparation for the examinations. However, on the advice of a family friend, he began training him for this, wishing to receive a high rank and a government stipend for his studies. In 1626, Gu passed an examination at Suzhou and became a shengyuan, or student scholar. Around this time, he purportedly joined the Fushe, a literary movement which sought to revive the philosophy and writing style of Chinese antiquity.
Gu's biological father, Gu Tongying, died that year. He went into the traditional period of mourning and did not take the 1627 examinations. However, his position as a shengyuan required him to ostensibly attend later annual examinations to reconfirm his status. The following year, the Commissioner of Education took sick leave and left during the grading process, and Gu's results were not released. In 1630, he passed the preliminary examinations, but later in the year failed the triennial examinations in Nanjing to become a juren (a higher rank of scholar). The following year, he married a woman with the surname Wang from Taicang and changed his name to Gu Jiang (顧絳).
Gu repeatedly took examinations throughout the 1630s. He often achieved the highest rank in the annual examinations, but achieved only the lowest rank in the higher-level preliminary examinations. He failed the triennial examinations for a second time in 1639. Taking Gu Shaofei's advice, he began to shift his focus from exams to private studies. He later wrote: "Realizing the many grievous problems with which the state was faced, I was ashamed of the meager resources which students of the Classics possessed to deal with these problems." He took notes as he read through the Twenty-One Histories and various local gazetteers. He later noted 1639 as the year he began collecting notes for his geography works.
In 1641, Gu Shaofei died, and Gu returned home to mourn. After this, he no longer took part in the examinations. The next year, his older biological brother Gu Xiang died, and Gu became the head of the household. Financially burdened by the funerals of both his brother and Gu Shaofei, he was forced to mortgage part of his family estate to a prominent local scholar-official, Ye Fangheng, beginning a property dispute. Shaofei's death also created turmoil within his family, as Shaofei's nephews objected to the legitimacy of Gu's adoption. They unsuccessfully attempted to force Gu and his adoptive mother Wang to leave the family estate by setting fire to their home.
The invading Manchu Qing dynasty captured the Ming capital of Beijing in 1644 and continued south, threatening the rest of China. Gu and his family moved several times over the following months, as the local government began to break down across China. They briefly returned to their family residence at Qiandun, where they were robbed. After this, near the end of the year, they settled at a village named Yulianjing between Kunshan and Changshu.
The Southern Ming, a rump state of the Ming, was established in Nanjing under the rule of the Hongguang Emperor in 1644. Gu was recommended as an official by the magistrate of Kunshan, Yang Yongyan, and in early 1645 was called to Nanjing to serve in the office of the Ministry of War. After he departed for Nanjing, the Manchu captured Kunshan, killing two of Gu's younger biological brothers and injuring his biological mother. In the sixth month of the year (in the Chinese calendar), the Qing forces captured Nanjing and killed the Hongguang Emperor, forcing Gu to return home to Yulianjing before he had taken up office.