| Summary: | After the First Opium War (1840-1842) there were increased academic
interests in studying the history and geography of China’s northwestern
borderlands, introducing foreign history and geography and writing the
modern history of China. Such interests, however, were no more than
reflections of the times in history studies and could hardly improve the
whole picture of historiography. At the turn of the 20th century, Liang
Qichao published “The Introduction to Chinese History” and “The New
Historiography”, which marked the emergence of a new trend of thought
in historiography and should be deemed the beginning of modern Chinese
historiography. Soon after, the “national quintessence school” (guocui xuepai)
called for preserving the quintessence of Chinese culture and attempted
to bridge Chinese and Western scholarship. Then the “Reorganization of
National Heritage” (zhengli guogu) Movement came, urging to re-arrange
traditional scholarship. Hu Shih (1891-1962) explicitly put forward the goal
of “compiling a history of Chinese culture,” helped dissolve the boundary
between modern and traditional historiography and indicated the approach to
the transformation from ancient to modern historiography from a perspective
of discipline classifications. This “new trend” of Chinese historiography,
centering on new materials, new methods and new issues specified the
research path for the early stage of modern Chinese historiography
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