Study on the Reactions of Officials and Scholars to Sacrifice Offering for Gu Yanwu after First Opium War

The paper focuses on an affair happened in the 1840s. After the Opium War, some literati-officials began to offer sacrifice to Gu Yanwu periodically, a great scholar of early Qing dynasty. The members of the Gu Yanwu Shrine Association mainly were Peking censors such as Chen Qingyong and scholars on Northwest frontier such as Zhang Mu. In their opinions, if the provincial officials and frontline commanders had been qualified, China would have won the war against the British. Modeling on Gu Yanwu,Zhang Mu and his friends advocated Gu Yanwu爷s virtuous characters and the style of paying attention to the statecrafts. They insisted that their actions were helpful for the Qing Empire. In order to resist Western firearms and gunboats, they tried to look for resources from Chinese traditional science and technology, although these ways to deal with the foreigners had no novelty. But there were some people who thought more than others among this association. Wei Yuan and Feng Guifen would become a new type of intellectuals.