In Han times, the Historical Records (shi-ji) of Si-ma-qian and the Han Records (Han-shu) of Ban-Gu represented a great achievement of historical scholarship. But at that time people didn`t have the concept of ‘historiography’ (shi-xue) yet, so th...
In Han times, the Historical Records (shi-ji) of Si-ma-qian and the Han Records (Han-shu) of Ban-Gu represented a great achievement of historical scholarship. But at that time people didn`t have the concept of ‘historiography’ (shi-xue) yet, so they classified the Historical Records (shi-ji) as the part of the canon study (jing-xue) writings, in the Han Records (Han-shu) yi-wen-zhi (藝 文志), the first bibliography of ancient writings. After the collapse of Han dynasty, Chinese knowledge system began to change, which divided into four fields, canon study (經), historiography (史), philosophy (子), literature (集), this classification system lasted until 19th century. Among them, this paper tried to examine how the historiography separated from canon study. Many scholars acknowledged that chinese historiography especially in Wei-Jin-Nan-Bei Chao times. The government developed an official organization designed to edit official historical works, and many individual and family historians wrote their own histories, so the amount of historical works increased impressively, and various kinds of history genres come on the stage in that time. But until now not so much scholars focused on the emergence of historical consciousness. So little is known about the concrete process of evolution of historical consciousness, which is most important to explain why the Wei-Jin-Nan-Bei Chao intellectuals began to think that historiography was independent scholarship from cannon study. To explain this subject, this paper considers the relations of two scholars, Wang-su and Du-yu. Wang-su was a most influential scholar in Wei dynasty, his main field was Ritual study (禮學). When he explained the Ritual (禮), he used to concerned the historical precedent, so his scholarship inclined to be rational and reject the dogmatism. But he failed to erect the interpretative system for confucian canons. But Wang-su had two outstanding students, Wang-bi(王弼) who elected the chinese metaphysics Xuan-xue (玄學), and Du-yu who made the historical methodology. Du-yu created the spring and autumn (春秋) hermeneutics, he tried to systemize a way to pursue the truth inside the historical text, the spring and autumn (春秋), and that was a great step forward the emergence of historical consciousness in the chinese way thinking.