Gu Jiegang
The New Culture Movement in the 1920s searched the past for authentic roots of the new Chinese nation they hoped to build. Gu Jiegang, the founder of Chinese folklore studies, used the western concept "myth" to reinterpret China's ancient history as a mythology to match the Greeks. They saw these legends as a way to show a direct line of connection to ancient China. Gu and his students searched archives and libraries to find new sources and made imaginative new interpretations of Lady Meng Jiang’s story. In articles such as the 1921 "Meng Jiang Nü gushi de zhuanbian" (The transformation of the Meng Jing Nü legend). Gu and his students were the first to find the connection between the sparse anecdote in the "Zuozhuan", Liu Xiang’s fuller story of Qi Liang’s wife in the Han dynasty, and the Tang and Song dynasty story of Lady Meng Jiang weeping the Great Wall into crumbling. Gu and his students read the legend as the triumph of individual feeling over ritual, of women over power, and of the common people over feudal elites. They established the legend as Chinese premier folktale in the 1920s.