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Gu Jiegang was born two years before China's defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War. The country during his early years was wrought with turmoil. During high school, Gu briefly joined a revolutionary group during the 1911 Revolution. However, he soon realized that he had "no personal aptitude for politics, and no ability in promoting great social movements". He developed an interest in history while being a student at Peking University, and resolved to use a new historical narrative to calm his country's social and political turmoil. He evacuated to Chongqing in the Second Sino-Japanese War and started studying the ethnic minorities in China, Muslims in particular.