Wang Fuzhi
Liu came from a family of prominent Qing dynasty scholars and officials. His father, uncle, grandfather, and great-grandfather were prominent in the school of Han learning which grounded their political reforms in study of the classics. They felt an affinity with such early Qing figures as Wang Fuzhi and the School of Evidential Scholarship. Early family education gave him the philological tools needed to study ancient texts, especially the "Zuozhuan", a rich chronicle of pre-imperial China. Liu passed the first and second levels of the imperial examinations, but when he did not succeed at the highest level, he instead went to live in Shanghai in 1902-1904. There he met the revolutionaries Zhang Binglin and Cai Yuanpei and published essays calling for driving the Manchus out of China. He took the name GuangHan (光漢), or "Restore the Han," and developed the doctrine of "guocui" (), or "national essence," which set out to reinvigorate China through the study of classical culture before Confucius. He edited the journal "Guocui xuebao" (國粹學報, "National Essence"), which published essays from many prominent revolutionary scholars.