Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors
The modern Chinese nation must rethink its history in order to survive. To this end, Gu used textual criticism to challenge traditional Chinese historiography. One example is the myth of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, a supposed golden age in China's antiquity that had scarcely been doubted up to the early twentieth century. Gu questioned the historicity of this myth not only to rectify errors in understanding, but also to destroy the entire philosophy of history that revolved around looking back to this supposed golden age. Gu debunked the spurious past, says Schneider, to redefine “the idea of ‘Chinese’ through a process of reordering the relation of past and present”. Yet he believed China’s true past yielded “sources of radical inspiration both for destroying the old traditions and for creating and authorizing new ones.”