Anyone interested in eighteenth-century Chinese intellectual history should be grateful to Minghui Hu for producing the first systematic, full-length study in the English language on Dai Zhen, whose polymathy in varied subjects truly astounds. Often, when assessing the contributions of a profound thinker, one is wont to take into account both the retrospective and the prospective aspects of the savant's accomplishments, namely, how the great man synthesizes and sums up what has gone on before, and how he presages and envisages what is to come. Hu's book does precisely that, and its titular message is clear: at the same time that Dai wrought a new vision of the classical, his thinking and scholarship initiated, augured, and constituted elements of the modern.

Let us first shine a light on the retrospective part, the merits of which are many. Two in particular stand out. First, the book teems with personages—both intellectual influences and adversaries—with whom Dai interacted. Hu portrays the vibrant eighteenth-century Chinese world of thought by highlighting the congress between a host of scholars who defined the lineaments of late imperial Chinese intellectual history and culture. This intricate narrative reveals the many pathways and lineages of the germination and growth of ideas, especially the so-called kaozhengxue or kaojuxue (evidential learning) that epitomized the intellectual temper of the Qianlong-Jiaqing period. Second, Hu's book offers an alternative perspective from which to view the contents and imports of Dai's thought. Instead of fixating on Dai's politico-moral philosophy (which amounts to only some 5 percent of his work by Hu's statistical reckoning), as most conventional works tend to do, Hu constructs Dai's worldview through his manifold writings on highly technical subjects such as mathematical astronomy, historical geography, phonology, and historical etymology. In the process, Hu draws our attention to the hitherto still understudied roles of Western learning in mid-Qing intellectual culture and Dai's intimate encounter with it.

In the first chapter, “The Man and His Times,” Hu revises our understanding of Dai by situating him in the intellectual context of Jesuit science. Dai and his followers saw themselves as tongru, meaning not just scholars of broad and deep erudition, but those who exceled in both classico-humanistic scholarship and technico-scientific learning. It is through Dai's works on the latter that we may approach the core of his classical and philosophical vision. Chapter 2, “How Jesuit Science Conquered the Kangxi Court,” tells us how Jesuit missionaries, especially Schall and Verbiest, succeeded in demonstrating the superiority of Western astronomy based on spherical trigonometry, so much so that from Kangxi's time until the 1840s, the top position at the Astro-calendrical Bureau (Qintian Jian) would be shared by a Jesuit and a Manchu. Chapter 3, “Searching for Truth in the Origins of Civilizations,” features Mei Wending's mathematical genius and his response to Bouvet's cosmological claims about the origins of civilizations. Chapter 4, “How to Build a Coalition around Science,” tells us that there was a “science faction” among the scholar-officials in court, devoted to continuing and transmitting Jesuit mathematical astronomy to elite society, so that it would become a part of classical knowledge. It is only in chapter 5, “An Outsider Enters the Mainstream,” that Dai takes center stage, where Hu details the ways in which Dai developed his intellectual goals and agenda, which were to reconstruct the real and perfect classical world with his technical methods that were an integral part of classical learning. Chapter 6, “How to Dethrone Jesuit Science,” reveals how Dai and others employed mathematical astronomy to explicate and understand rites and rituals in the classics, thus using Jesuit science to affirm the centrality of the Chinese classical order. Chapter 7, “Bringing It Home to the Palace of Light,” highlights Dai's and others' endeavors to reconstruct the mingtang, understood by him to be a cosmological hall, an ancestral temple, and a policy chamber. Chapter 8, “Legibility of Visionary Scholars,” shows how Dai and his cohort supplied classical and technical knowledge, especially in the domains of mathematical cosmology, historical geography, and social order (as reflected in the proper garb of the shenyi, “the long garment”) that would legitimize the Qing imperial state.

Hu's revisionist study sheds new light on the innovativeness of Dai Zhen's learning and thinking, enriching our understanding of the scientific and technical dimensions of kaozheng scholarship. Yet, Hu's prospective view that such innovativeness adumbrates China's transition to modernity may be a stretch. Hu seems to have taken entrenched historiographic views, especially those of Liang Qichao, Hu Shi, Liang Qichao, Yasuda Jiro, and Mizoguchi Yūzō—which make Dai into a revolutionary spokesperson for early modern Chinese scientism, humanism, and individualism—as historical reality. While Dai's reimaging of the Confucian cosmopolis with his classical and technical knowledge was undeniably remarkable or even original, we may legitimately ask whether his thought represents fundamental questioning of the ultimate ground of moral values, the traditional mode of knowledge, and the old sense of the past. I do not believe Hu has scrutinized Dai's ideas in such a way that their “modernity” can be ascertained.