DAI ZHEN (zi, Shenxiu; hao, Dongyuan; 1724–1777), the most illustrious representative of the kaozheng school of evidential research and one of the leading philosophers of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).

Dai Zhen was born into a modest mercantile family of Xiuning, Anhwei Province. He pursued his earliest education by borrowing books from neighbors. He learned very quickly and astonished his teachers by questioning the authority of everything he read. For a brief period he was apprenticed to a cloth merchant, but in 1742 he was sent to the home of a wealthy scholar and there studied with Jiangyong (1681–1762).

The scholar Jiangyong provided the formative influence during the first period of Dai Zhen's adult life. He was a specialist in the Li ji (Record of Rites) and in mathematics and phonology; the training he gave Dai Zhen in these areas became the foundation for much of Dai Zhen's later scholarship in...