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correspondence with Ruan Yuan, if such items are extant.
This paper is not a prosopographic study of a generation of mid-Qing scholars, but I need to involve all of them in order to come to certain conclusions about one of them.
Patronage of scholarship and learning during the mid-Qing
Providing scholars who did not have government offices or private income with a means of livelihood while pursuing their research and writing was not a practice unique to China, nor was it a new phenomenon of the mid-Qing era. Often, the individuals offering this support had been motivated by political considerations. Lynn Struve of Indiana University and Kent Guy of the University of Washington have recorded in English the result of their studies on early Qing patronage of scholarship and learning. Struve has found that the Kangxi Emperor commissioned major literary projects from roughly the 1680s through the 1710s, including the Ming Shi (Ming History), to legitimize the Qing rule by making use of scholars who were not officials. This tradition was followed by the Qianlong Emperor in such monumental compilation tasks as the Si ku chuan shu (Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature).
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Literary works were produced under the patronage of individual scholar-officials as well. The Xu Brothers of the Kangxi era, who had several as chief editors of several imperially commissioned compilations, maintained a retinue of scholars. The most celebrated mid-Qing officials who were patrons of scholars were the Zhu Brothers. They gave scholars jobs on their personal staff, or in academic institutions, or an allowance while working on literary projects they sponsored. Zhu Yun (1729-1781), who was remembered for having suggested to the Qianlong Emperor the idea of the Si Ku Chuan Shu, and his younger brother, Zhu Gui (1731-1807), personal tutor to the Jiaqing Emperor, for instance, had on their staff at one time or another such scholars as Zhang Xuecheng (1738-1801), Shao Jinhan (1743-1809), Hong Liangji (1746-1809) and Ruan Yuan. Guy observed that
Although Chu's was the first group of this type of scholarly patronage to coalesce, such circles became a fairly common feature of the era's intellectual life. Among the most important successors of Chu's circle in this regard were the