The Six Confucian Classics are The Book of Changes, The Book of History, The Book

of Songs, The Book of Rites, The Book of Music, and The Spring and Autumn Annals.

An important proposition put forward by scholars of late imperial China was

that those are all historical texts. According to these scholars, the Six Classics are

all concerned with the social and political realities of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou

dynasties rather than the teachings left by ancient sages. Zhang Xuecheng of

the Qing Dynasty was the representative scholar to systematically expound

this proposition. This view challenged the sacred status of the classics of

Confucianism and marked a self-conscious and independent trend in Chinese

historiography.