 Perhaps the most fertile period for those who worked at the periphery of the main lines of Neo-Confucianism was five or six decades that spanned the collapse of the Ming and the consolidation of the Qing dynasty, roughly 1640 to 1700. Although this was a time of instability in some parts of China, it nevertheless witnessed declining faith in longstanding political customs as well as budding movements in Confucian scholarship that paved the way for more dramatic departures from orthodoxy. One such movement was the rise of “evidential studies” (kaozheng xue 考證學), understood as approaches to scholarship that lean more heavily on areas of study like astronomy, geography, mathematics, and especially philology. A leading scholar of evidential studies was Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), who established a reputation not just as a precocious philologist but also as a creative political reformer (Angle 2002: 89–93; Brown 2011; Gu 2017). Another remarkably original and prolific philosopher was Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692), who reconceived all of Neo-Confucian metaphysics and moral psychology, working against the prevailing dualism of li and qi and developing an account of the virtues that made considerably more room for human desires and emotions (J. Liu 2010, 2018: 157–179, 265–284; Cheng 1991). A third was Huang Zongxi (1610–1695), who wrote comprehensive intellectual histories of the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties and offered some of the most radical political reforms ever put forward by a traditional Confucian thinker, contending that scholars and ministers be permitted to criticize their ruler openly and proposing that a variety of procedural requirements be imposed on the deliberation and decision-making of the emperor (SYXA; MRXA; MYDFL; de Bary 2011). All of these philosophers (and especially Huang) completed significant portions of their work in the early years of the Qing dynasty, but they were products of the distinctive intellectual and social circumstances witnessed at the end of the Ming, when Confucian thinkers started to consider political reforms in earnest and began to doubt a great deal of what had, for centuries, passed for obvious truths about the Confucian canon.