 The Qin had brought a sudden end to the institutions that generated the sophisticated classical period of Chinese philosophy. At first, their ideologies, “Legalist” and Huang-Lao thought, dominated an impoverished intellectual life. When the Han Dynasty began trying to reconstruct China’s classical history , its historians coined the term “Daoism,” probably thinking of Huang-Lao content. However, they implicitly fixed its reference by pointing to Laozi and Zhuangzi as exemplars. So an operative definition of philosophical Daoism could be “what  Laozi  and  Zhuangzi  taught” leaving details to interpretation. Other early Han writers using their own interpretations, cribbed and copied from the original texts but, under Huang-Lao influence, exhibited little further philosophical reflection. The products of this “recovery” have also come to be thought of as Daoist texts and include the Huinanzi (around 140 BCE) and the Liezi (third Century AD) and the Yijing. The operative definition if we included these texts would, of course, change. 