 Be it the comparative or developmental approach, the contention is that Chinese thought experienced notable changes in the late imperial period, roughly from the late Ming through the mid Qing. While scholars argue over the genesis, content, nature, and significance of the new developments, most acknowledge and recognize the patterned fundamental shifts in intellectual trends and directions. Some of the interrelated traits of the intellectual redirection included the following: fungibility and syncretism in thinking that tended to mitigate the authority of received opinions; palpable impulse to reorder and manage the world, invoking the ideal of ordering the world through practical statecraft and statesmanship (jingshi); general aversion toward metaphysical speculation and moral introspection, and the corresponding interest in the pursuit of solid and practical learning (puxue and shixue), giving rise to utilitarian and instrumental notions of scholarship; valuing personal practical experience, academic, political, social and otherwise, such that one’s actions in the phenomenal and external worlds loomed large; historicization of the classics (jing) that had hitherto been revered as sources of timeless authority, rendering them into objects of scholarly scrutiny, thereby breeding in time the meticulous scholarship of evidential research and learning, which came to dominate the intellectual world in the so-called Qianjia period; preference for limpidity, clarity, and simplicity in writing style and language; and finally, new and broadening horizons of the meaning of community, as the literati’s place in state and society was redefined and reconceptualized. To be sure, these interlarded strains of thoughts were by no means new in the Chinese intellectual universe. Yet, from the late Ming on, there seemed to be an unmistakable convergence of the various traits that fostered conceptual commonalities and intellectual confluences out of a socio-intellectual environ that was nevertheless characterized by manifold sectarian affiliations and polemics. Various modes of learning and thinking cohered to forge a new orientation that seemed to give conscious life in the late imperial period an identifiable stamp and identity.