Yu Yue hailed from Deqing, Zhejiang, and later moved to Renhe, now a subdistrict of Hangzhou. In 1850, Yu passed the imperial examination as metropolitan graduate, and was appointed junior compiler in the Hanlin Academy. He then served successively in a variety of academic posts in the imperial bureaucracy, and was later promoted to educational instructor of Henan, not long before his resigning from this position and withdrawing to Suzhou, where he became a private teacher and devoted himself full-time to classical studies. From 1868 on, he was director of the Gujing Academy, which he headed for more than 30 years. Yu's analyses of the classics are widely admired for their philological acumen, and he has had a large influence on both Chinese and foreign students of the Chinese classics, particularly in Japan.
Notable thoughts
Yu's philosophy was inclined to the teachings of Wang Niansun and Wang Yinzhi, who interpreted Confucian classics in a practical way. In the 1860s, Yu was intimately involved in restoring the Gujing Academy, a sishu established by Ruan Yuan in 1800 yet destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. As opposed to the then dominant goal of education—namely education as pathway towards an official career—Yu aimed to provide a non-political environment for classics studies and stressed philology and historical research during his teaching, an intellectual tradition initiated by Gu Yanwu and Dai Zhen. Yu allowed considerable freedom in readings of texts, which to a great extent stimulated Zhang Taiyan's creative thinking and developments to classical writings. He believed that the most important techniques in rendering the classics readable for contemporary readers were restoring original word and sentence orders, establishing the proper senses of individual words, and most importantly being more aware of the use of phonetic loan words. Yu believed that many of the difficulties encountered in reading the classics were due to a failure to recognize the use of loan characters—an often quite challenging task, requiring an intimate knowledge of ancient Chinese phonology—and in his commentaries, he often raises the possibility of this phenomenon to suggest alternate readings. Yu maintained links with both the traditional philological school and scholars of new thoughts—to name a few, Song Xiangfeng and Zhuang Cunyu from Changzhou, who explored political messages carried in classics including the Gongyang Commentary and the Spring and Autumn Annals. He also exchanged ideas with late-Qing reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. Liang referred to Yu as one of the few orthodox scholars that survived the academic downfall during this period, yet Yu was actually not very much stuck into the so-called orthodox Confucianism: unlike Kang Youwei's speculative method in interpreting the Analects, Yu supported a more textual and factual approach; furthermore, instead of focusing merely on Confucian thoughts, Yu tended to put more emphasis on the Hundred Schools of Thought, which decentered the Confucian hegemony in the pre-Qin period.
Major works
Qunqing Pingyi — analysis and commentaries on Confucian classics, in which Yu followed the scholarly approach of Wang Yinzhi's work Jingyi Shuwen.
Zhuzi Pingyi — a collection of works of the pre-Qin masters and philosophers. It includes Yu's analysis and commentaries to the Daoist writings Baopuzi and Huainanzi, the legalist classics Hanfeizi and Gongsun Longzi, as well as to the histories Songshiyi and Yizhoushu.
Gushu Yiyi Juli — scholarly work on 88 systematic errors that were commonly seen in the interpretation of classical texts as a consequence of a different understanding of grammar or words. Point-by-point analyses to these errors were given by Yu. The book received great attention when it was published.
The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants — a high-class version of the popular romance Sanxia Wuyi, revised by Yu under the standards of written literature of his time. The revision was published in 1889.
Chunzaitang Quanshu, an eight-volume collection of Yu's works, which also compiled other notable publications of Yu, including:
