The influence of Tongcheng School lasted for more than 200 years until the early years of the Republic of China. Fang Bao is the founder of Tongcheng School, and Yao Nai is the master of Tongcheng School. They are all from Tongcheng, Anhui. At that time, there was a saying that "the world is in Tongcheng", so they were called Tongcheng School. Fang Bao is a master of stereotyped writing and the first person to advocate "righteous law". "Righteousness" is the mind, not the level: "Fa" is the pursuit of elegance and cleanliness. In fact, these "laws" are all derived from the metrical introduction of eight-part essay.
Fang Bao's paper also talks about "explaining Tao"; He studied in Xincheng and Zhu Zhixue, but he didn't go deep. Fang Bao is too bound by eight-part essay. What he learned was only a part of Historical Records, Europe, Zeng and Gui, but it was neat but not vigorous and lacked charm. These are all schools adopted by Yao Nai. Although it is also vigorous, it can be "circuitous and memorable", which is his new realm. His teacher Liu Dakui pointed out that attention should be paid to syllables when writing. Syllables are signs of arrogance, so we can start with words.
Yao Nai got this inspiration, and then gained the charm of cotton from the hardness of this syllable. His writing style is really the so-called "feminine beauty". He advocated reading aloud the most and attached great importance to function words, which is the same reason, but this is obviously a tone sandhi of stereotyped writing. Liu is the vice list of Yongzheng, and Yao is a scholar of Qianlong. Both of them are diligent in writing eight-part essays. At that time, sinologists advocated textual research, which inevitably caused cumbersome problems. Therefore, Yao Nai advocated the combination of righteousness, reason, examination and ci, but ignored the "rough" Confucianism.
However, his meaning is not deep, and there are many mistakes in his textual research. All he has is the skills of writing and chapters. Fang Bao commented that Gui Youguang's prose was "organized", but "meaningful words" were too few. Zeng Guofan's comments on Yao Nai also said the same thing. In fact, Tongcheng School is the same. Those who attack Tongcheng school say that they are empty and superficial, that their scope is too narrow, and that they are all good; But their organizational skills and romantic skills are also indelible.