The calligraphy theorist of Qing Dynasty who wrote The North-South School of Calligraphy and The North Monument and the South Posture was Ruan Yuan.
Ruan Yuan had a wide range of academic fields, including Confucian classics, philology, epigraphy, astronomy and almanac, history, geography and collating, especially in Confucian classics, and he had corresponding works.
When he was sixty years old, he was a friend. Praise Ruan Yuan's study of exegetics, collation, catalogue, laws and regulations, history, epigraphy, skills and numbers, articles, nature and anecdotes, saying that "whoever does this, he has consolidated the whole of Han and Song Dynasties, expanded the towers of heaven and man, and lost the distinction between flashiness and reality, and the total talent will return".
Ruan Yuan is a representative of the late Ganjia school? It is also considered by some scholars as one of the main representatives of Yangzhou School formed in the late Qing Dynasty, and it is defined as a school in which Sinology reached its peak and began to decline. In a higher sense, the significance of Ruan Yuan's academic thought system not only marked the decline of Sinology in Qing Dynasty, but also became the turning point of the leap from traditional scholarship to modern scholarship. ?
Ruan Yuan is extremely disgusted with those who advocate learning from the West. He thinks that China is the most developed in science and culture. Although he acknowledges the academic achievements of the West, he also thinks that western scientific and technological production has existed since ancient China. He even thinks that the advanced implements of westerners are the products of copying China's achievements. Ruan Yuan denied the Western method and denied the westerners' revision of some scientific viewpoints. His attitude is regarded as "a pedantic view behind the times".