Abstract: There were two themes in the argument about the Old Text Chapters of the Shangshu ( Book of Documents) among Qing Confucian scholars. The first approach determined whether it was genuine or fake, while the second approach wanted to exclude or preserve it from the canon. Modern scholars relying on philology and history have addressed whether it was genuine. While Qing Confucian scholars eschewed the simple true-or-false dichotomy because it could not consider the value of Old Text Chapters of the Shangshu for Confucianism. Because there was a layer of argumentation above the level of textual study, Qing scholars generally regarded the Old Text Chapters of the Shangshu as excellent. So that how to deal with textual study and principle——excluding it based authenticity or preserving it for its correctness——became an ongoing controversy to them. Since the principles expressed in the text has been excluded from the modern scholarship, if we can put aside the traceability of modern history and philology and turn it into the dilemma of exclusion or preservation of Old Text Chapters of the Shangshu which stems from the Qing scholars’insistence of the principles，then the significance of the Han learning for Qing intellectual history，which was reflected in the continuous controversy，would be that it was not the source of modern scholarship，but a big break between Han Learning and modern scholarship．