Abstract: The transformation of knowledge in modern China has emerged as a critical topic in recent scholarship. To explore China’s turn to modern knowledge, it is absolutely necessary to understand the changes occurring within China itself, as well as how modern Western scientific-style knowledge was constructed in China. The scholarship of the Qing period was a key transitional point, which is seen in the nature and recognition of scholarship as represented by important early modern reconsiderations of traditional scholarship. This article focuses on the important late Qing scholar Gong Zizhen, analyzing how he traced Zhang Xuecheng’s historical view of ?? bibliographies and schools?? back to the “Yiwen zhi” of the Hanshu, distinguishing the “Six Classics” and the “Six Arts” in order to systematize the millennia of the classical learning tradition by establishing a historical view of this tradition. Gong further built a knowledge system based on the Six Arts, outlining the professionalization and specialization of the learning of the Six Arts based on the new areas of expert knowledge that had emerged since the eighteenth century. In thisway, we can not only explain how traditional classical learning was expressed in various classifications but also reveal the preliminary knowledge construction of traditional scholarship by Qing Confucians.