The Six Confucian Classics are The Book of Changes, The Book of History, The Book
of Songs, The Book of Rites, The Book of Music, and The Spring and Autumn Annals.
An important proposition put forward by scholars of late imperial China was
that those are all historical texts. According to these scholars, the Six Classics are
all concerned with the social and political realities of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou
dynasties rather than the teachings left by ancient sages. Zhang Xuecheng of
the Qing Dynasty was the representative scholar to systematically expound
this proposition. This view challenged the sacred status of the classics of
Confucianism and marked a self-conscious and independent trend in Chinese
historiography.