This view was accepted by his students Fu Sinian and especially Gu Jiegang, who further advanced "our traditional knowledge of Chinese antiquity was built up in successive strata, but in an order exactly the reverse of the actual occurrence.
In a more specific way, the Doubting Antiquity School was represented by Gushibian 古史辨 (Debates on Ancient History), the scholarly movement led by Gu Jiegang, centered on the magazine of the same name.
It is these conjectures that gained the greatest popular interest in the non-academic media, such as: Nevertheless, the Doubting Antiquity School's more important legacy was the critical approach to sources they pioneered.
Joseph Needham wrote in 1954 that many scholars doubted that classic texts such as Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian contained accurate information about such distant history, including the thirty kings of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–c.
Needham writes that this remarkable archaeological find proves that Sima Qian "did have fairly reliable materials at his disposal—a fact which underlines once more the deep historical-mindedness of the Chinese.
For instance, manuscripts discovered in tombs have proved the authenticity of several texts long thought to be later forgeries, including the Wenzi, the Kongzi Jiayu, the Heguanzi, parts of the Yi Zhou Shu, and many others.
The major opposition included Chu Coching, Liu Yizheng, Liang Qichao, Wang Guowei, Chen Yinque, and Miao Fenglin.
[8] Zhang Guoan of Beijing Normal University believes the existence of Doubting Antiquity School was a reflection of the political climate of rising Chinese nationalism at the time.
In 1929, the sixth excavation of Yin Ruins in Anyang discovered a piece of painted pottery, which further aroused the thinking and discussion of the relationship between Yangshao and Xiaotun.