Burning of books and burying of scholars in the context of "Book burning"

The Book of Documents (Chinese: 書經; pinyin: Shūjīng; Wade–Giles: Shu King) or the Classic of History, is one of the Five Classics of ancient Chinese literature. It is a collection of rhetorical prose attributed to figures of ancient China, and served as the foundation of Chinese political philosophy for over two millennia.

The Book of Documents was the subject of one of China's oldest literary controversies, between proponents of different versions of the text. A version was preserved from Qin Shi Huang's burning of books and burying of scholars by scholar Fu Sheng, in 29 chapters (piān 篇). This group of texts were referred to as "Modern Texts" (or "Current Script"; jīnwén 今文), because they were written with the script in use at the beginning of the Western Han dynasty.

The Hundred Schools of Thought (Chinese: 諸子百家) were philosophies and schools that flourished during the late Spring and Autumn period and Warring States period (c. 500 – 221 BC). The term was not used to describe these different philosophies until Confucianism, Mohism, and Legalism were created. The era in which they flourished was one of turbulence in China, fraught with chaos and mass militarization, but where Chinese philosophy was developed and patronized by competing bureaucracies. This phenomenon has been called the Contention of a Hundred Schools of Thought.

The philosophies that emerged during this period have profoundly influenced East Asian culture and societies. The intellectual landscape of this era was characterized by itinerant scholars, who were often employed by various state rulers as advisers on the way of government, war, and diplomacy. Often, members and traditions of the same school had little in common other than the same influential figure that their beliefs were based on. This period ended with the rise of the imperial Qin dynasty and the subsequent burning of books and burying of scholars as part of an ideological suppression effort by Qin Shi Huang and Li Si.

Fu Sheng (Chinese: 伏勝; 268–178 BC), also known as Master Fu (伏生), was a Chinese philosopher and writer. He was a Confucian scholar of the Qin and Western Han dynasties of ancient China, famous for saving the Confucian classic Shangshu (Book of Documents) from the book burning of the First Emperor of Qin. Fu Sheng is depicted in the Wu Shuang Pu (無雙譜, Table of Peerless Heroes) by Jin Guliang.