“Constructing Modern Knowledge in China, 1600-1949" is a topic of large scope and special significance. To explore colossal research project, I propose two basic approaches: First, to examine the differentiation of knowledge that was already occurring in traditional Chinese scholarship, including the rise of new fields and classifications of knowledge. Second, to explore the construction and practice of Western knowledge in China. Without the latter, it is impossible to grasp the overall development of Chinese modernity; without the former, it is impossible to understand how the system and nature of traditional scholarship clearly established the position of Chinese scholarship and opened up a dialog between China and the West. I have devoted my research to the internal dynamics and evolution of traditional Chinese scholarship and would like to address the fundamental question: Given the dynamics and evolution, was there a unity of intellectual system in traditional China? To do so, I have been studying the change of scholarship in early modern China and attempting to analyze how traditional Chinese scholarship could differentiate, specialize and maintain an open system. To examine the intellectual change in early modern China, I focus on classical knowledge-the prestigious location of both politics and culture in China for millennia. Previously historians had adopted many perspectives to study classical knowledge in early modern China. In this paper, I will investigate the evolution of the numbers of “Classics” and versions of the Confucian canon in order to shed new light on the history of classical knowledge and its cultural implication. Over the past two millennia, the numbers of “Classics” and versions of the Confucian canon changed in accord with contemporaneous political and intellectual contexts and intensified during the peak of evidential scholarship movement, roughly spanning from Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Daoguang reigns [1730-1850]. My research will not only discern the imperial orthodoxy from different version of classical knowledge but also show that classical knowledge could no longer be the sole academic authority in late Qing China. I would like to demonstrate that the discursive space craved out for classical knowledge in High Qing China was indeed more energized and active than we previously assumed. Moreover, the transformation of the classical knowledge in Qing China was not merely an internal evolution of classical knowledge itself but also an outcome of rapid change of academic disciplines as well. The multifarious and intensified change of the numbers of Classics and versions of the Confucian canon in the nineteenth century can be found in the new arrangement of twenty-one “Classics” by Duan Yucai (1735-1815), ten classics by Shen Tao (1792-1855), a different justification of twenty-one “Classics" by Liu Gongmian (1824-1883), and the new justification of orthodox version of the Confucian canon in "Six Classics" espoused by Gong Zizhen (1792-1841). As a result, the traditional classical knowledge had already significantly expanded and even shifted paradigmatically before the advent of the industrial West. The emergence of these new branches of specialized knowledge in the Confucian canon demonstrates the expansion and paradigmatic shift of classical knowledge during the nineteenth century. I shall call it the germination of modern specialization in China. This sort of differentiation within the traditional classical knowledge was an indispensible step toward the construction of modern knowledge in China. The academic prototype in modern China should be traced to the specialization of classical knowledge in the Qing dynasty.