Qian Mu's masterful book, Zhongguo jin sanbainian xueshushi (A History of Chinese Scholarship in the Past Three Centuries), has been the source of significant debate since its publication. This paper presents some supplementary materials and offers a reevaluation of his criticism of the Changzhou School's Gongyang studies. This study makes a deeper examination of this particular issue, while respecting Qian Mu's value system, and focuses on a discussion of this school's origins and scholarly strategy. On the basis of Qian Mu's original thesis, some corrections are proposed. Although Zhang Taiyan, Liang Qichao, Liu Shipei, and Qian Mu have all discussed the origins of this school, it is possible to further extend their discussion and also to make a comparison of their views. This paper presents a broad range of materials for the purposes of contextualizing the four scholars' theories and of shedding light on the origins of the Changzhou School. It then examines the background of this school and the ways in which it was affected by the classics teaching of the Hui family of Suzhou. The Han School scholars criticized the Song School scholars for the latter's close association with the practice of the eight-legged essay, underscoring the hackneyed and restrictive aspects of this writing form. The Song School scholars, on their part, chided the Han School scholars for their overlooking the fact that the eight-legged essay could serve as a bridge to the great tradition of the Cheng-Zhu scholarship. Although the Changzhou scholars were influenced by the Han School, they were unable to detach themselves from the eight-legged essay. They took a middle position. They would not slight the eight-legged essay, which was the prescribed form for composing the examination papers. Yet in their own scholarly pursuits they emulated the idea of "subtle words with profound implications" from the Western Han scholarship so as to engage the Song School scholars in a "hermeneutic" dialogue. Qian Mu clearly favored the Song School and he himself was a product of the larger academic environment of the early Republican era. He overemphasized the influence of the Hui family-and hence the Han School-in the development of the Changzhou School and overlooked the Song School undercurrents in the Changzhou School.