In the past few decades, Dr. Benjamin Schwart's theory of "in search of wealth and power" not only dominated the study of Yen Fu but also greatly influenced the interpretation of the entire modern Chinese intellectual history. Schwartz proposed that the main concerm of Yen Fu was the search for wealth and power for a battered China, and his scholarship and thought, including his translation, was, naturally, dominated by this theme. My essay, however, proposes that Yen Fu's central concern was not wealth and power. While greatly influenced by Confucianism and traditional world-view and mode of thinking, Yen Fu's life-long pursuit is Tao-- the universal, uniting, and highest "way" of the world. Witnessing the challenge that China confronted during the great encounter of China and modern West, Yen Fu spent his whole life in search of a way to unite the most valued underlying principles of Chinese and Western civilizations, so as to figure out what is the best for China and mankind. This great project is carried out mainly through the introduction and reinterpretation of selected masterpieces of both the West and China. The present essay is the first one of a series of studies on Yen Fu, showing that "the loss of the subjectivity of Yen Fu" is the major problem of the research in the last sixty years. As a result, the deep-rooted "Chineseness" of Yen Fu, as well as his contemporaries, was greatly neglected. The main body of this essay is a careful analysis of Yen Fu's mode of learning and thinking, together with his central beliefs and tenets in his early years. Through this study we can not only grasp Yen Fu's central concern but also a better understading of modern Chinese intellectual history.