Doubts about Wei Guan's Idea of "Banning a Hundred School of Thoughts and their Exponents"

The majority of scholars assumes Wei Guan instead of Dong Zhongshu to be the first person to put forward the concept of "banning a hundred schools of thoughts." The author of the present article thinks that the idea of Wei Guan meant the banning of a hundred schools of thought and their exponents,but only banning of the two schools of the Debaters and Legalists.He did not mean to ban the various schools in the later sense as concerning all those during the period from Pre-Qin times to the early years of the Han Dynasty.In fact,the first to propose such ideas were Li Si and the first emperor of Qin Dynasty;however,the schools of thoughts and their exponents they meant to ban did not include legalists but the Confucianists.