 Gu took special delight in suggesting that there was barbarian blood under the skin of Sage King Yu of the Xia dynasty, whose existence he doubted in any case.Gu, observes Schneider, thought that “if a periodically failing Chinese civilization was revived by infusions of barbarian blood or culture, then how could it be said that the subsequent product was Chinese?How could it be said that it was a continuous, coherent tradition?” Gu thus wanted to destroy at its root “the idea that from time immemorial there was a transcendent unchanging Chinese essence.” For Gu, Chinese history was not merely the history of Confucianism; the content of the Chinese identity was “always in a state of change”.