Liang moved to Hunan province and began teach pupils of his own in 1897. There Liang began to think more deeply about the adoption of Western reform in China. He edited an anthology of Wei Yuan’s work, read Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and began teaching a revolutionary curriculum combining Western thought with Chinese classics. Studying the West, Liang came to think that the West’s recent superiority over China lay in its scientific and philosophical foundations.

Sir Francis Bacon