During his lifetime and even after his death, Gu Hongming was consistently labeled as an eccentric figure, with titles such as “the eccentric Confucian”, “the oddball” and “the maverick genius”. In the writings of literati, Gu was always depicted as follows: “He wore a dark red old-style mandarin jacket and a worn-out long gown,  both gleaming with an oily sheen  from wear and tear, the sleeves dotted  with stains of snot and saliva. On his head sat a flat-topped skullcap with a red knot, from the back of which hung a thin, rarely combed queue.  On his gaunt  face, underneath a yellow, disheveled mustache  was a mouth  fluent in  seven or eight languages and notoriously fond of challenging or provoking  others”. Literary descriptions of him  were often seen in newspapers, such as: “Gu Hongming is an old man so eccentric that he borders on the absurd and insane—he is like an enigmatic riddle or a metaphor brimming with Zen wisdom”. Many believed that Gu Hongming’s extremely bizarre  and seemingly irrational behavior, along with his capricious and random expressions, vividly embodied abstract Confucian ethics as a straightforward and direct attitude toward life, as if he were a living specimen of an ancient Confucian scholar navigating  modern society.