Abstract: Zhang Xuecheng focuses on “the forest of the works of the world”. He took the Warring States period as the node to separate the entire academic world as the “source of three generations of prosperity” and the “flow of after the three generations”. He divided them into dual realms, “on the way” and “off the way”. Besides, he is a deeply self-proclaimed “school of literature and history”, aimed at analyzing the necessity and viable path to the “source” of “on the way” in later academics’s “out of the way”. Therefore, constitute the three characteristics of Zhang Xuecheng’s study on academic history. That is to say, he faced the whole academic world rather than a specific academic category; secondely focused on the “source” and “flow” of the dual judgment rather than the outline of the long-range academic history, and he determined to reform the academic rather than only satisfied with the interpretation. These characteristics make him go beyond the general sense of academic history writing