Abstract Amidst the pedagogical anxieties of the late Qing and Republican China, Tong Xiegeng’s yizhi puzzle (1862) emerged as a creative response to a rigid educational system that privileged rote memorization and dismissed play. This article argues that the puzzle and its accompanying books represent a sophisticated, bottom-up attempt to redefine traditional Chinese education by transforming the classical texts into an interactive, child-centered experience. Through an innovative 15-piece puzzle and a series of books, Tong created a multimodal “edutainment” ecosystem. The study highlights the puzzle’s core pedagogical method: a synergy of text and image ( tuwen jiehe ) that shifted the child from a passive recipient of memorized text into an active constructor of meaning. Learning was achieved through hands-on, embodied play, internalizing classical knowledge rather than merely reciting it. By challenging the traditional dismissal of play ( xi wuyi ), Tong’s work prefigured a modern, child-centered pedagogy and stands as a powerful example of private cultural synthesis as a form of educational reform.
Yu Fu (Mon,) studied this question.