Meng Wentong (1894-1968), born in Yanting County, Sichuan Province, and graduated from Sichuan School of Ancient Learning, Sichuan. He learnt from Liao Ping, a master of modern Chinese classics, and Liu Shipei, a master of traditional Chinese classics. Academically influenced by Liao Ping, Meng, after he became famous, also learnt from Ouyang Jingwu for history. Benefiting from many renowned teachers, Meng, became a master of Chinese culture that includes Chinese classics, official history, works of ancient philosophers, other authors, Buddhism, Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Confucian school of idealist philosophy of the Song and Ming dynasties. This is quite rare in the 20th century. Since the 1920s, Mr. Meng had taught at Chengdu University, Chengdu Normal University, Chengdu School of Chinese Classics, Central University, Henan University, Peking University, Hebei Normal University of Women, Sichuan University and West China Union University. In the 40's he was the director of Sichuan Provincial Library. After 1949, while continuing to serve as a professor of history at Sichuan University, he also served as a researcher and an academic committee member at the First Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Meng was a successor of modern "Shu Studies", his academic style, known for comprehensiveness and inclusiveness, was different from the "New History" dominant in the academic world in 1920s and 1930s. In 1927, Mr. Meng earned his fame with the book An Insight into Ancient History and later he completed the book Tracing the Source of Chinese Classics, in which he proposed the "theory of three lines" of the ancient Chinese nation. Both of his conclusions and methods had produced far-reaching and extensive influences. In his long article titled The Expansion of Farm Production and the Evolution of Tax Contributions and Academic Thought in Ancient China, he tried to find out the law of historical evolution in the interaction between economic foundations and superstructures, and that article was a masterpiece illustrating the argument of "taking history as a mirror". In his later years, Mr. Meng devoted himself to the study of the history of nationality and local history, especially in the last four years of his life, he wrote a book entitled "Studies on the History of Vietnam", wherein he criticized some of the odd theories by Vietnam historians who coveted Chinese territory, marking a new level of study in ancient history of nationalities. In addition to the aforementioned works, Mr. Meng wrote more than dozens of professional books and papers including Studies on Ancient Places, Studies on Ancient Nationalities, Five Arguments on Confucianism, Ten Compiled Books on Taoism, A Discussion on Ancient Sichuan History, Researches on Pre-Qin Ethnic Minorities. Bashu Publishing House has published six volumes of Collected Works of Meng Wentong since 1986.