In this presentation, I explore how the "Yiwen zhi" of the Hanshu, the earliest library catalog in China, defended Confucian authority over the Classics by proposing a theory that all masters (zhuzi) were descendants of ancient royal officials. While previous scholarship has argued that it was not until the late Western Han that Rujia, as a school of thought, became the state ideology, insufficient attention has been given to why the Classics, once shared cultural heritages in the pre­Han period, became exclusively Confucian propriety in the imperial history of China. My paper aims to address this gap.