Abstract: Wen Qiao came from a gentry clan. Handsome and intelligent, filial and fraternal, learned, firm, and upright, he ranked among the first-rate famous scholars of the Western Jin. Later, however, because he mishandled matters concerning his deceased mother and fell short in filial conduct, he was downgraded to a low grade by the zhongzheng Kong Yu, and his reputation declined accordingly, giving rise to rumors that he was a second-rate figure. Liu Yiqing and other writers of anecdotal fiction, owing to differences in their value commitments and their taste for the strange and curious, deliberately recorded many of Wen Qiao's misdeeds. This is logically consistent with the second-rate assessment in their tales, but the authenticity of these records is doubtful. When the Tang dynasty recompiled the Book of Jin, because its main historical source was the old Jin histories and because Wen Qiao's actions conformed to the interests of the ruling class, the court historians deliberately shaped him into a model of a famous minister. Later writers either criticized Wen Qiao, from the standpoint of filial piety, for failing in his duties as a son, or praised his achievements from the perspective of loyalty and righteousness; their angles of evaluation differed and their modes of expression were varied. Ultimately, this controversy arose from the conflict in practice between the ethical categories of loyalty and filial piety.