Besides citing passages from Daoist classics like Zhuangzi and Huainanzi, the Wenzi also cites others like the Yijing, Mengzi, Lüshi Chunqiu, and Xiao Jing.
For instance, he is the first scholar to render the Babylonian epic Enûma Elish into Chinese, after learning the Akkadian language from Jean Bottéro while he was a visiting scholar in Paris (see his work Jindong kaipi shishi 近東開闢史詩 "Creation Epic of the Near East"), and the first one to make a comparative study of the oracle bone script and the Indus script (see his essay Tan Yindu Hegu tuxing wenzi 談印度河谷圖形文字 "On the Indus Valley Pictorial Characters").