History of Technology 29 - Technology in China

HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY

HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY

Editor

Ian Inkster

INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH

Senate House, University of London, London WC1E 7HU

EDITORIAL BOARD

Professor Hans-Joachim BraunUniversitat der Bundeswehr HamburgHolstenhofweg 8522039 HamburgGermany

Professor R. A. BuchananSchool of Social SciencesUniversity of BathClaverton DownBath BA 7AYEngland

Professor H. Floris CohenRaiffeisenlaan 103571 TD UtrechtThe Netherlands

Professor Mark ElvinResearch School of Pacific and AsianStudiesAustralian National UniversityCanberra, ACT 0200Australia

Dr Anna GuagniniDipartimento di FilosofiaUniversita di BolognaVia Zamboni 3840126 BolognaItaly

Dr Irfan HabibDepartment of HistoryAligarh Muslim UniversityAligarh (U.P.) 202001India

Dr Richard HillsStandford Cottage47 Old RoadMottram-in-LongendaleCheshire SKI4 6LWEngland

Dr Graham Hollister-ShortImperial CollegeSherfield BuildingLondon SW7 2AZEngland

Dr A. G. KellerDepartment of HistoryUniversity of LeicesterUniversity RoadLeicester LEI 7RHEngland

Dr Jerry C.-Y. LiuDepartment of International AffairsWenzao Ursuline College of Languages900 Mintsu 1st RoadKaohsiung 807Taiwan

Professor Simon SchafferDepartment of History and Philosophyof ScienceUniversity of CambridgeFree School LaneCambridge CB2 3RHEngland

History ofTechnology

Volume Twenty-nine, 2009

Edited byIan Inkster

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Contents

Editorial viiThe Contributors xiNotes for Contributors xv

Special Issue: Chinese Technological History:The Great Divergence 1Edited by Jerry Liu and Kent Deng

JERRY LIU AND KENT DENGIntroduction 3

PATRICK K. O'BRIENThe Needham Question Updated: A Historiographical Surveyand Elaboration 7

JERRY C.-Y. LIUCultural Logics for the Regime of Useful Knowledge during theMing and Early-Qing China c. 1400-1700 29

KENT DENGMovers and Shakers of Knowledge in China during theMing-Qing Period 57

HARRIET T. ZURNDORFERChina and Science on the Eve of the 'Great Divergence'1600—1800: A Review of Recent Revisionist Scholarship inWestern Languages 81

Special Issue: The Mindful HandEdited by Lissa Roberts and Ian Inkster 103

LISSA ROBERTSIntroduction: Transcending Boundaries: Mindful Hands in theHistory of Technology 105

History of Technology, Volume Twenty-nine, 2009

vi Contents

ALETTE FLEISCHER

Into the Light: Crystals and the Recreation of Nature inSeventeenth-Century Garden Caves and Cabinets 113

CHANDRA MUKERJI

The Mindful Hands of Peasants: Construction of an Eight-LockStaircase at Fonseranes, 1678-79 141

SIMON WERRETT

Enlightenment in Russian Hands: The Inventions and Identityof Ivan Petrovich Kulibin in Eighteenth-Century St Petersburg 161

LISSA ROBERTS

The Mindful Hand Goes to Japan: Dutch-Japanese Trade in theSecond Half of the Eighteenth Century 181

IAN INKSTER

The West Had Science and the Rest Had Not? The Queries of theMindful Hand 205

Contents of Former Volumes 213

Editorial

This volume consists of two special issues. The first collection addressesproblems relating to technological development in Imperial China. Thecommon question from the Western point of view is of the sort: Why didChina lose its early leadership of productive technologies to Europe duringthe early modern period? Answers to this seemingly clear enquiry varyfrom general cultural inwardness to the interferences of imperialgovernance. This collection surveys such theories but alters the issue byraising the notion that Chinese technologies did not so much fail as movealong a path different from that of Europe. It is Europe that represents theanomaly. Our second collection on the Mindful Hand, also shifts commonground by querying and modifying accepted views of the links betweenknowledge and technique in early modern European development.Scientific or related knowledge was not brought to technique as a socio-cultural gift from an educated elite to the working man. Rather, educatedgents, practitioners, instrument makers, craftsfolk and technicians of allkinds intermingled both socially and in terms of their recognition oftechnical problems as well as in the assemblage of the mental, commercialand cognitive resources required to pursue innovative productionprojects. The technical hand was mindful of its knowledge context.

It might well be that, in most cases, two Special Issues in one academicvolume spells some confusion. For the reader, the question might be, Whythese subjects? For the editor, which collection should go first? In thepresent case, however, there was no real quandary for the editor, andhopefully little real mystery for readers. The order of the two issues fell intoplace quite naturally.

A great swathe of the literature on the so-called 'failure' of China toadvance further its earlier lead over the rest of the world centres upon linksbetween governance, knowledge and technique. The famous NeedhamParadox, posing the query as to why China should fall behind intechnologies when it had possessed such a lead for such a time, is oftenrequired to yield to arguments about the inability of the Chinese system ofgovernance to foster a culture that could support or induce a progressiverelationship between the great Empire's knowledge-mongers and itshydraulic-agrarian systems of production. This argument from govern-ance first emerged clearly in the European Enlightenment and petrifiedinto an orthodoxy on China and the East; one which was visibly designedto define the advantages of the West. Thus, in 1880, Mons Dabry deThiersant wrote:

'The central government, without money, and we might say, without the


Editorial

power of repression, is at infinite pains to retain the obedience of its fourhundred millions of subjects, who lay on its shoulders the blame of the disastersthey have brought upon themselves. Moreover, it has to reckon with theirsuperstitions and their time-honoured prejudices. In the provinces thegovernors exhaust every contrivance in order to procure the funds whichare required of them every instant from Peking for the general needs of theState: whence come the traffic of offices, the sale of justice, the arbitrary raisingof the customs (of which the collectors absorb the profits), and consequentlygeneral discontent, which is fostered by the ceaseless intrigues of secretsocieties, as well as by the words ands writings of the literary men - thatfrivolous, ignorant and vain class which takes egotism to be patriotism, andonly thinks of upsetting everything, instead of using its intelligence andinfluence for the good of the country. As to the common folk in general, givenover to its instincts . . . It trembles as it thinks of the calamities which are instore for it in the future.'1

A form of governance that could support courts, hydraulics and fireworks,inefficient and corrupt and, essentially, poor, could not possibly mount anysort of an industrial revolution.

Of course, as the collection edited by Liu and Deng shows clearly, thisperspective has been much elaborated, altered by finer measurements anddefinitions, softened by theories of hydraulic society or Westernimperialism. Yet this strain of thinking persists. A strong element thatremains fairly untarnished is that in China, for whatever precise reasons,the distance between hand-workers and mind-workers was at all timesconsiderable, and possibly even increasing from the seventeenth oreighteenth centuries. Thus merchant culture seems not to have functionedin the manner depicted by the Annales school for Europe - rich,challenging, querulous, but trading off dollops of tax in exchange forequally measurable quantities of power. In China there may well haveexisted many rich merchants promoting novel commercial institutions andpushing more aggressive attitudes. But they did not generate a culture ofstreet query, of shoptalk, of artizanry in which the learned could speak alanguage similar to that of technicians, in which social distinctions couldbe submerged inside micro-environs of both discussion and purchase.Herein may lie something salient within the enlightenment tradition aschallenged by the contributors to the Liu and Deng collection.

On this level the contrast with the West seems clear. FollowingHabermas, in their study of the cultural history of technological progress,Mikael Hard and Andrew Jamison refine an implicit position of the role ofthe Euro-state, where the foremost industrializing nations emergedamongst relatively liberal states that nurtured the growth of civil placesof competitive intellectual endeavour that were by no means confined to aparticular stratum of society. Later Western or Eastern followers did notattain such civil luxuries and depended on political hybridity, culturalprotectionism in the case of Japan, Indian traditionalism combined witheconomic planning, centralized Marxism in the case of China, as means oftechnological advancement.2 Certainly, in late developers there is goodevidence that large, civil engineering projects, such as the arsenals at


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Editorial

Jiangnan or Yokosuka, were designed to deliberately foster close relationsbetween existing handicrafts and artisanal skills and introduced machineryand formalized knowledge, and Meng Yue has referred to 'hybrid science'in just this regard.3

Thus the arguments and style of our Mindful Hand collection are by nomeans inevitably confined to Europe; apart from the Japanese compara-tive instance suggested by Lissa Roberts, we might here at least suggestthat if a key to European industrial capitalism lies in sites of mindful-handedness, then either a large scale comparative exercise or a globalanalysis might focus on the socio-cultural ingredients of such 'liberal'hybridity. Did the efficacious workings of the mindful hand in Europedepend on a prior commercialization of urban living that had forced itsway into the many interstices of proximate living? Did the strong artisantraditions in metal-working sit at the heart of technological change justbecause they were not so far distant (in every sense) from the intellectualpuzzles of much wealthier and leisured folk? Of course, for historians theproblem (and the orientalist danger) lies in transferring questions such asthese from a broadly euro-context into one that might address, forinstance, interpretations of Chinese economy and society. Juxtaposing twoexcellent essay collections cannot in itself satisfy or resolve such problems.But it is hoped that historians of technology will now further appreciate thenature of the task.

Notes1. Claude Philibert Dabry de Thiersant, author and traveller, has several books to his

name on the indigenous peoples of South America, but also on China and the Far East,including from 1850s-1880s, Islam and Catholicism in China, its military capabilities andalliances, medicine and so on. See Thiersant, Le Mahometisme en Chine et dans le TurkestanOriental, (2 vols. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1878). The passage above is quoted in the weeklynewspaper Japan Weekly Mail, 21 August 1880, p.1075.

2. Hard, Mikael and Andrew Jamison, Hubris and Hybrids: A Cultural History of Technologyand Science (London and New York, 2005); See also Hard and Jamison, The IntellectualAppropriation of Technology: discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939, (Cambridge Mass.: 1998).

3. Hashimoto T., 'Introducing a French Technological System: The Origins and EarlyHistory of the Yokosuka Dockyard,' East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine, 1999, 16: 53-72; Yue Meng, 'Hybrid Science versus Modernity: The Practice of the Jiangnan Arsenal1864-1897', EASTM, 1999, 16: 13-52.


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The Contributors

Kent G. DengReaderLSEHoughton StreetLondon WG2A 2AEUnited KingdomEmail: [email protected]

Alette Fleischer, GPhilCentre for Science, Technology andPolicy StudiesUniversity of TwentePost Box 2177500 AE EnschedeThe NetherlandsEmail: [email protected]

Jerry C.-Y. LiuAssociate ProfessorDepartment of International AffairsWenzao Ursuline College ofLanguages900 Mintsu 1st RoadKaohsiung 807TaiwanEmail: [email protected]

Chandra MukerjiDistinguished Professor ofCommunication and ScienceStudiesDepartment of Communication0503University of California, San Diego9500 Gilman DriveLa Jolla, CAUnited States of AmericaEmail: [email protected]

Patrick K. O'BrienProfessor of Global EconomicHistoryLSEHoughton StreetLondon WC2A 2AEUnited KingdomEmail: [email protected]

Lissa RobertsProfessor of Long Term Develop-ment of Science and TechnologyCentre for Science, Technology andPolicy StudiesUniversity of TwentePost Box 2177500 AE EnschedeThe NetherlandsEmail: [email protected]

Simon WerrettAssistant ProfessorHistory Department, University ofWashington315 Smith HallBox 353560Seattle, WA 98195-3560United States of AmericaEmail: [email protected]

Dr Harriet ZurndorferSenior Research ScholarDepartment of ChinesePB 9515 Faculty of HumanitiesLeiden University2300 RA LeidenThe NetherlandsEmail: [email protected]



Notes for Contributors

Contributions are welcome and should be sent to the editor. They areconsidered on the understanding that they are previously unpublished inEnglish and are not on offer to another journal. Papers in French andGerman will be considered for publication but an English summary will berequired. The editor will also consider publishing English translations ofpapers already published in languages other than English. Include anabstract of 150-200 words.

Authors who have passages originally in Cyrillic or oriental scriptsshould indicate the system of transliteration they have used. Be clear andconsistent.

All papers should be rigorously documented, with references to primaryand secondary sources typed separately from the text, double-line spacedand numbered consecutively. Cite as follows for:

BOOKS

1. David Gooding, Experiment and the Making of Meaning: Human Agency inScientific Observation and Experiment (Dordrecht, 1990), 54-5.

Only name the publisher for a good reason.

Reference to a previous note:

3. Gooding, op. cit. (1) , 43.

Titles of standard works may be cited by abbreviation: DNB, DBB, etc.

THESES

Cite University Microfilm order number or at least Dissertation Abstractnumber.

ARTICLES

13. Andrew Nahum, 'The Rotary Aero Engine', Hist. Tech., 1986, 11: 125-66,esp. 139.

Please note the following guidelines for the submission and presentation ofall contributions:

1. Type your manuscript on good-quality paper, on one side only anddouble-line spaced throughout. The text, including all endnotes,


xiv Notes for Contributors

references and indented block quotes, should be in one typesize (ifpossible, 12 pt).

2. In the first instance, submit two copies only. Once the text has beenagreed, then you need to submit three copies of the final version, onefor the editor and two for the publishers. You should, of course, retaina copy for yourself.

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Special Issue: ChineseTechnological History:The Great Divergence

EDITED BY JERRY LIU AND KENT DENG


Introduction

JERRY LIU AND KENT DENG

PATTERNS OF USEFUL AND RELIABLE KNOWLEDGE IN PREMODERN CHINA

In this special issue, we offer four articles on patterns of useful and reliableknowledge in premodern China. They are the fruits of the conferenceorganized by the Global Economic History Network (GEHN) in Taiwan2006, which concentrated on historical relations between regimes of usefuland reliable knowledge (URK for short), technological change andmaterial/industrial progress in world history. Theories and evidences onthe connectivities of URK across great systems, and different methods inanalysing, contrasting and comparing the material advancement amongcivilizations are newly introduced to explain patterns of divergence.4

The reason why we pay special attention to China is that, with the on-going debate on the Great Divergence since 2000, there has been a surgeof new discussion on the once seemingly settled topic of the 'NeedhamPuzzle' in an effort to reconcile China's impressive early achievements inscience and technology with China's lack of later scientific, military andindustrial revolutions of the European type. Needham's own view in theconclusion of his Science and Civilization in China is that China's civil serviceexaminations misled its literati, which made those revolutions impos-sible.5 This is by no means his only interpretation. However, Needham'sverdict does not explain why and how China's achievements in scienceand technology were made in the first place during the period whenChina's civil service examination institutions were already socially wellentrenched together with the Confucian literati. This problem invitesfurther investigation into the paradox of China's limited development inscience and technology.

Patrick O'Brien's article represents the renewed energy in probingNeedham's Puzzle from a Weberian viewpoint. It looks at the negativeimpact of the Confucian fundamentals, especially the perpetual attentionof Confucianism to human behaviour in order to regulate it, instead of astudy of nature in order to improve productivity unless it becameabsolutely necessary. What the article has argued is that the Chinesesystem did it so efficiently that Confucianism successfully removed thetension between China's political stability and intellectual creativity whilesuch tension and its intensification induced human creativity to triumph inWestern Europe. Such a triumph over-compensated for the social cost ofperiodical decline in social stability a la Schumpeter's 'creative destruc-tion'.


Introduction

Jerry Liu's article (unintentionally) provides rich empirical evidence forthe O'Brien Thesis. Liu shows that moral guidance and social control werealways given priority by both the imperial state and the literati. This led tothe unique propensity towards specific useful and reliable knowledge inChina. As a result, the Chinese elite, who were in the best position toaccumulate and diffuse knowledge, always tended to improve socialconditions and provision of public goods rather than improve theirunderstanding of the natural world. This behavioural pattern can be seenas a 'cultural trap'. The trouble is how to explain the occasional ingressionof crude sciences and technology in China. Liu's article indicates thatsciences and technology of the Chinese type were not sustainable becauseof the obvious lack of collective efforts and continued financial support. Inthis context, Chinese natural curiosity was cancelled out by Chinese socialand moral pursuits. Liu, however, puts forward a cultural question,pointing out that while Europeans have been asking why China did notdevelop modern science and technology independently, the Ming andQing Chinese were questioning why the advanced European practicalknowledge was coupled with European violence and aggression, whichwere morally indefensible. For China, the European inability to developan adequate moral protocol simply marred the utility of Europeanscientific and technological knowledge.

Kent Deng's article endorses Zurndorfer's view (below) that the Jesuittop-down model of knowledge diffusion before 1840 was confined to a verysmall number of imperial court elites inhabiting an ivory tower. TheJesuit-transmitted science and technology failed to impress the Chineseacademy, which, not surprisingly, was submerged in Confucianism. Deng'ssurvey for the dissemination and adoption of European useful and reliableknowledge in China from 1600 to 1910 indicates that foreign invasion wasthe key to push forward changes in China's old system. With a series ofmilitary defeats, Social Darwinism and pragmatism replaced Confucianculturalism and ushered in new movers and shakers of Europeanknowledge for the reform of Chinese statecraft. Once the floodgate wasopened up, the scale, scope and speed of changes turned out to beunprecedented. Western intrusion, thus argued, becomes a necessarycondition for change in China, including capitalist industrialization.

Harriet Zurndorfer takes the 'Great Divergence' debate further byelucidating the Jesuits' 'deliberately incomplete transmission' of Europeanscience to China before the nineteenth century. Chinese scholars neverlacked curiosity. It was the out-dated knowledge introduced by the Jesuits,the primary brokers for European useful and reliable knowledge at thattime, that was partly responsible for Chinese half-heartedness in acceptingEuropean mathematical and astronomical practices. On the Chinese side,the incompatible worldviews of Chinese intellectual tradition hadeffectively inhibited the Jesuit mathematical and astronomical knowledgefrom penetrating the Confucian unitary vision of man, ethics, politics andthe universe. Zurndorfer suggests that it took considerable time for theJesuit-conveyed knowledge to be incorporated into the corpus of Chinese


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Jerry Liu and Kent Deng

metaphysics. And the European mathematical input was limited tocalendrical calculation.

It is our view that this volume will contribute to the ongoing debatesurrounding the creation, diffusion and exchange of useful and reliableknowledge across cultural boundaries.

Notes and References1. Taking on the formulation of URK and material progress in Europe between the

fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, Inkster's article provides a valuable source of comparisonswith the Chinese case of this edited volume. See I. Inkster, 'Potentially Global: "Useful andReliable Knowledge" and Material Progress in Europe, 1474-1914', The International HistoryReview, 2006, 28(2): 237-86.

2. J. Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 7, Part II (Cambridge, 1954).


5


The Needham QuestionUpdated: A Historiographical

Survey and Elaboration

P A T R I C K K . O ' B R I E N *

I meditated upon this lack of certitude in traditional mathematicsconcerning the movements of the spheres and began to be annoyed thatphilosophers had discovered no sure scheme from . . . the movement of themarching of the world which had been built for us by the Best and MostlyOrderly Workman of All. (Copernicus, 1543)

NEEDHAM'S PUZZLE AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE: CHINA AND THE WEST

Recent syntheses in comparative global history proclaim that classicalviews (Smithian, Marxist and Weberian) that narrated the history ofChina as a history of cumulative economic retardation compared with theeconomic dynamics of Western Europe from, say, the accession of theMing (1368) to the Opium War (1839) are no longer tenable.

Two generations of post-colonial historical research on West, South andSouth-East and, above all, on East Asia have confirmed MarshallHodgson's percipient observation of 1974 that historical explanations that'invoke pre-modern seminal traits for the long run economic success of theOccident can be shown to fail under close historical analysis'. Modernrevisionists have also published a substantial volume of evidence to supportBraudel's insights of 1982 that for, most, if not all, that period, theadvanced economic regions of Eurasia are more appositely represented inthe words of Ken Pomeranz as 'a world of surprising resemblances'.Revisionism has, moreover, degraded the virtually unsupported assertionsfrom a best-selling polemic from David Landes that 'for the last thousandyears Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development andmodernity'.

Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, Malthus, Marx, Weber and theirnineteenth and twentieth 'Eurocentric' acolytes - purveying histories oflong-term Asian backwardness are now engaged in a scholarly andpotentially heuristic debate in global economic history. Furthermore (andunless their Asiacentric counterparts happen to be ideologically convincedthat histories of anything that might potentially lend support to new


The Needham Question Updated

anachronistic narratives of 'Western triumphalism' are politically incor-rect), the major discourse in global economic history that remains wideopen for both discussion and research is the famous Needham's Puzzle.

According to Needham and his school, for more than a millenniumdown to and some time after the Accession of the Ming (1338), the locusfor most technical, organizational and institutional innovations promotingentirely gradual and, of course, cyclical economic progress (with'efflorescences' under the Tang and Song dynasties) can be located in theEast and not in the West of the Eurasian Oikumene.

At some conjuncture (still under debate) in early modern history, thelocus for the generation and application of knowledge behind both processand product innovation shifted from the Orient to the Occident and hasremained there down to the present time.

Disagreements over the chronology for what can be represented as aclimacteric in the discovery, development and diffusion of useful andreliable knowledge in China followed by the clear emergence of capacitiesfor an accelerated rate of accumulation of such knowledge in WesternEurope is probably not resolvable within any degree of precision. NathanSivin suggests that 'Chinese civilization was much more efficient inapplying natural knowledge to practical human needs' down to thefifteenth century.

Needham himself traced the crossover to the centuries of Europe'sclassic scientific revolution but finds the antecedents for that revolution (asdo modern historians of science) in the writings of natural philosophers,writing as early as the twelfth century. Since Needham launched his greatproject to integrate the contributions of China into global histories ofscience and technology, few historians have displayed the temerity to denyChinese pre-eminence and precedence in the discovery, development andapplication of useful and reliable knowledge to problems of productionand wealth that may have lasted for some 1500 years after the birth ofChrist. Thus, Needham's famous question (once again under revivedinvestigation and debate) is when, how and why did the Chinese empirelose its position of scientific and technological superiority to the West?

FLOWS OF USEFUL AND RELIABLE KNOWLEDGE

To clarify and historicize that question, it is necessary by way of a prefaceto say something about how economists and modern economic historiansanalyse knowledge as on 'input' into processes of production.

Following classic texts from Schumpeter and Kuznets, they seeeconomic growth ('sustained' rises in standards of living) as emanatingfrom two basic mechanisms: (1) rising productivity of labour employed inagriculture, industry and services and (2) the reallocation of labour fromsectors of production (usually agriculture), in which productivity per hourworked is lower, to sectors of production, in which productivity is higher(industry and urban services).

Given this standard framework for the analysis of changes in rates of


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Patrick K. O'Brien

growth and structures of output, historians proceed to ask: where doesuseful and reliable knowledge that allows for higher and sustained rises inlabour productivity emanate from? Why did some civilizations (China)accumulate and diffuse such knowledge at more impressive rates thanothers (e.g. Western Europe)? When and why does the locus for thediscovery and diffusion of knowledge change?

Two classes of economic theory address these questions and are labelledas endogenous and exogenous. Endogenous growth theory certainlyprovides historians with a plausible way of explaining the diffusion ofknowledge across any industry or economy once such knowledge has beenperceived to be reliable and commercially profitable. Alas, seriousdifficulties remain in trying to account historically for the relativeachievements of different countries, cultures or civilizations in the discoveryand development of useful knowledge. Even economic historians (who areeducated to explain its accumulation with reference to a tradition ofthought drawn from classical, Marxist and neo-classical models ineconomic theory) remain dissatisfied with narratives that square circlesby accounting for Europe's convergence to Chinese levels of scientific andtechnological efficiency, basically in terms of the outcome of shifts indemand for innovations emanating from higher rates of economic growthin the West. Interestingly, and as a 'Christian Marxist', Needham himselfequivocated between endogenous or demand-induced theories of knowl-edge accumulation and some rather ad hoc speculations that linked theshift in the locus of innovation to clear and profound cultural andtheological contrasts between the East and the West in the appreciation,comprehension and manipulation of nature.

In short, Needham suggests that variations across space and time in theaccumulation of knowledge could 'in some degree' be exogenous orautonomous - not as fortuitous gifts from Athena, but rather as emanatingin significant ways from the social, political and, above all, cultural realmsof distinctive civilizations that can be represented as partially but looselyconnected in diverse and complex ways to their economic foundations.

Rejecting the insistence by mainstream economists on reifyingdistinctions between endogenous and exogenous forces, historians continueto recognize 'loops of inter-connections' that are analogous to thecomponents and circuits of the internal combustion engine that play theirown particular and indispensible roles in moving economies at variousspeeds from one to another and superior level of efficiency. Whether theprocess is endogenous or exogenous or best represented by diagramsdisplaying arrows of inter-connections, it is not clear how historians mightproceed systematically to compare something as amorphous andintangible as the discovery and diffusion of knowledge in China andWestern Europe over long spans of time - an evolution that, as theynevertheless recognize, led ultimately to significant differences in thestandards of welfare afforded to the populations of these two civilizations.

For a start (and unlike real income, output or other indicators ofeconomic progress), they will never find a way of measuring the


9


accumulation of knowledge available for production in the East comparedwith the West. Historians must make do with impressions from scholarswho know something about the quality of material life for populationsresiding at both ends of the Eurasian landmass, who have someunderstanding of the cultures and institutions that (along with favourablenatural endowments) provided generations of Chinese with higher levels ofwelfare for more than a millennia of time.

Even for those centuries from the accession of the Ming dynasty down tothe Opium War (1368-1839), when extensions to the base of knowledgeavailable to the Europeans and Chinese economies supposedly diverged,the knowledge in Needham's prism can neither be added up nor connectedin systematic ways to economic progress. Furthermore, it emanated from aplethora of sites, sources, institutions, households and individuals ('proto'technologists and scientists) of great variety. Knowledge emerged innumerous forms: explicit and tacit, recorded and unrecorded, written andoral.

In the future, historians may be able to impose some kind oftaxonomical, even scalar, order upon the great mass of Chinese andEuropean written and printed material that could be represented aspotentially useful and reliable for purposes of production. At present, theycan only investigate the contexts or regimes for the discovery, developmentand diffusion of such knowledge in order to make comparisons acrosscivilizations that might help us to suggest when, why and to what degreethe regime evolving in Europe became more promotional for productionthan the regime operating in China.

In short and over these centuries when technological progressproceeded gradually, reciprocal comparisons (pace Marc Bloch) are theonly method available to ascertain when and why Western economiesmoved (as many historians assert) up to and along a trajectory thateventually left the Chinese empire economically behind and vulnerable togeopolitical takeover.

Such an exercise in history (involving the comparison of severalconnected but separable components of regimes for the discovery,development and diffusions of the knowledge upon which the relativeeconomic performances of Europe and China depended) could never beconclusive. The widely shared assumption behind my argument (which islocated in a larger narrative on divergence) is that technologicalinnovation mattered for Europe's precocious transition to moderneconomic growth and that sources for its extension and deepening werecontrasting systems or regimes for the production, development anddiffusion of useful knowledge.

With a specified comparison in place, I will now proceed to elaborateon connected but separable components of two regimes, but propose toallocate more space to Chinese and European cultures and cosmologiesbecause modern historians assume that observed contrasts betweenEastern and Western regimes reside, in some reductionist sense, in theircultural and cosmological foundations.


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Patrick K. O'Brien

SITES AND INSTITUTIONS FOR THE GENERATION OF USEFUL KNOWLEDGE

Urban SitesHistorically, most productive knowledge emerged from urban settings.Maritime towns and cities as nodes or poles de croissance have long beenemplotted into histories of slow economic growth in early modern Europe.These narratives and proto-theories from historical sociology representcoastal and riverine sites as promotional: (1) for the establishment andmaintenance of gilds, professional schools, universities and other institu-tions for the generation of knowledge, (2) for the exercise of mercantilearistocratic, courtly and ecclesiastical patronage for its formation; (3) forthe employment of skilled artisans producing instruments used for theinvestigation of the natural world; (4) as locations for the embarkation andstorage of knowledge imported on sailing ships and embodied in plants,primary products, machines, devices and information from ports along theMediterranean and Baltic and North Seas surrounding Europe and,increasingly (after 1415), from Africa, Asia and the Americas; and (5) aspolitical spaces offering some protection and toleration and autonomy vis-a-vis the powers of conservative monarchs, seigneurs and bishops tocontrol, tax and even repress potentially dangerous knowledge. Thus,historians of Europe have been educated to look for sites of comparablescale, scope and potential along the rivers, canals and coasts of the Mingand Qing empires. They do find hierarchies and networks of towns andcities all over China. Yet, for reasons that may well be basically politicaland geopolitical, the extent and depth of urbanization in China, as well asthe character of Chinese towns, look relatively less conducive to theaccumulation of knowledge than appears to have been the case in WesternEurope.

Higher EducationA high proportion of innovative knowledge produced over these centurieshas been 'attributed' to lists of European and Chinese men who receivedsome form of'higher education'. This component of the two regimes undercomparison turns out to be one in which secondary sources allow historiansto make some supportable comparisons constructed around severalrelevant questions, including: (1) ratios of the higher educated to totaland to literate populations in Europe and China; (2) the relative opennessof political elites to recruitment based upon merit; (3) degrees ofcentralized political and/or ecclesiastical control exercised over theinstitutions and the personnel involved with the delivery of all forms ofhigher education; (4) the scope of the curricula on offer to students at animpressionable stage in their lifecycles; (5) the status accorded to the studyof nature; and (6) the encouragement of disputation and debate, both atuniversity and across the cultures at large.

For long stretches of its history and largely for political reasons, theChinese empire probably offered higher education to a comparable, if nothigher, proportion of its male population than Europe and, what is more,


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recruited entrants to positions of power and patronage upon a meritocraticbasis. From a Euro-centred perspective, the empires and educationalinstitutions emerge, however, as less plural, subject to tighter degrees ofcentral control and offered, for reasons elaborated on below, a morecircumscribed curricula for young men interested in the study of thenatural world.

Circulation of KnowledgeKnowledge was, however, circulated in cheaper printed form in Chinaseveral centuries before Europe. It is simply not possible to demonstrateeither that the volume of printed natural and technical knowledgeavailable for consultation in China fell below the total volume available inEurope or that the range of potentially useful branches of knowledgecovered was more confined in scope or scale in the East. The Needhamproject's 18-volume compendia of Chinese investigations and analysis of(ski) things celestial, terrestrial, botanical, biological, zoological, geogra-phical, optical, mineral, mechanical, chemical, agricultural, industrial,etc. degrades any Eurocentric suggestions of that kind. Furthermore, thereseem to be no areas of knowledge in which Chinese publications failed toappear in printed form for year after year during either the Ming or Qingdynasties.

Historians who have the credentials to engage seriously with the historyof Chinese science deny the charge that the language is not precise enoughfor the communication of abstract science and technology. Anothernegative aspersion that the flow of words printed in China and devoted toyet another round of learned commentaries on Confucian classics in moralphilosophy, to lessons in statecraft to exemplary forms of history, toliterature, calligraphy and poetry exceeded the flow of useful knowledgeby a larger margin than was the case in Europe has not been tested.Although the corollary that the authors of books on 'things' (gewu) werenot widely regarded within their own culture to be engaged in thepromotion of morally and intellectually superior forms of scholarship, itmay be the case.

Large volumes of knowledge were, moreover, published in the form ofstate-sponsored encyclopaedias and manuals that made rather limitedinroads into the curricula for higher education. Furthermore, historians ofChina have not exposed anything approximating to the scope and scale ofan 'associational culture' for any sustained discussion of natural philosophyof the kind that emerged across urban Europe in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries. Indeed, there are suggestions that associations ofintellectuals were less tolerated under the Qing (post-1644) than duringthe closing stages of the Ming dynasty.

To sum up: at present, there is no evidence to show that the share ofpages printed and circulated that could be classified as potentially usefuland reliable knowledge (compared, say, to the volume of didactic books onreligion and moral philosophy) was any higher in the West. Scholars whohave surveyed China's fact-based literature leave an impression that it


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displays a greater concern with agronomy, hydrology and medicine thanwith commerce or industry. These 'unquantified' observations are justwhat one would expect from a physiocratic empire in which leadingpatrons for books included the state and its mandarinate concerned withjingshi or how to manage the age and the empire.

Economic Incentives (Patents, Prizes, Rewards)How far innovatory knowledge in Europe and China was rewarded and/orprotected its progenitors against plagiarism and exploitation by imitators,in order that the search and development for useful knowledge mightbecome profitable for individuals, families or institutions makingdiscoveries, remains another key question to pursue.

Beginning in Venice (1415), European innovators received some(rather inadequate) measures of protection and/or rewards for novel andpotentially productive ideas. Europe's state-run systems of protection were,however, neither universal, generous nor effectively enforced, and it couldbe the case that the maintenance of traditions of secrecy among kinshipgroups in China might just have provided incentives that were asefficacious as patents and rewards.

CULTURES AND COSMOLOGIES FOR INNOVATION IN EUROPE AND CHINA

Families, Schools and CareersMary Douglas defined culture 'as a widely shared cluster of beliefs andvalues deployed implicitly and explicitly to promote, justify or restrain thecollective actions of institutions and the behaviour of individuals'. Culturalhistorians (now in the ascendant in departments of history) 'reconstruct!'cultures in order to 'make sense' of the actions taken by organizations,institutions and people in the past. The goal of cultural history is to recover'outlooks and dispositions' of peoples as they were experienced, recordedand reflected upon at the time. They are aware that people, then and now,inhabited multiple cultures and that culture should not replace economiesas another 'reductionist' category for historical analysis. 'Although' (asMarshal Sahlins observes), 'actions and events are reordered by culture.Culture is also reordered by actions and events'. Cultures as 'durabledispositions' were far more stable and resistant to change in early modernChina and Europe than they are today.

Historians looking for comparisons and contrasts in the dispositions ofcultures towards the accumulation of knowledge and innovations shouldfind the cosmologies and clusters of beliefs playing upon the relativepropensities of Chinese and Europeans alive between 1368 and 1839 todevelop useful and reliable knowledge heuristic to contemplate. Historicalevidence will be hard to find and inferences difficult to draw. But, already,the relevant areas for future investigation and research in comparativehistory have been clearly mapped out by historians and social scientists.For example, innovators are born, raised and socialized within familiesand networks of kin who inculcate curiosity, desires for the acquisition of


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knowledge and attitudes towards risk into children. Secondly, primaryschools not only provided the basis of literacy and numeracy required forhigher forms of formal education, but reinforced or modified attitudes andaspirations acquired at home. Ambitions formed with families and atschool led men towards careers that were selected among privilegedminorities, placed to make choices in this matter, basically upon economicgrounds, but were also chosen partly in response to cultures of approbationand disapprobation. For example, was it the case, as some historians havesuggested, that a disproportionate (sub-optimal share) of young educatedmen in China, with potential for innovative thought, were attracted intothe imperial civil service, in which their prospects for advancement rarelydepended on the allocation of time and talent to the study of'things', letalone the taking of risks or the promotion of novelties? But did thisostensibly unproductive avenue for upward mobility represent reallysignificant contrasts with the courtly, clerical and military careers open tomen of ambition and talent in early modern Europe?

All three institutions - families, schools and careers - demand muchmore rigorous and textured historical research than appears to beavailable on current bibliographies of comparative histories for the Eastand West. At present, the extant historiography allows historians to deal infar greater depth with potentially significant contrasts between Easternand Western cultures at less micro tangible and more general levels, byreconstructing the cosmologies or basic beliefs about the natural world, ascomprehended by Chinese and European elites, for, say, four centuriesdown to the Opium War. Such cosmologies were neither homogeneous norstable through time, but they are represented by intellectual historians ascultures that prompted relevant political and wealthy elites to formulatepolicies, construct institutions and offer patronage that either promoted orrestrained the accumulation of useful and reliable knowledge.

My reading into the complex and contested histories of early modernEuropean and Chinese developments in science and technology leads meto suggest that the modern bibliography supports Weber's position,namely that, over this period, Western Europeans reordered a traditionalChristian cosmology in ways that became discernibly more conducive forthe accumulation of knowledge. The maintenance and restoration of analtogether more neutral Confucian cosmology that prevailed under theMing and Qing dynasties did little or nothing to promote any significantreconfiguration of elite cultures in China until much later in the nineteenthcentury.

Reconfiguration of European Cosmology 1543-1727This Weberian hypothesis is framed by dates that refer to the decadesbetween the lives of Copernicus (1473-1543) and Newton (1642-1727) - aperiod of scientific revolution when increasing shares of Europe's political,ecclesiastical and business elites began to comprehend the natural world innew ways that can be represented as analogous to a gestalt switch.Cultural and intellectual historians (including modern historians of


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science) tend to narrate and analyse that switch by way of critical surveysof the protracted, acrimonious and often violent debates between ancientsand moderns. The former, as stakeholders in charge of establishedinstitutions based upon biblical scriptural and Aristotlean bodies ofknowledge, sanctified by religious authority, resisted claims from modernsfor the validity of their own more reliable and useful forms of knowledgebased upon: (1) systematic observation; (2) Baconian interrogations ofnature deploying a variety of reliable and transparent experiments; and(3) above all, the formulation of mathematically rigorous and logicallyconsistent models of how nature depicted as a single coherent systemactually worked.

In retrospect and after protracted and unsettled debates amongspecialists in the history of science, the scientific revolution may still beregarded as a progressive shift in the understanding of how and whyphenomena in the celestial, terrestrial and biological spheres of the naturalworld operated as they did. That evolving comprehension of naturepermeated gradually into the mentalities (not of the illiterate masses atlarge but) of Western Europe's educated political and economic elites(including craftsmen) with the powers, means and skills required tofavour, sponsor and produce innovations in thought and practice.

Of course, the proclivities of elites to embrace cosmologies favourable tosustained interrogations designed to extend possibilities for the compre-hension and manipulation of nature did not change simply as the outcomeof an intellectual debate between ancients and moderns. Furthermore, theantecedents and possibly the foundations for that change are to be found inMedieval Christendom. Indeed, evidence has now piled up to undermineideologically biased histories that left chronologies and impressions of earlymodern Europe's history as one of pronounced discontinuities with itsmedieval past. Nevertheless, the four 'Rs' of the period under review forpurposes of this narrative in global history, namely the Reconnaissance,the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Revolution in Science, alloperated in diverse and interconnected ways to extend and accelerate apronounced shift in the conceptions held by Europe's elites about thenatural world that surrounded and framed their privileged lives on Earth.

For example, and although this conjecture cannot be quantified, theRenaissance of the Quartocentro, which continued during the lifetime ofCopernicus, was marked (and more clearly marked after the fall ofConstantinople to the Ottomans in 1453) by a faster rate of recovery ofclassical (particularly Greek) knowledge about the natural world.Recovered, restored and translated texts by Plato, Archimedes, Heron,Democritus and others undermined extant canonical and beatifiedauthorities for higher education derived from Aristotle, Ptolemy andGalen.

Secondly, and what seems to have been seriously quantified by ageneration of modern scholarship on the nature of the Reformation, areliberal, Weberian and Mertonian hypotheses that the Vatican resolutelyopposed the recovery and assimilation of classical and Islamic knowledge.


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The long-established ideological view that the Roman Church (even inSpain) consistently and effectively stamped out investigations into naturalphenomena repressed all speculations about the world that mightsomehow contradict or qualify the rather limited range of references tothat natural world as embodied in Christendom's canonical texts,including new and old testaments, scripture, even the writings of SaintPaul and other saints, is no longer held as tenable by ecclesiastical history,let alone histories of science.

All organized religions, Catholic and Protestant alike, remained hostileto the diffusion of 'heretical' cosmological ideas that ecclesiasticalauthorities deemed to be potentially dangerous to established hierarchiesof churches, clerics and their 'sacred books'. For the advance of economies(our key interest), the Reformation left Europe with several institutiona-lized and competing religions and a multiplication of texts, printed invernacular languages (mainly moral and theological), but containing aplurality of facts and hypothesis about the natural world. As the violenceassociated with the theological disputes gave way to co-existence, thenotion that there could be any single and singular source of authority onthe operations of the natural world became less and less credible toeducated Christians of all persuasions. Provided their findings andinferences did not explicitly undermine the 'words' of God, as interpretedby several of his chosen churches, natural philosophers as well astheologians became freer to investigate the basis upon which 'their Gods'might have constructed the natural world that shaped the material lives ofpopulations all over Europe.

Finally, and as an outcome of the reconnaissances of the fifteenthcentury, Europeans established regular contacts and commerce withAfrica, Asia and the recently rediscovered Americas. Voyages of discoveryfollowed up by profitable commerce and colonization provided anenormous boost to European confidence. Europeans had acquired thescientific knowledge and technologies required to achieve a dramatic andultimately profitable conquest over the most awesome parts of nature,namely the winds, tides and seas covering most of the world andsurrounding their promontory on the edge of Eurasia. Western Europe'scommand of the oceans then generated accumulating flows of informationabout the geographies, peoples, institutions, flora, fauna, artefacts andcommodities from all parts of an expanding world that gradually degradedreceived biblical, clerical and fantastical accounts and conceptions ofnature, as it had supposedly operated outside the known, but narrow,geographical and intellectual compass of Western Europe.

In numerous ways, these famous historical conjunctures - theReconnaissance, Renaissance and Reformation - reordered the culturesurrounding urban elites in the West and intensified their ambitions topromote, patronize and participate in systematic investigations of thecelestial, terrestrial and biological spheres of the natural world. Despite allthe scholarly debate and nuanced interpretations that now surround it,European historians may as well continue to label the programme of


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investigation and development in natural philosophy as it proceededbetween the times of Copernicus and Newton as a scientific revolution.

The flow, validity and variety of new knowledge about the universegenerated by natural philosophers researching with indispensible helpfrom artisans and funded by princely aristocratic, mercantile and evenecclesiastical patrons will be too vast to summarize here. Furthermore, thepurpose of the debate is not to reconstruct and evaluate the histories ofmodern specialized sciences in retrospect. Nor will I be concerned to traceeither tangible or indirect connections between the knowledge diffusedover this period to particular innovations. Instead, the rather generalargument (pursued this far for whatever credence becomes available froman exercise in comparisons with China) makes two points: first, that aloosely connected programme of investigations into the celestial, terrestrialand biological spheres of the natural world was conducted within anotherwise conservative and often hostile social environment of WesternEurope, and, secondly, and at propitious times in its early modern history,the knowledge generated by that programme penetrated into, andultimately undermined, the traditional cosmological predispositions ofthat continent's political, economic and ecclesiastical elites.

The foundations of elite culture had been based on Europe's conversionto Christianity, a religion that co-existed in tension with the sanctifiedpagan texts (Aristotle, Ptolemy and Galen), with 'common sense' and withall kinds of heretic fantasies that the clerical establishment did its best tostamp out in favour of a unified view of nature as God's creation. Incultures permeated by monotheistic beliefs, in an afterlife and by hereticalfantasies, it is, moreover, not surprising to observe that astronomy playedthe key historical role in a cosmological reordering of perceptions aboutthe natural world. That 'gestalt switch' could simply be illustrated bydetailed investigations into the beliefs held by increasing numbers ofeducated men about the natural world after, say, the times of Copernicuscompared with the comprehension of and attitudes towards nature held bypreceding generations for, say, two centuries following the Black Death.

Up for debate is the historical background to and representation of ascientific revolution as a 'cosmological reordering' that led European elites(including skilled artisans) and eventually majorities among populations inthe West to believe and expect that everything in the world can beexplained rationally, demonstrated empirically and manipulated techno-logically.

Cultures and Cosmologies for Innovation in the EastResearch to establish plausibility for a historical narrative about thepossible significance of changes to the cosmological basis for the discoveryand diffusion of useful knowledge around Western Europe can only betaken further by following Marc Bloch's advice to engage in reciprocalcomparisons with China - the West's leading contender for technologicalleadership - then and, again, today. This strategy for the construction ofglobal economic history upon a comparative basis bypasses 'orientalist'


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objections that Chinese culture is sui generis and the empire's regime for theaccumulation of such knowledge had successfully proceeded along atrajectory, all of its own, for at least 1,000 years. Historians must alsoperforce ignore assertions that comparisons of this kind can be dismissed as'Eurocentric'.

Several tentative and under-researched suggestions as to why theregime evolving in Western Europe may, in retrospect, be perceived asbeing on a relatively more efficient trajectory have appeared in print.Furthermore, an extensive historical literature on the rise and decline ofnational economies in the West has already documented the penalties(institutional and cultural constraints) attached to the early starts andtemporary positions of technological leadership held by the Italian, Dutch,British and, latterly, the American economies, which could well apply toChina before 1800.

Until well into the eighteenth century, many features of the economiesand societies of the Ming and Qing empires continued to be widelyadmired by enlightened European intellectuals of the day. At that time,the scale and scope of information about China that filtered into Europeanperceptions through reports from Catholic missionaries (mainly Jesuits),travellers' tales and accounts from merchants were neither voluminous,representative nor accurate. Today, these valuable accounts are but a partof a much wider and deeper historiography written in Chinese, Japaneseand European languages, concerned to ascertain with reference to primarysources what institutional or cultural capacities the empire possessed (orlacked) to sustain technological leadership when confronted by dimlyperceived, but retrospectively clear, challenges from the West.

Historians, with help from a far greater volume of evidence thancontemporaries had at their disposal, have revisited seventeenth andeighteenth-century European debates that deal with representations ofChina as a model culture, polity and economy. Several have reaffirmed theobjections raised by Montesquieu, Hume and Adam Smith, who disputedmore favourable interpretations of the oriental empire by Montaigne,Barros, Bayle, Voltaire, Leibniz, Quesnay and others. This famousenlightenment discourse resonates into modern investigations into knowl-edge formation and innovation across different civilizations, includinginstitutionalized incentives and scope for the operation of multiple sourcesand centres for state and private patronage for investigations into thenatural world and the circulation of knowledge. In short and taking a leadfrom anthropology, modern historians have taken up Needham'ssuggestions to expose and analyse contrasts in cultures and cosmologies,playing upon the missions of Chinese institutions (including the imperialstate) as well as the dispositions of China's educated and wealthy elites tosupport and patronize the development of potentially productive forms ofknowledge.

As wily Jesuits missionaries to China discovered, the differences between(Confucian) and Western (Christian) cultures as moral philosophies wereneither profound nor (in their ultimately mistaken view) unbridgeable.


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Both cultures supported hierarchy, patriarchy, filial piety and proclaimedin favour of righteous, just, frugal and patient behaviour, althoughChristian practice had probably come further along the way towards anaccommodation with the avaricious tendencies of those with sufficientwealth and power to lead more autonomous lives and display individua-listic patterns of conduct. That contrast came about because Christianityhad risen to a position of ideological hegemony in Europe as a functionalcomponent of the Roman Empire and as a quasi autonomous hierarchicalorganization with pretensions to a universal mission after the fall of Rome.Christian churches and their congregations existed under the benignprotection of diverse and competitive secular authorities, kings, aristoc-racies and oligarchies to whom they offered the promise of compliantsubjects. That promise was not idle. As parishioners, most Europeansbelieved that obedience to moral codes propagated by priests andparticipation in the rituals performed by the Church accorded to the willof a divine creator would secure their places in Heaven.

In China, the political institutions of an empire that survived as apolitical unit and claimed sovereignty over populations and territorygreater in scale, extent and complexity than Western Europe also rested onprinciples designed to maintain hierarchy, internal stability, externalsecurity and obedience, coupled with more commendable concerns forsocial welfare. These Confucian principles never evolved in a Westernsense into religions that were expressions of a divine order interpreted by auniversal church that, for centuries, sustained claims for a sphere ofauthority sanctified by God and separated from the secular powerexercised by hereditary rulers of realms, republics and cities. In China, theprinciples underpinning the institutions of the empire (including families,farms, firms, merchant networks, gilds, schools, higher forms of education,the organizations of local, urban, regional and imperial governance) wereall derived from a set of canonical texts as revised, interpreted andimplemented by an elite of officials, recruited along meritocratic lines,operating in the name of successive dynasties of emperors, with mandatesfrom Heaven. The Chinese recognized no god and provided no space forthe authority of a church separated from the state. Power in the Chineseempire depended more heavily for the implementation of rules, policiesand decrees emanating from emperors and their officials upon ideologicalpersuasion than upon coercive, more costly forms of power deployed byrulers of Europe's smaller but more manageable set of warring polities.Under the Ming and Qing dynasties, Confucianism and the institutionsand personnel most actively involved in the refinement, revision anddiffusion of that all pervasive and effective moral code evolved into anextraordinarily powerful and relatively cheap way of obtaining compliancefor the governance of a vast, heterogeneous complex and expandingempire.

Confucianism's status as a primary source of power utilized byemperors, mandarinates, local officials and patriarchs to exercise authorityemerged clearly during crises of internal order and interludes of dynastic


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change when China's ruling elites turned again and again to purificationof Confucian values to restore peace, harmony and stability to an empirethat had, by the time of the Qing dynasty, survived for more than twomillennia. As an ideology, designed and refined to maintain a commonidentity, cohesion, obedience and effective rule, Confucianism became ofgreater concern for the political authorities of China than religions (eitherCatholic or Protestant) ever became for the dynasties, aristocracies andoligarchies, governing polities of smaller scale and lower complexity inEurope.

Apart from rituals of ancestor worship, deference towards age andgreater veneration for ancient texts (all of which could be functionallyconservative in their operation), the major contrast between Eastern andWestern cosmologies resides in the more stable and coherent cluster ofbeliefs and perceptions that the majority of a well educated Chinese eliteheld about the natural world and the study of nature over the centuriesbetween the accession of the Ming dynasty (1368) and the Opium War(1839).

Both Christian and Confucian cosmologies can be depicted asanthropocentric in the sense that they reaffirmed and continually refineda foundational belief, namely that all institutions and personnel exercisingpower over the subjects of hereditary rulers should act in accordance withimmutable moral-cum-spiritual precepts. Prescriptions for all forms ofhuman behaviour in the spheres of familial, interpersonal, social, economicand political relations were pretty clear for both Chinese and Europeanrulers and their subjects. One salient difference was that rulers of China,unlike their counterparts of the West, had refrained from embodying theseprinciples (as expressed on their policies and decrees) into codes of lawreinforced by precedents that applied across the empire.

Law usually operates to constrain custom and the discretion of localofficials to take personal and particular contexts into account. In theiradjudications over all spheres of private and social behaviour, includingthe economic spheres, the Chinese managed without applicable referenceto any universally applied system of imperial law.

Both cosmologies also recognized that men not only interacted withothers, but were also intensely preoccupied with the natural world thatsurrounded, sustained and afflicted their daily lives. Yet, the attentiondevoted and resources allocated to the systematic study of nature wereneither a top priority nor accorded high status, either in China or Europe.Nevertheless, the historical record suggests that the Chinese accumulated amore impressive stock of useful and reliable knowledge down to someindeterminate period, marked by a climacteric that probably occurredunder Ming emperors, when Confucian priorities for the conceptions andcomprehension of nature and the methods used by Savants to investigateall natural phenomena (including the human body) seem (in retrospect) tohave continued along a trajectory that accumulated useful and reliableknowledge at a low, rather traditional rate of advance compared toWestern Europe.


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In this, our Europe mirror, Chinese savants neither envisaged norinstitutionalized a separated quasi autonomous sphere for the study ofnature, whereas Christian cosmology (with its felicitous origins in theRoman Empire) accommodated its theology, teaching and institutions totake in knowledge inherited from classical times. In forging that particularfusion, the 'Roman' Catholic hierarchy left no space at all beyond itsparameters and perimeters for alternative moral philosophies or inter-pretations of the words and commands of God. But the Church certainlyencouraged the circumscribed study of an (albeit inferior) branch of paganknowledge and learning, namely natural philosophy, concerned withsystemic investigations into nature as a whole, but always as a reflection ofthe creation and works of God.

For centuries in the West, natural philosophy as represented in the'expurgated' works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen and a limited range ofother pagan and Islamic texts existed within a tolerated but uneasyposition of subordination with Christian theology, concerned with its ownsanctified set of Latin texts and scriptures dealing with God and principlesof moral behaviour.

Unlike Christianity (or Islam), Chinese cosmology displayed nocomparable divisions or tensions. Confucians never separated moral fromnatural philosophy. They formulated their overall view of the world as anintegrated whole, embodying human behaviour, all socially and politicallyconstructed institutions (especially the state) conceived to be organicallyrelated to the celestial, terrestrial and biological spheres of the naturalworld.

For centuries, Chinese savants contemplated, studied and addedimpressively to the world's stock of knowledge about natural things(shixue), including stars, water, plants, animals, minerals, colours,medicines, topography, magnetism, optics, etc., etc. Their epistemologicaltradition accorded no credence, however, to speculations, let alonetheories, about the operations of nature (li) as a cosmic realm detachedfrom man, society or from emperors with their mandates from the heavensto rule over a large and successful empire. Nature, as a whole, seemed toomultifaceted and alien an idea to grasp, let alone produce general theoriesabout. It was perceived to display nothing more challenging and usefulthan harmonies and balances (jing andyang). As part of nature, men wereadvised by sages to go with and not against its grain. Furthermore, itwould have been inept and dangerous for savants, employed by the state,to publicize speculations that questioned or undermined the harmoniouscosmological foundations of the empire. Not only was it politically prudentand profitable to stay with mainstream moral philosophy, but the curiousminority of educated Chinese who strayed into speculations about natureconcentrated upon the classification of natural phenomena, detectingpatterns and correlations and/or investigating problems of clear andimmediate practical import. After all, their successful civilizationflourished on this basis for more than a 1,000 years.

As systems of belief that weave diverse perceptions of the universe into


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some kind of coherent whole, there were similarities but also discerniblecontrasts between European and Chinese cosmologies and it is arguablythe case that the wedge into Western cosmology that widened between thetimes of Copernicus and Newton placed investigations into the compre-hension and manipulation of the natural world upon a more systemic andefficient basis for technological innovation.

This 'hypothesis', currently under debate among historians of science,cannot be construed to suggest that the accumulation of useful knowledgein China had been restrained from the beginnings of the Empire. Clearly(as Needham and his school have demonstrated), that had not been thecase. And, as Mark Elvin observed, the Chinese were nothing other thanalmost entirely cognizant of (if not familiar with) the several methods andstyles of investigation adopted for the study of natural phenomena in theWest.

Furthermore, only historians of particular problems or proto-sciencescould detect and somehow sum up changes at frontiers of knowledge whereChinese levels of comprehension and potential for advance really laggedbehind the West. The list of extant examples (which includes geometry,cartography, anatomy, astronomy and the use of scientific instruments)was never that long. On the basis of an established cosmology andindigenous institutions and traditions for enquiry, the Chinese continuedto add to their own and the world's stock of useful and reliable knowledge.Neither intellectual stasis nor any deep-seated cultural antipathy to learnfrom and adapt advanced Western knowledge (offered to the Chinese stateas part of a culturally unacceptable package of religious moral and naturalphilosophy by Jesuit missionaries) can be represented as an incontrover-tible or highly significant part of scholarly answers to Needham'simportant question of why. China failed to keep up with the pace set bythe West for the accumulation of knowledge from the times of Copernicusonwards.

Tim Brooke, Dennis Twitchett, Jonathan Spence and Jean Genet, BenElman, John Henderson and other historians of Chinese intellectualtraditions are currently constructing a narrative to suggest that 'promising'developments in Confucian thought in both moral and natural philosophyoccurred in the late Ming period, and may well have been cut short by theprolonged and protracted takeover of the empire by Manchu armies after1644. They and other global historians are suggesting that decline of theEast allowed for the rise of the West. Certainly, there seems to have beenwidespread destruction during this dynastic takeover by the Qing regimeand sufficient and cultural repression for some time thereafter to providesupport for the thesis of a lost cosmological moment in the long history ofthe empire.

Needham's Unanswered QuestionEurocentric and other historians from backgrounds in comparative historymay remain more impressed with Needham's view that 'China wasovertaken by the exponential growth of modern science' and by Mary


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Wright's classical study and its conclusion that 'obstacles to the adaptionto the modern world was not imperialist aggression or the accidents ofhistory, but nothing less than the constituent elements of the Confuciansystem itself.

From several perspectives (which are shared by many Chinese scholars)is the view that what counted against China in its always difficultendeavours at unpropitious times to move onto a learning curve for theaccumulation of knowledge comparable to the West was China's longtradition of success as an empire, reinforced by a set of cosmological-cum-political constraints that can be ranked for discussion and future researchunder the heading of Needham's Puzzle. At the top of that agenda forhistorical research must be the Chinese stance of incredulity towards theparadigm that had gripped the imagination of European naturalphilosophy, namely that all natural phenomena, including the humanbody, could be investigated, comprehended and interrogated as cases orinstances of universal laws of nature. Furthermore, these laws (whichexplained how and why things operated as they did) were themanifestations of the intelligent designs of a divine creator. They couldbe exposed by transparent experimental methods and explicatedrigorously in mathematical language. Natural laws that could berepresented as divine in origin provided the West with a cosmology anda culture for elites of aristocrats, merchants, industrialists and craftsmenthat rested on an acceptable, unproveable, but ultimately progressivesupposition that God created a natural world that was rational andexplicable, that its tendencies to afflict the lines of people's everywherecould be fixed or ameliorated and that matter could be manipulated toprovide technologies to raise the productivities of labour.

Confucian cosmology neither restrained nor promoted the interrogationof nature or the search for technological solutions to problems ofproduction. What it did not provide for, even during the continuedeconomic advance of the Qing empire, was that powerful promotionalconfidence that entered into the cultures of Western elites of a naturalworld that was the rational and explicable work of their God. As Needhamobserved, 'there was no confidence that the codes of nature could be readbecause there was no assurance that a divine being had formulated a codecapable of being read'. His point is intact and remains open for researchand discussion.

Bibliography of Books and Articles ConsultedM. Adas, Machines and the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of

Western Dominance (Ithaca, 1989).S. Adshead, China in World History, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 1995).S. Adshead, Tang China, the Rise of the East in World History (Basingstoke,

2004).D. Aldcroft and A. Sutcliffe (eds), Europe in the International Economy 1500-

2000 (Cheltenham, 1999).S. Amin, Eurocentrism (New York, 1989).


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M. Bagioli, Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago, 1993).M. Bagioli (ed.), The Science Studies Reader (New York, 1999).E. Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy (London, 1964).J. D. Barrow, The Universe that Discovered Itself (Oxford, 2000).C. Bayly, The British of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Oxford, 2004).S. A. Bedini (ed.), Patrons, Artisans and Instruments of Science (Aldershot,

1999).R. Bin Wong, The Chinese State and Useful Knowledge: Criteria,

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(London, 1982).T. Brook, 'Communications and Commerce', in D. Twitchett and F. Mote

(eds), Cambridge History of China, Vol. 8 (Cambridge, 1998).T. Brook, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991).T. Brook and G. Blue (eds), China and Historical Capitalism, Genealogies and

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(Oxford, 2005).V. Bulloush (ed.), Universities, Medicine and Science in the Medieval West

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Philosophy, 1997, 4: 395-407.A. Crombie, 'Commitment and Styles of European Scientific Thinking', in

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Europe 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1996).P. Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences (Basingstoke, 2001).G. Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Developments c. 2000BC—

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Early Modern Culture (Princeton, 1994).B. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China

(Berkeley, 2000).B. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology (Cambridge, 1984).B. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550-1900 (Cambridge,

MA, 2005).B. Elman and A. Woodside (eds), Education and Society in Late Imperial China

1600-1900 (Berkeley, 1994).


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M. Elvin, 'Chinese Cities since the Sung Dynasty', in M. Abrams and A.E. Wrigley (eds), Towns and Societies (Cambridge, 1978).

M. Elvin, 'Vale Atque Ave', in K. Robinson (ed.), Science and Civilization inChina, Vol. 7.2 (Cambridge, 2004), 1-18.

D. Faure and T. T. Liu (eds), Town and Country in China (Basingstoke,2002).

A. Feuerwerker, State and Society in 18th Century China (Ann Arbor, 1976).J. V. Field and F. A. James (eds), Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists,

Scholars and Craftsmen in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993).H. Floris Cohen, 'Science', in D. R. Woolf (ed.), A Global Encyclopaedia of

Historical Writing (New York, 1998), 816-19.H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry

(Chicago, 1994).J. Gascoigne, Science, Politics and Universities in Europe (Aldershot, 1998).S. Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture (Oxford, 2006).J. Genet, A History of Chinese Civilization, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1996).Global Economic History Network, unpublished papers presented by F.

Cohen, K. Davids, S. R. Epstein, J. Goldstone, R. Iliffe, J. Liu, B.Wong and H. Zurdorfer to conferences 4 and 9 on the GEHN website:www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economichistory/GEHN.

D. Goodman and C. Russell (eds), The Rise of Scientific Europe 1500-1800(London, 1991).

J. Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive Systems of Marriage andFamily in Pre Industrial Societies of Eurasia (Cambridge, 1990).

E. Grant, Science and Religion from Aristotle to Copernicus 400 BC—AD 1550(Baltimore, 2004).

J. S. Gregory, The West and China since 1500 (Basingstoke, 2003).L. Guohao et al. (eds), Explorations in the History of Science in China

(Shanghai, 1982).A. R. Hall, Historical Essays on the Relations of Science, Technology and Medicine

(Aldershot, 1994).J. B. Henderson, Scripture, Cannon and Commentary (Princeton, 1991).J. B. Henderson, The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology (New

York, 1984).J. Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science, 2nd edn

(Basingstoke, 2001).M. Hodgson (ed.), Rethinking World History: Edmund Burke, III (Cambridge,

1993).C. O. Hucker (ed.), Chinese Government in Ming Times (New York, 1969).T. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West

(Cambridge, 1993).I. Inkster, Science and Technology in History: An Approach to Industrial

Development (Basingstoke, 1991).M.Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Modern West (Oxford, 1997).A. Janison, 'Technologies Theorists: Conceptions of Innovation in

Relation to Science and Technology Policy', in Technology and Culture,1989, 30: 505-33.


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A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print Knowledge in the Making (Chicago,1998).

J. Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 1998).M. Kranzberg (ed.), 'Science and Engineering', in a special issue of

Technology and Culture, 1961, 2(4): 305-91.V. Lai, The History of History, Politics and Scholarship in Modern China (New

Delhi, 2003).D. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York, 1998).D. C. Lindberg (ed.), Science in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1978).D. C. Lindberg (ed.), The Beginnings of Western Science: The European

Scientific Tradition in Philosophical Religious and Institutional Context 600 BCAD 1450 (Chicago, 1992).

D. C. Lindberg and R. L. Numbers (eds), God and Nature (Berkeley, 1986).D. C. Lindberg and R. S. Westman (eds), Reappraisals of the Scientific

Revolution (Cambridge, 1990).J. Liu, 'Cultural Logics for the Regime of Useful Knowledge, during Ming

and Early Qing China c. 1400-1700', History of Technology, 2009: 29-56.G. Lloyd and N. Sivin, Adversaries and Authorities, Investigations into Ancient

Greek and Chinese Science (Cambridge, 1996).G. Lloyd and N. Sivin, The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early

China and Greece (New Haven, 2002).G. Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges, Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West

(Edinburgh, 1981).J. McClellan and H. Dorn, Science and Technology in World History

(Baltimore, 1999).J. Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena (Princeton, 2002).J. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress

(Oxford, 1990).S. L. Montgomery, Science in Translation, Movements of Knowledge through

Cultures and Time (Chicago, 2000).B. Moran (ed.), Patronage and Institutions, Science, Technology and Medicine at

the European Court (Woodridge, 1991).D. Mungello, The Great Encounter, China and the West 1500-1900 (Oxford,

1999).S. Nakayama and N. Sivin (eds), Chinese Science: An Exploration of an Ancient

Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1973).S. Naqvin and E. S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New

Haven, 1988).B. Nelson, On the Roads to Modernity, Conscience, Science and Civilizations

(Towota, 1981).B. Nelson, 'Sciences and Civilizations, East and West', in R. Seeger and R.

Cohen (eds), Philosophical Foundations of Science (Dordrecht, 1974).D. F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: the Divinity of Man and the Spirit of

Invention (London, 1999).J. North, The Fontana History of Astronomy (London, 1994).P. K. O'Brien (ed.), Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe (Europe,

2001).


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R. Olson, Science Deified and Science Defied, the Historical Significance of Sciencein Western Culture, Vol. 2 (Berkeley, 1990).

W. O'Malley (ed.), The Jesuits, Cultures, Sciences and the Arts 1540-1773(London, 1999).

M. Ostler (ed.), Science in Europe 1500-1800: A Secondary Sources Reader(Basingstoke, 2001).

A. Pacey, Technology in World Civilization (Oxford, 1990).A. Peyrefitte, The Immobile Empire (New York, 1992).K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, Europe and the Making of the Modern

World (Princeton, 2000).W.-Y. Qian, The Great Inertia (Becketon, 1985).E. S. Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ching China (Ann Arbor, 1979).T. G. Rawski and L. M. Li (eds), Chinese History in Economic Perspective

(Berkeley, 1992).D. Reynolds, 'Redrawing China's Intellectual Map: Images of Science in

Nineteenth Century China', Late Imperial China, 1991, 12(1): 27-61.P. S. Ropp (ed.), The Heritage of China (Berkeley, 1990).P. Rossi, The Birth of Modern Science (Oxford, 2000).G. Rozman, Urban Networks in Ching China and Tokugawa Japan (Princeton,

1973).G. Rozman (ed.), The East Asian Region, Confucian Heritage and its Modern

Adaptations (Princeton, 1991).U. Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2005).V. Ruttan, Technology, Growth and Development: An Induced Innovation

Perspective (New York, 2001).M. Sahlins, Culture in Practice, Selected Essays (New York, 2000).H. Selin (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Science, Technology and History of Medicine in

Non-Western Cultures (Dordrecht, 1997).S. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1994).N. Sivin, Science in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections (London, 1995).G. W. Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977).J. M. H. Smith, Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History (Oxford, 2005).R. J. Smith, China's Cultural Heritage, the Ch'ing Dynasty 1644-1912 (London,

1983).J. Spence, The Chan's Great Continent, China in Western Thought (New York,

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1964).R. Temple, The Genius of China: 3000 Tears of Science, Discovery and Invention

(London, 1999).S. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, the Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago, 1990).D. Twitchett and F. Mote (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Vols 7 and

8 (Cambridge, 1998).P. Wood (ed.), Science and Dissent in England 1688-1945 (Aldershot, 2004).M. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism (Stanford, 1957).D. Yang, 'China's Traditional Mode of Thought and Science', Studies in

Chinese Philosophy, 1990-91, 22(2): 43-62.


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J. Young, Confucianism and Christianity, the First Encounter (London, 1983).M. Zelin et aL, Contracts and Property in Early Modern China (Stanford, 2004).H. Zurndorfer, 'La Sinologie Immobile', Etudes Chinoises, 1989, 7(2): 99-

120.H. Zurndorfer, 'Learning, Lineages and Locality in Late Imperial China',

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2005, 35: 209-37.

Note* I am honoured that the editors have invited me to contribute a historiographical

introduction to this special issue of the History of Technology devoted to the publication ofexemplary research, concerned with the comparative histories of science and technology inChina, India, Islam and Japan. I am indebted to all my colleagues who participated inGEHN (Global Economic History Network, 2003-06) for the education they supplied thatenabled me to construct this essay.


28

Cultural Logics for the Regimeof Useful Knowledge during

the Ming and Early-QingChina c. 1400-1700

J E R R Y C.-Y. L I U

ABSTRACT

Few would dispute that Europe had triumphed over China materially,scientifically and technologically in modern world history, althoughhistorians are still debating about the precise date, causes and courses.Global economic historians today ascribe China's 'failure' of achievingan equal level of scientific and technological progress to its inability increating, innovating, accumulating, transferring and diffusing suffi-cient useful and reliable knowledge, and to convert such knowledgeinto substantial material growth. A cultural historian who chooses toengage with the problem seriously, however, tries to avoid and neutral-ize the European triumphalism by contextualizing the outer culturalambiances and identifying the inner cultural logics for the Ming andearly-Qing China's 'non-doings' in systematically institutionalizing 'use-ful and reliable' knowledge.

Taking a cultural approach, the paper provides first a broad sketchof the regime of knowledge as a whole, and draws from it the regime of'useful knowledge' during the Ming and early-Qing China. Throughthe historical mapping of the well developed network of sites of knowl-edge production and reproduction (interconnected official, inde-pendent schools and libraries and intellectual circles), as well as thestorage, diffusion and categorization of knowledge in £.1400-1700, itsuggests that factors of imperial polity, sites of knowledge productionand reproduction, scientific and technological institutions alone can-not explain the Ming and early-Qing China's 'failure' in adopting ef-fectively useful knowledge. Rather, by deriving the cultural logics of theregime of useful knowledge, the paper illustrates how cultural motives,collective mentality, cosmological assumptions and style of thought


Cultural Logics for the Regime of Useful Knowledge

may play a significant role in defining the 'usefulness' and 'uselessness'of a certain genre of knowledge. The paper identifies the cultural lo-gics through studies of the Ming and Qing Chinese scholars' prefacesand postscripts to works of useful knowledge on medicine, agriculture,astronomy, calendar, commerce, mathematics, geometry, art of war,statecraft, weather forecast, botany, zoology, ethnology, topographyand craft skill. Our analyses suggest the potent influence of China'spro-humanistic way of thinking upon internal and external encountersof useful knowledge during the Ming and early-Qing era.

INTRODUCTION

China had once led Europe in science, technology and material growthafter the fall of the Romans to as late as the thirteenth or fourteenthcentury. Yet, most also agree that Europe had triumphed over China, atleast after the nineteenth century, based on the direct testimony of theencounters of the two great civilizations. In the 1840s, China couldhardly stand on its feet defending against the European invasions,whether the cause was Western opium or cannons. Global economichistorians today ascribe China's 'failure' of achieving an equal level ofscientific and technological progress to its inability in creating, innovat-ing, accumulating, transferring and diffusing sufficient useful and reli-able knowledge, and to convert such knowledge into substantial mate-rial growth. Only the precise period, causes and courses for the Euro-Chinese divergence in material progress are still under debate.

Many (Sinocentric) historians, however, 'regard such a program forresearch in comparative history as contaminated by a potential (andpossibly by an agenda) for the construction of yet another meta-narrative of Western triumphalism'.1 Some consider the question mal-posed, since 'China's economy, policy and culture had developedalong its own path dependant trajectories', which had been very differ-ent from or even contradictory to the scientific or material centred(Eurocentric) one.2 A cultural historian who chooses to engage withthe problem seriously, however, tries to avoid and neutralize the Euro-pean triumphalism by providing the Chinese regime of knowledge aspecific cultural-historical context. Such an engagement is significantin two senses. First, it is important to look into the established regimeof knowledge in the Ming and early-Qing China, to depict the well de-veloped intellectual networks of knowledge production, reproduction,storage and diffusion. There is the un-negligible fact that the Chineseregime of knowledge had been vivid and energetic before the greatencounters. The sites of knowledge production include an intercon-nected official and independent school and library system at the capi-tal, prefecture and sub-prefecture levels during the Ming and QingChina. The diffusion of ideas was achieved through the communica-tion of central and local official apparatus and publishing houses. Asintellectuals travelled for the itinerant public lectures and civil exams,


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and the state mobilized local artisans for public constructions, usefulknowledge also flowed. In other words, there existed an establishedorder of knowledge control and a vast amount of knowledge that wasconsidered as 'useful' and important was produced, innovated, accu-mulated and diffused through the regime of knowledge.

Secondly, given the well established intellectual networks and abun-dant knowledge production in the Ming and early-Qing China, but notso well achieved scientific and technological progress, it suggests that,besides the educational institutions, libraries and intellectual networks,some links are missing in explicating China's relative underdevelop-ment. Here, the economic and cultural historians may ask the samequestions: What is the mechanism of selection and perception of 'use-ful' knowledge? Why was a certain category of knowledge consideredmore useful and important than others, hence worth generating anddiffusing? Why was scientific and technological knowledge not recog-nized as systematically useful and not adopted even for the ultimatesocio-political aims of the leaders in China? And why was it not inno-vated to reach its high/wide level of usefulness? To us, there are cer-tain logics underlying such regimes of knowledge production, accumu-lation and diffusion. The central task of a cultural historian thus is tocontextualize the outer cultural ambiances and identify the inner cul-tural logics for China's 'non-doings' in systematically institutionalizingthe 'useful and reliable' knowledge during the Ming and early-Qing era(c. 1400-1700). Through studies of the Ming and Qing Chinese schol-ars' prefaces and postscripts to works of useful knowledge on statecraft,art of war, medicine, agriculture, astronomy, calendar, mathematics,geometry, weather forecast, botany, zoology, ethnology, topographyand craft skill, etc., the paper aims to identify how, in reality, Chinesescholars and intellectuals visualized their knowledge environment. Ouranalyses suggest the potent influence of China's pro-humanistic way ofthinking upon internal and external encounters of useful knowledgeduring the Ming and early-Qing era.

REGIME OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE MING AND EARLY-QING CHINA

The Official and Independent Educational SystemChina had developed a mature education system by the time of theMing Dynasty. The Ming state divided its administrative system into 13provinces and two municipal capitals (not including the ethnic minori-ties at the Chinese peripheries), which were subdivided into 393 pre-fectures (called Ju (Jf?) or zhou (M)) and 1,171 counties by 1382. Acounty could have as many as 20 cantons (xiang (£|$)), although theaverage was about eight.3 In order to train those young talents intoloyal civil officers, the founding emperor of the Ming, Zhu Yuan-Zhang, made a great effort in promoting the official schools and thecivil examination system. At the central level, the Ming founded the


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Cultural Logics far the Regime of Useful Knowledge

state universities, or guozijian (Hîs), in the two capitals, while localofficial schools were also set up at the prefecture, county and even can-ton levels. In 1423, the guozijian in Nanjing alone had 9,900 students.Students and teachers in the official schools received monthly stipendsfrom the state, and were provided with staple food, fish, meat and high-quality clothes. Apart from classic learning and history, the officialschools also taught subjects like imperial laws and judicial procedures,statecraft, mathematics and archery.4 The official schools were strictlysupervised by the central and local governments both in the content ofteaching and in administration.

The other important school system in China was the independentteaching institutes that were called shuyuan (Hl?^), whose origin maybe traced back to the Tang and Song dynasties. The Chinese shuyuanswere either founded by private owners, local officials and retiredscholar-gentries, or they were jointly invested by local governments andprivate owners. Although, during the Ming times, more than 60% ofshuyuans were established, owned or renovated by local officials andtheir disciples,5 they were independent from the official school systemin respect of teaching and administration. In most cases, the Ming shu-yuans were managed by private owners or school principals who wereemployed by, but not subjected to, the instructions of local officials.They received both private and official donations of money, books andsometimes even tenure lands. During the Jiajin (^$R) period (1522-66), there were up to 1,239 shuyuans in China. In Jiangsu provincealone, there were more than 18 of these independent teaching insti-tutes and, in Anhui province, 39 shuyuans were renovated in the Jiajinera. During the Qing China, the number of shuyuan rose to more than1,900. One of the key differences between official schools and shuyuanswas the spirit of free lectures. Only a few of the Chinese shuyuanstaught subjects that were directly related to the state civil examinationsystem. Many of them criticized the current affairs, educational policyof official schools or even lectured against the doings of state officers.6

Such is the reason why the Ming state, though unsuccessfully, hadmade many attempts to destroy or even eliminate all the shuyuans.Thus, the first picture we have for the Ming regime of knowledge isthat there was an interconnected network of more than 2,700 officialand independent schools (not counting the canton schools) within theMing territory in the early fifteenth century.

Knowledge Production, Classification and StorageAs O'Brien rightly notes, the sheer volume of publications of MingChina looks impressive, although it was dominated by editions, com-mentaries and elaborations on classical texts in moral philosophy (theanalogue of theology and scripture in European publishing), followedby literature (plays, poetry, stories), as well as numerous gazettes, al-manacs and manuals concerned with statecraft (administrative andjudicial procedures) .7


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Jerry C. -Y. Liu

Between 1403 and 1408, the Ming court compiled the largest andthe earliest encyclopaedia of the world. The Encyclopaedia of Yong Lecollected some 8,000 pieces of work of different kinds from around theempire, and they were subdivided into 22,937 juans (^).8 The bibliog-raphy of the encyclopaedia contained 'useful' knowledge on: geogra-phy, agronomy, hydrology, botany, zoology, natural history, medicines,optics, acoustics, pharmacology, silk, sugar, paper, printing, minerals,metals, chemicals, paints, glass, borax, dyes, alum, navigation, tides andwinds, etc.

The Ming and Qing works on statecraft, which include a vast amountof useful knowledge, should not be overlooked. A brief survey of theheadings in the works of statecraft summarize the key genres of 'practi-cal' knowledge of the Ming and Qing scholars: (1) Sacred (or Confu-cian) teachings, rites and ancestral instruction: The ruling principles ofan emperor, on masters and colleagues, sacred teachings, the ancestralinstructions, self-cultivation, ritual ceremonies, courtesies to the sub-jects; (2) Reclining luxuries, pleasures and tributes: Heresy and reli-gious preferences, inspection tours, pleasures, tributary gifts, extra la-bours and exploitations; (3) Judiciary, honouring decency and im-peaching misconducts: Correcting infringement, assisting integrity, jailand criminal, discipline, honouring loyalty and merits, treacherous of-ficials and powers, impeachment; (4) Civil service and current affairs:Orders, state affairs, current policies, responding strategy, employment,accepting advises, selecting the able, assessment, civil service system; (5)Finance and taxation: Financial expense, taxation, labours, horse trad-ing policy, land cultivation, taxation on salt, currency; (6) Infrastruc-ture, welfare and social orders: Rivers and canals, water transportations,topography, famine and relief, good storage, astronomy and calendar,schools, customs, pacifying bandits, constructions and buildings; (7)Military and security: Military preparation, frontier defence, art of war,punitive expedition, river defence, coastal guards, pacifying and admin-istering the foreigners; (8) Feudal awards and palace affairs: Crownprince, queens and concubines, suzerain and vassals, awarding nobletitles, collateral relatives of the emperor, eunuch.9

As Fu rightly argues, unlike the classification of knowledge in themodern era, which systematically organizes knowledge according to thedevalued utilitarian logics of different academic disciplines, the ancientChinese categorization of knowledge paid little attention to such aca-demic utilitarianism. In contrast, the principles of knowledge categori-zation in traditional China had been that of meaning and function ofcertain knowledge, and that of conformity of knowledge to people'srecognition of reality. In other words, the traditional categorization ofknowledge in China focused, first, on the profoundness of values orimplications that a given genre of knowledge might bring about topolitics and the day-to-day life practices. Secondly, the arrangement forthe order of knowledge had to conform to people's recognition ofreality. The importance of historic figures and events needed to be


33


reflected in their orders of appearance in an edited book. Thus, an-cestral instructions and sacred teachings always precede statecrafts;thoughts of saints and sages go before knowledge of astronomy andtopography; and accounts for lives of emperors headed those of civilofficers and local merchants.10 Knowledge and even the classification ofknowledge cannot be lifted above the existing structure of cultural val-ues in ancient China.

As for publishers, according to the calculation of Tu Xin-Fu's(tfcff £^) General Records of the Ming Wood Block Carvings (^ftfiS^!l^^),there were at least 4,993 wood block printing publishing houses in theMing China. Counting five wood block carvers in each of the bookpublishers, it then amounted to 25,000 carvers during the Ming period,who were mainly scattered over the Suzhou, Xinan, Beijing, Nanjing,Hangzhou and Jianyang areas.11 The Ming regime of knowledge cer-tainly looks prosperous in knowledge production.

Book depositary infrastructure in China was composed of four mainsystems, namely the official (central and local) school library collec-tion, privately owned library (cangshulo (HcH®)) collection, monasticlibrary collection and shuyuan library collection. Yung-Lo emperorseemed to value books far more than jewelleries. In 1404, the emperorordered the Minister of Rites Zheng Si (H|$I§) to send those who knowbooks well to search and purchase scattered books from the folk. Hecommanded:

Do not bargain with the civilian about the price of the book, justoffer whatever they want and bring back those rare books .... Thefolk people accumulate gold and jade for their sons and grand-sons, I on the other hand collect these books for my offspring. Thevalue of gold and jade is limited, yet is there a price for thesebooks?12

Brook has rightly pointed out that '[i]mperial distribution initiated thecollections of books that most schools had, but commercial circulationenabled them to grow beyond the canonical core'. When Chen Feng-Wu (1475-1541), the Huguang Education Intendant, looked over thecatalogue of books in the Wuchang prefectural school in 1505, 'he wasdismayed to find "only the editions of the classics issued by the court,but neither the writings of the philosophers nor the histories'". So,Chen sent someone to Nanjing to buy commercial presses of classics,histories, the writings of the philosophers and literary collections tosupplement the collections.13 Book collections and storages in the in-dependent shuyuans and private cangshulos libraries had almost becomea vogue and riches to be chased for the retired officials and local gen-tries. Monasteries, too, collected numerous numbers of sutras and con-tributed to the important site of knowledge storage. However, oneshould note that the book depositary system during Ming and early-Qing China had emphasized the storage, in a passive sense of accumu-lation, of books far more than the real utilization and circulation of


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Jerry C. -Y. Liu

books (knowledge). In most cases, only civil officers, students in theofficial school or shuyuan and monks in the monastery were allowed toaccess to the books stored in these libraries.

The Intellectual Networks and Knowledge DiffusionApart from the civil examination that connected all the official schools,the independent teaching institutes, shuyuans, had developed amongthem a well established 'system of public lecture meeting (1SW0JS)'in the middle of the Ming. With the promotion and participation ofsome famous Ming scholars, like Zhan Ruo-Shui (^^/R), Wang Shuo-Ren (HrvfO and Zou Shuo-Yi (I|5^^), such a system of public lecturemeetings flourished and was widely applied in the county and provin-cial levels during the Ming period. As the name of the public lecturemeeting indicates, these meetings were systematically organized aca-demic activities among the Ming intellectuals. They were held regularlyin public, and the participants were not limited only to students ofthose shuyuans. Many scholars, local gentry and even common peoplewould travel for hundreds of miles to attend the public lecture meet-ings. The lecture meetings might be held inside or outside the shu-yuans; on many occasions, they had attracted up to thousands of par-ticipants.14

The Regulations of Lecture Meeting of Dong-Lin Shuyuan, of 1604,provide more detailed information about how the public lecture meet-ings were organized. Key points of the regulations were extracted andtranslated as follows:15

The grand meeting is to be held once a year, either in the springor autumn. The exact date should be decided when the timecomes nearer. Only the announcement and invitations should besent half a month in advance. The minor meeting is to be heldevery month except for January, June, July and December .... Eachmeeting will last for three days. People may come voluntarily, andno individual invitations are needed .... The grand meeting shouldelect one Chairperson every year to preside over it. And the minormeeting should elect one Chairperson every month to preside overit .... In every meeting, one speaker is elected to lecture over onechapter taken from the Four Books. Apart from that, the lecturemeeting takes questions when there are questions being raised,and discussions would be welcome when the participants feel needto .... During the meeting day, in order to wash away the inertiaand to give more inspiration to the participants, it is proper to re-cite a poem or two after the long sitting .... The registry should beset up in every meeting. It registers the frequency of attendance ofthe students and scholars on the one hand, so as to check theirdiligence and laziness; and it registers the personal information ofthe outside participants on the other hand, so as to trace the ca-reers and whereabouts of the attendants, and take them as modelsor lessons in the future .... Participants coming from different


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provinces and counties should be arranged into a table of fourpeople for lunch. The meal includes two vegetable dishes and twomeat dishes. For dinner, six dishes of vegetable and meat disheswith some wine should be served.

Apart from Dong-Lin Shuyuan, many other big shuyuans, includingZi-Yang (HHf), Huan-Gu (M^) and Yao-Jiang ($fc£Q, all held theirregular lecture meetings monthly, seasonally and yearly at the county,provincial and inter-provincial levels. Famous speakers were invited foritinerant lectures, which had no doubt weaved among them an inter-connected network of intellectual communication.16 Chinese shuyuanshad actively sponsored the travels of the Ming and Qing intellectuals.Taking Bai Lu Dong Shuyuan (SH^tf^) as an example, between1644 and 1662, 100 out of its 800 taels budget was used to provide forthe travelling costs of the renown scholars annually. Distinguished in-tellectuals from distant locations would be paid 12 taels more peryear than the locals, if they were to study or research in Bai Lu DongShuyuan.17

In his A Study on the Schools of Ming Scholars (^flf^) of 1676,Huang Zong-Xi (Hr^H) documented 17 different schools of Mingacademics in the order of timeline. He listed more than 210 represen-tative figures of the 17 academic schools of thinking and summarizedthe stream of thoughts and their major works. The scholastic origins,founding masters and localities of the schools were evidently traced,and Huang even commented on individual schools of thinking to ac-count for the intellectual trends and their interrelations. Huang's studyagain provides a clear mapping of close intellectual networks amongscholars in the provinces of Jiangxi, Zhejing, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hu-guang, Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Henan and Huguang at the Mingtimes.18

Although there was not an open diffusion of scientific knowledgeand academies in China as such, a centralized bureaucracy, togetherwith local gentries, did serve a comparable function to the Europeanscientific communities of that time. A frequent change of serving lo-calities for civil officers was the common feature for Chinese govern-ments of all dynasties. The statistical data for the movements of 53,270civil bureaucrats at the county level in the Qing period provide strongevidence for such high-degree mobility. Accordingly, 74.1% of provin-cial magistrates (£DJ??f) and 78.8% of county magistrates (£P§!) in Qinglocal governments served a term of less than three years, and nearlyhalf of them stayed less than one. Within such position changes, 50%were simply swaps of serving locales.19 As Wong pointed out, when offi-cials moved to new posts, information about crops and agriculturaltechniques that was successful in the former jurisdictions was taken totheir new ones, with the hopes of persuading peasants to adopt them.Irrigation projects specifically and water control works more generallywere intimately enmeshed within particular ecologies. Handicraft tech-nologies were also promoted. Chen Hongmou, for instance, promoted


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sericulture in mid-eighteenth-century Shangxi by establishing 'silk-worm bureaus' in the provincial capital and a number of prefectures todemonstrate silk-weaving techniques.20 However, it should be notedthat, unlike the European scientists and technologists, who gatheredaround in scientific societies from time to time and engaged in serioustesting, debating, arguing and refining of useful knowledge, thereseemed to be very limited scholastic interactions among Chinese aca-demics of useful knowledge.

During the Ming period, the state registered around 300,000 heredi-tary artisans. Among them, 20% were stationed artisans, who mainlyserved in the Capital city area for the production of weaponry and mili-tary necessities, and the other 80% were artisans in shifts who werecalled up from their residential areas to serve in the Beijing and Nan-jing capitals for a term of 3 months every 3 years. In 1393, 62 differentprofessions of artisans were categorized into five different shiftingterms in order to meet the demands of various official departments.For instance, carpenters and tailors were called up every 5 years toserve for a period of 3 months; tilers, bricklayers, painters, blacksmithsand carvers were called up every 4 years; house builders, coppersmiths,weavers, dyers and brush pen makers were called up every 3 years;stonemasons, shipbuilders, oar makers, saddle makers, fan makers,wooden bucket makers, silversmiths, goldsmiths, pearl stringers andlocksmiths were called up every 2 years; and mounters, foundry work-ers, embroider makers, arrow makers, bow makers, lazurite makers,printers, earthenware kiln workers were called up every year. Duringthe Jiajin period (1522-66), the Ming state re-categorized the artisansinto 188 different professions. For those who were called up from a fardistance, it usually took them 3 or 4 months to travel.21 It logically fol-lows that useful knowledge of manufacturing would flow with migra-tions of skilled artisans, though this was diffused in a radiating webformat, which flowed among the two capitals and cantons. Based onsuch a powerful bureaucratic organization, China was able to overcomemany difficulties with the process of knowledge diffusion and sustaina remarkable advanced level of science and technology in many areas(such as agriculture, manufacture and astronomy) before the seven-teenth or even the eighteenth century.

CULTURAL AMBIANCES OF THE MING AND EARLY-QING KNOWLEDGE REGIME

Cultural Logics of Chinese Intellectual TraditionSocial, economic and political changes have to be understood throughvalues that were embedded in or planted into everyday life. There arecertain 'deeper logics' beneath cultural practices. By 'cultural logic' (orlogics), here, we mean a stable pattern of value presentation,22 which,at an individual level, resembles what Confucius described as an at-titude, manner or stance towards one's life that he could hold on


37


persistently to face the world.23 At a collective level, the logic of cul-ture is the way of thinking and behaving of a people, which, when it isaccumulated over time, may constitute the mean-system of a culture.We agree with Brook and Luong that culture or 'meaning systems areof great importance in relation to the material and political circum-stances of daily economic life, both in the microscopic analysis of hu-man action and in the macroscopic examination of system transforma-tion'.24 Hence, they must be brought back into the theorizing of theinteractive relations of culture and economy. With the cultural logics,people then formulate among them a collective mentality or worldview,which, when they were applied to the regime of knowledge, play a sig-nificant role in defining the 'usefulness' and 'uselessness' of the spe-cific genre of knowledge.

There exist disparate cultural logics in both Chinese and Europeanregimes of knowledge. In China, a 'pro-humanistic' cultural logic wasdeeply embedded in the intellectual tradition by the Ming times. Sucha moral, ethical and commonsensical-oriented way of thinking and be-having founded itself on the Confucian tradition, whilst it absorbed theBuddhist way of self-cultivation, Taoist mystic philosophy and a no-madic or peasant spirit of common sense at the same time. The Songscholars associated the Confucian concept of 'benevolence' with theTaoist metaphysical concept of Tao' and 'universe', which connectedthe nature of human reason with the law of natural phenomena, andinjected moral and ethical meanings into the natural law. The 'ration-alistic school' advocated the principle of 'unity of the natural and hu-manity', which affirmed the union of natural order and life philosophyin the Chinese worldview, and provided the basis for all interpersonalrelations. Neo-Confucian scholars in the middle and late Ming periodextended this moralized natural law even further. Wang Yang-Ming(1472-1528) asserted that human emotions, consciousness and com-mon feelings of people should be taken as the basis of an ethical sys-tem, for 'goodness' and 'sincerity' in fact came from the inner heart ofevery human being. In this sense, virtuous sages or holy man ratherthan God, spiritual ideology or supernatural powers became the modelfor people to follow.

The Song and Ming intellectual traditions provided solid philoso-phical ground for three analytical levels of the so-called 'common-sense', which, in turn, became the basic sources of Chinese culturallogics. Such a repository includes (1) the common or intuitive knowl-edge and obvious natural laws within the universe; (2) the commonfeelings of people or human emotions; and (3) the inner conscious-ness or sense of morality within a moralized world.25 Thus, it is impor-tant to note that 'natural laws' or 'natural science' in China differedhugely from that of the European tradition, for morality, ethic andhuman feelings or 'nature' under the principle of 'unity of the naturalworld and humanity' was indivisible from the 'ethic-freed or -neutralized natural world' at the very first instance. Chinese intellectual


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traditions up to the late-Ming period had been highly 'rationalized'.26

Such a pro-humanistic way of reasoning operated in a very different'natural context', which saw the wholeness of the natural world, ethicsand humanity not as a burden of knowledge, but as an inborn andrequisite integrity. As a benchmark of human reason, the pro-humanistic cultural logic stresses less the objective goal, profit orienta-tions or the scientific logic of a human behaviour. Rather, the case ofthe Neo-Confucianism in China during the Sui and Tang eras and laterthe Song and Ming periods deliberately emphasized the spirit of com-monness, the self-generating moral senses and the spontaneous flow ofhuman emotions. Differing from the dominant instrumental view inEurope,27 such a process prioritizes not the calculative, scientific orlogical articulation of interest for an individual or a specific group, buta general and sympathetic understanding of human desires, minds andfeelings as a whole. This humanistic course of rationalization con-sciously denied the 'intellectual escape' of pure reason from its integralmoral-ethical traits. It emphasized the fusion of the nature, inbornhuman morality and pragmatic profit calculation.

Cultural Ambiances of Regime of Useful KnowledgeThe existing inner cultural logics of Chinese intellectual traditions hadpotent influences upon the regime of useful knowledge during theMing and early-Qing China. Such logics permeate the outer culturalambiances of the regime, and generate certain conditions to the pro-duction and diffusion of useful knowledge. To have a more detailedportrait of the cultural ambiances of the knowledge regime, it is con-ducive that we conduct a broad survey of the prefaces and postscriptsof works on useful knowledge of statecraft, art of war, medicine, as-tronomy, agriculture and gardening, calendar, mathematics, geometry,climate, botany, zoology, ethnology, topography and craft skill. Sincethe preface and postscript of a book usually extract the essence of itscontent, explain the author's motives of writing, elaborate on the mainarguments and narratives of the book and provide the background in-formation of such narratives and the author's personal history, the in-vestigation may contribute to a better understanding of the specificcultural context in which the Ming and early-Qing scholars were situ-ated.28 The textual analyses may provide a critical mapping on the mo-tives and mindset of the authors or readers of these works, and revealthe underlying cultural logics of the regime of useful knowledge.

The cultural ambiances of the Ming and early-Qing regime of usefulknowledge can be contextualized in the following five analytical logics.

To Be Useful and Pragmatic in Knowledge ProductionPerhaps, the best terms to convey the character of the knowledge pro-ject in which the Ming and early-Qing Chinese intellectuals were en-gaged are 'jingshi zhiyong (IMtSlfcffl), which means to manage theworld or the age through classic learning so as to elaborate on its


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pragmatic efficacy. The standard term for a school library in the Mingis Zunjing Ge (Pavilion for Revering the Classics), which, together withCangjing Ge (Pavilion for Storing Classics), showed the attitude of theMing scholars towards Confucian classics and Buddhist sutras. Duringthe late Ming, there was a great shift in the study of Confucianism fromthe conventional exploration of the human mind and human nature tothat of the pragmatic utility of the classics. Prefacing his Collected RoyalMing Documents on Statecraft (MÎMffi^t^), Chen Zi-Long lamented that the intellectuals during his time learned no pragmaticknowledge, but produced an immense number of works on the verifi-cations and explanations of ancient texts. The scholars cared littleabout state policies concerning current affairs and the daily needs ofpeople, but spent most of their time refining the glossary and polishingthe sentences of literary works to make them look elegant andbeautiful'. To Chen, these works carried no practical efficacy, buthollow literary grace. Thus, he compiled the book of statecraft by re-ferring to the models of ancient sages and investigating the presentexperiences.29

The emphases on the notion of jingshi zhiyong are reflected in theemergence of a vast number of works concerning statecraft during thatperiod. The influential ones include Huang Xun's (Jlflfll) Collected RoyalMing Memorials of Famous Officials on Statecraft (M^ÊIMiPflS) of1551, Wan Biao's (plj^t) Royal Ming Collections of Works on Statecraft

of 1554, Feng Ymg-Jing's (MMsQRoyd Ming Compila-tion of Documents on Statecraft and Pragmatics (MÎStftJf ffllli) of 1603,Wan Ting-Van's (B$iW) A Brief Outline on Statecraft (£f tftliB§) of 1610,Chen Qi-Su's (|gC^fS) Royal Ming Selected Writings on Statecraft

of 1627, Chen Ren-Xi's (ffit^M) Royal Ming ExemplaryRecords on State Affairs (M^tSffi^) of 1630, and Chen Zi-Long et aledited Collected Royal Ming Documents on Statecraft of 1639. The purposefor these enormous collections was to enhance the understanding ofcivil officers and Confucian scholars about the operation of real poli-tics, in a sense that the classics can be very 'useful' in their practicalapplication to state affairs.

Explaining the relationship between classic learning, statecraft andthe pragmatics of knowledge, Wang Guo-Nan's (SHfii) wrote:30

One should manage the world with Tao and protect Tao with clas-sics. Classics are like the laws of natural phenomena and the warpof a loom in human society. Both are essential to the real worldand they reflect its pragmatic functions. Such basic laws of the realworld can be summarized as qian (fg) [the first divined tokenJnthe Book of Changes], which includes the four virtues of yuen (70)[beginning or sprouting in spring], heng (^f) [vigor and growth insummer], li (^fj) [collection or harvest in autumn] and [storage or consolidating the foundation in winter]. The pragmaticfunctions help to nurture, to grow, to harvest, and to preserve thenatural world. This is the so-called management.


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Chen Ren-Xi's (|5|{_Ji;) made it explicit that his Exemplary Records onState Affairs was meant to erect models for the later generations. Bycompiling scholastic works from self-cultivation to the coastal guardsystem, military preparation, judicial regulation and pacifying barbari-ans, Chen aimed to extend the practical functions of the classical textto its very extreme. As he stated:31

It [the book] promotes rites and music so as to reconcile the tiesbetween the natural world and men; it rectifies the calendar anddifferentiate the seasons so as to provide references and guidancefor self-cultivation; it shows the state's sympathy to people so as toconsolidate its foundation; it accumulates the resources so as toenrich the country; it emphasizes the punishments and judicialregulations so as to correct the custom; it keeps details of the canaland coastal guard system so as to enhance water communication; ittakes records of the behaving of prime ministers and famous offi-cials so as to set examples; it investigates into warfare so as tostrengthen military preparation; and it surveys the four barbariansso as to show the state's efforts of making conciliation.

Evidently, the Ming scholars had perceived the need to associate classiclearning with practical knowledge. As Feng Ying-Jing ($f]jKjJrO de-clared, 'all in all, talking is empty, and behaving is substantial. Idealsare hollow, and doings are practical. Without substance and practice,what would the emptiness attach to?'32 Such powerful cultural logics ofacademic pragmatism and efforts in the production of useful knowl-edge during Ming and early-Qing China cannot be overlooked.

Accumulative Innovation, Sharing and Diffusion of Useful KnowledgeThe second characteristic feature that can be extracted from the Mingscholars' writing of useful knowledge is that there had been definiteindividual creativity, serious attempts of accumulative innovation and astrong intention concerning the sharing of useful knowledge. TheMing intellectuals had been working in diligence and made their ef-forts to borrow the teaching from their predecessors and apply it to thecurrent situation. In the preface to the Records of the Unified Great Ming

, the Ming Emperor Ymg-Zong (51 ) expressed his will ofwidely diffusing the knowledge of topography so that the work 'notonly would impart my offspring and later generations the great accom-plishment of their ancestors and knowing to preserve it with caution,but it would also help the country's scholars with their investigation inverifying the facts of the past and present'.33

Qi Ji-Guang (EfflJS&fc), on the other hand, recorded his efforts on ac-cumulative innovation of useful knowledge. As he wrote in A RenovatingBook of Effective Practice (fS^/fll), 'it selects only those useful and ef-fective strategies [from previous works] to train the soldiers in respectsof personnel selection, placement of orders, military strategies, mobil-ity and camping, martial arts, post guarding and water battling'. The


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book is 'effective', as it records no empty words, but only real practices.And it is 'renovating' because it bases itself on the previous militarycodes but is not constrained by them.34 Feng Shi-Ke ($|Bvf nj) docu-mented in the Records of the Extensive Territory (Hf JHI5) that, on seeingthe over-complexity or incompleteness of earlier works on topography,his friend, Lu Ying-Yang (HJKRl), spent more than ten years travellingaround the country, collecting all possible information from otherbooks and his own experiences. Lu 'took up every detail of the Recordsof the Unified Great Ming, he researched and refined the work andeliminated all confusing information. Lu discarded the old records andbrought in the new intelligence'.35 Apart from those cases, Ku Yen-Wu(Hyfe3£) went through more than 1,000 provincial and county gazet-teers and completed his Records on the Exploitation of Territoriesin 20 years.36 In the preface of Dan Qian General Collection(which assembled refined studies and works of natural knowledge,such as astronomy, geography, climates, plants, animals, mineral andjewel mining, etc.), Yang Shen (tJIft) recorded that he had transcribedmore than 1,000 juans of works of others since he started writing. 'Ionly selected the essential one hundredth of earlier works, which I feelinspiring and innovative, and compiled them into four dan qian collec-tions [dan qian here is taken in its metaphoric meaning for refinedworks],' stated Yang.37

Li Tai (^S^f), in his Collective Explications of Climates in the FourSeasons (HB^^f^^^), claimed:

I scrutinized a vast amount of books in my spare time ... and com-piled this collection accumulatively. Although it does not reveal allthe profundity, it is certainly much more comprehensive than theprevious versions. I dare not to hide it in private; and I wish toshare it with friends and colleagues. If there is anything that I hadmissed, or had not explained clear enough, it is hoped that otherlearned scholars would contribute to improve it later on.38

All these clearly show the efforts at accumulative innovation and astrong will towards sharing useful knowledge during the Ming andearly-Qing China.

The Permeation of Moral-Ethical Teachings with Useful KnowledgeThe third analytical logic for the cultural ambiances of the Ming andearly-Qing China's regime of useful knowledge is the permeation ofmoral-ethical guidance with practical knowledge. Extending from thepro-humanistic cultural logics in the intellectual tradition, ethic andmorality served as the ultimate benchmark of the Chinese knowledgeregime. It left the pure pursuit of useful knowledge and its applicationto material progress not much ground for ethical justification, let alonebreaking away from all moral burdens. In other words, all knowledgeand professions were subordinated to the ethical order and shouldfind their own position. The terms jishi zhiyong express the Confucian


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commitment to applying practical solutions for improving the world,while carrying 'simultaneously a moral orientation, a repertoire ofpractical activity, and a category of knowledge'.39 Cultural logic, in thesense of reasoning from ethics, benevolence, hard working, social jus-tice, loyalty to the emperor and responsibility to the state and public,performed as underlying motives of Chinese scholars' acquisition ofuseful knowledge. Knowledge production, to be 'useful', had to carrycertain moral functions. Explaining the concepts of statecraft and thepragmatics of knowledge, Feng Ying-Jing argued that there could be adirect analogy between self-cultivation with virtue and state managing:40

To employ the talents beneath the heaven and maintain the orderof the world, that is what we mean by managing the age [or theworld]. People usually consider that only a seven foot tall humanbody is the physical body, but they did not know that the entireworld can be taken as a human body too. If they understand thatthe entire world can be taken as a body, then managing the worldis just like cultivating one's own body. A person needs to train thebody to become healthy; to behave in the principle of benevolenceso as to fulfill oneself and become a good governor. He needs torefine the inter-personal relations so as to meet the principles ofrites; to make good use of the material world so as to conform tothe principle of righteousness; and to foster capable people so thatthey would gain enough wisdom to undertake state affairs. And byachieving all these, the world would then function subtly.

Even the art of war had to conform to the moral principles. In Li Jin-Xhin's (^jHfj) preface to the General Principle to the Art of War

he wrote that 'the art of war is often full of villainousstrategies, constant changes and deceptions, which are certainly de-nounced by the Sages. Only this work tends to constrain itself with be-nevolence and righteousness that are just like the rules and yardsticksof a great artisan'.41 Similarly, Wang Cheng (zEll) prefaced to his ownAn Essential Outline of the Art of War (||S|g^£) in 1500 that:42

While writing this book I would extract the main principle by theend of each section, or summarize the key points after several sec-tions by my own judgments, sometimes to comment on the ances-tors' merits and demerits, and sometimes to express my own viewson it. All these are nothing but to help grow the enduring moralprinciples and to embed the established ethical rules; to value theChinese and devalue the barbarians; and to respect the virtuouspeople and despise the villains.

Ethnological works could not have escaped from the moral-ethicalspectacles of Ming intellectuals either. After Yan Cong-Jianhad completed his famous book of Comprehensive Records on Foreign Ter-ritories (^cJHt?$|) in 1574, he asked his Uncle Yan Qing (H?ff) topreface it. Yan Qing described that the book collected the diaries of


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travellers and gathered extensive information from envoys that weresent to other countries. However, what were valued most were not thedetailed descriptions about the great expeditions of Zheng He, theexotic experiences, foreign customs and ethnographical knowledge. AsYan Qing put it:

I read it in my spare time .... Since it sets the model for conciliat-ing the peoples and vassals in peripheral areas with generosity andtenderness, would this not be classified as one of the nine classicsbeneath the Heaven? I am pleased with that this book conforms tomy principle [of virtue] thus I wrote the preface to it.43

It seems evident that Chinese scholars had to work within a culturalframework, which preferred to praise moral reciprocity over pure pur-suit of useful knowledge. For most Chinese intellectuals, there wassomething far more important than practical knowledge and materialprogress. Even if it meant adjusting oneself to the world rather thanmastering the world, it was certainly necessary under such pro-humanistic logics.

Knowledge of Low Esteem: Irrelevant to Great Career in Civil ServiceThe fourth analytical point to be made about the outer cultural ambi-ances of the Ming's knowledge regime is the low esteem of the usefulknowledge producers. Describing the progress of knowledge duringthe late-Ming China, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) stated that Chinese'have not only made considerable progress in moral philosophy but inastronomy and in many branches of mathematics as well. At one timethey were quite proficient in arithmetic and geometry, but in the studyand teaching of these branches of learning they labored with more orless confusion'. However, Ricci concluded in his report: 'The study ofmathematics and that of medicine are held in low esteem, because theyare not fostered by honors as is the study of philosophy, to which stu-dents are attracted by the hope of the glory and the rewards attachedto it.'44 Ricci is probably right. Even the great Ming general, Qi Ji-Guang, had to justify his efforts on producing a military work. Qiwrote:45

The world often considers archery and horse riding as trivial skills,and the military arrays as a means to fool people. Do these peopleknow the fundamentals of the world? The Yellow Emperor's codewas rooted in the pettiness; the warfare of the Emperor Tang andWu was based on benevolence and righteousness. However, therise of the pettiness and the emergence of benevolence and right-eousness are originated from my mind.

When Zhao Shi-Zhen (i|±/M) presented his The Manual of CelestialWeaponry (pfjfglf) with all the military weapons he produced for theMing court, he was 'mocked by some officials for being chasing aftersecular names', as the work contained no elaborations of classical text


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and moral philosophy.46 And, after transcribing more than 1,000 juansof earlier works, Yang Shen expressed his anxiety in the General Collec-tion. 'Maybe it will be laughed at by great scholars, and be consideredas a petty route to learning. But am I not aware of that?'47 Spending 30years to work on his The Travels ofXu Xia-Ke (f^MîltlB), Xu Hong-Zu

received his commentary from Yang Ming-Shi (fJHSffij) that:48

Those ancient scholars, who were famous of their dedications to as-tronomy and geography, had collected abundant secrecies andcontemplated their profound subtlety. They visited the spaciouslandmass and probed into distant hidden places .... If not that onehad the extraordinary inquisitive disposition, who would be willingto step into the extreme dangers and go to areas in distant barrenonly to exhaust his vigor. Given this said, if their findings aresomehow verified by scholars and become helpful in broadeningthe eyesight of people, they would still serve some auxiliary func-tions.

To the Ming intellectuals, a brilliant scholar's 'extraordinary inquisitivedisposition' and decades of hard working on 'useful' knowledge couldonly become valuable when it served some supplementary functions toclassical learning. It is not difficult to perceive the traditional Chineseliterati frustration towards the unaccommodating mainstream intellec-tual atmosphere for the pursuit of a pure (value-free) technologicalknowledge. As the Ming technologist, Song Ying-Xing (5tc]J§M)j re-marked sarcastically, 'I would advise those brilliant literati, who arelonging for their great careers, to throw this book away from theirdesks, because this book is not going to have any tiny little relevance tothe achieving of their scholarly honour, or the pursuit of their officialranks'.49 Knowledge that was not helpful to pass the official civil examwas held as trivial and of low esteem. Many academics only took onresearch after they were relieved from official posts.

Retiring from his position, Wang Xiang (:E^) wrote in his Records onFragrant Flowers of Er Ru Pavilion (H^D^SÎ^) that:

Confucius said he was a lesser person than an old farmer and anold gardener. The secular people were astonished and stated thatfarming and gardening were but petty things for trivial people, agreat man should reconcile the spirit of Ying and Yang and put allthe beings of the world in order. What is the use of such a trivialthing?

Wang argued enthusiastically that he wrote the botanical book not onlyto contribute to the living of people and as a reminder of the impor-tance of the forgotten gardeners. And he had to defend himself by ask-ing those so-called great men whether they consider the farming andgardening trivial things to do, and whether the ancient sages had eversentimentally attached to official positions and fame.50


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Likewise, Li Shih-Ying ($0^^) prefaced to the Studies on the RareFlowers, Plants, Birds and Animals in China and Barbarian Countries

that the learned people usually contributedtheir knowledge to the world when they were in high positions, andthey tried to release their depression and angers through their articleswhen they were poor or unsuccessful:

I recall that when I travelled to my official post that was ten thou-sand miles away from the capital, there were so many rare flowers,plants, and unusual birds and animals that I cannot even namethem. I realized the profoundness of the world's wild species andfelt it a great pity that I did not know them before. Now that I haveread this book and would applaud for it.51

Obviously, many officials had produced works on useful knowledge topreoccupy themselves in order to get away from the depression andexperiences of an unsuccessful career. They then tried to justify theirown efforts on the studies of those 'petty' things or trivial knowledge.

'Unusual' Knowledge: Lack of Private Resources and Scholastic InteractionsThe fifth point is that the Ming and early-Qing scholars who worked onuseful knowledge such as weaponry, mathematics, astronomy, techno-logical instrument, craft skill, etc. were considered 'rare', 'extraordi-nary', 'unusual' or even 'abnormal'. For many, this rare knowledgeshould not bother the minds of brilliant scholars at all; some even ar-gued that it would be sufficient for the unusual people or foreigners toresearch it. Prefacing to the Compendium of Astronomic Inquiries

Ko Zhen-Shi (?LJ|B?F) wrote that, when seeing somethingrare, the ancient Chinese scholars used to exclaim in praise. But theyargue that 'for knowledge that fell outside the field of classical learn-ing, there will be foreigners rather than Chinese officials or scholars tostudy them'. It is not necessary for the Chinese scholars or classics torecord all those. Ko went on to explain that:52

Indeed I have met some unusual people who gave me books fromthe great West, and I was surprised by the remarkable articles andsubtle principles that were beyond our knowledge. I first learnedthese unusual things with curiosity. But when I pursued further, Irealized that there are natural laws that exist between the heavenand the earth. The western scholars discovered them, and the east-ern scholars read about them. However, it is not because the west-ern scholars were more capable of mastering the rare knowledge,but that the eastern scholars had never made real efforts in re-searching it. This book is one of the particular cases.

Wu Wei-Zhong (S^fu^) was not at all happy about the Ming scholars'reluctance to engage in the study of Western scientific and technologi-cal instruments. Timidity and shallowness of the Ming mandarins was


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his verdict. In the postscript of the Selected Illustrations of Rare Instrumentsfrom the Far West (^HW^HIÎt), Wu stated that:53

The very unusual things of the world are achieved by very unusualpersons. The unusual persons wonder about them, but the pettymandarin scholars are timid and shallow and they try to cover uptheir ignorance with the Doctrine of the Golden Mean. By stating thatif even the Doctrine of the Golden Mean cannot explicate them,wouldn't they be abnormal? However, if one can accept marvelousarticles in the literary circle; ingenious military moves on the bat-tlefield, unusual methods in geomancy, exceptional persons inhuman society, rare animals in the mountain and the ocean, andinexplicable phenomena of ghosts and gods, why can he not ac-cept rare things in instruments?

Apart from being classified as rare and abnormal people, the Ming re-searchers of useful knowledge, though creative and diligent, had beenworking very much alone; and they had few private resources and pa-tronage for research. After completing his famous piece, Song Ying-Xing wrote:

Recently I have written a book named The Exploitation of the Work ofNature. It is a pity that I am so poor that I do not have money tobuy some rare books and rare crafts to validate my writings. I wouldlove to invite people who share the same interest with me to discussand verify the correct ones from the mistaken ones, but I do noteven have a place to think about all these.54

Contrasting with the European case, it seems that private sites for theproduction of useful knowledge had been rare and relatively distantfrom one another, while private patronages for intellectuals who wereengaged in technological innovation had been limited and scarce dur-ing the Ming times. The scarcity of site and patronage for the innova-tion of useful knowledge is a fact, yet the root for such a shortage wasnot the institution's inability to mobilize sufficient resources and assets,but the society's underlying logic of the 'uselessness' of such knowl-edge.

The writings of the Ming technologists revealed that the ambiancefor the research of useful knowledge was certainly not warm at all.Unlike the case of vigorous debates of classical teachings that occurredduring the public lecture meetings of the Ming shuyuans, there lackedintimate interactions among scholars of useful technical knowledge.And there is no real evidence for the existence of any regular 'scientificsocieties' in the Ming China. Liu Shi-Xue (§[JtfcP) lamented the effortsof Zhao Shi-Zhen for his The Manual of Celestial Weaponry that:55

He has been pondering about the usages of linen and handling theworks of military instruments in the capital for decades, and noone seems to show any interest about them. Chang-Ji^j^f [Zhao]has been contemplating so seriously and working so diligently, yet


47


for decades he has got no one to share his expertise. When he metsome learnt persons by accident, he would try to test the essence ofhis findings by all means.

Similarly, Liang Zuo (^fe), although he admired the profound workof his teacher, Yang Shen (on Dan Qian Collections), grieved that 'thebook was published, and was treasured in the artistic and literary circle.The pity is that it is difficult for people to find it'.56 Chen Jin-Mo

also wrote in his Angle Measurement (J S!|) that the diagramsand explanations in the Western works are very clear and detailed.However, the minds of Chinese readers are perplexed because theireyes are blinded. They simply cover the books up and put them away inthe cabinets; therefore, only very few scholars have thorough under-standings about them.57

After 30 years of hard working, Li Shi-Zhen (^f£fj^) completed hisSystematic Pharmacopoeia (7^ ||S|@) in 1578, which was published laterin 1593. In 1596, Systematic Pharmacopoeia was presented to the Mingcourt by Li's son, who, however, received only a seven-word remarkfrom the emperor that the court should '[k]eep the book for refer-ence, and notice the Ministry of Rites'.58 Useful knowledge, althoughcreatively produced, after all, was not systematically researched andcollaboratively innovated during the Ming and early-Qing China as itwas in Europe.

CONCLUSION: <WHOSE' AND 'WHAT' USEFUL KNOWLEDGE?

So, why was scientific and technological knowledge not recognized assystematically useful for and by Chinese elites? And why didn't Chineseleaders adopt the 'useful knowledge' from Europe? Here, answers tothese questions can be addressed in four different respects. First, mostwill agree that the successful story of European material progress viathe production, innovation, accumulation and diffusion of usefulknowledge and its later application in scientific and industrial revolu-tion was by no means a pure teleological process. In other words, it isnot some brilliant intellectuals or one small group of social, politicalelites in the fifteenth or sixteenth century who had actually designedfor the entire progressive project, which brought about the dynamicconsequence of the mid-nineteenth century (despite that some, likeFrancis Bacon and later Joseph Priestly, did predict what would happenin the nineteenth century in terms of immense material progress thatwe find no equivalent in the Ming China59). The European story wasaccidental in the sense that it was an unexpected, if not unintended,consequence that was achieved in collaborations of hundreds andthousands of mutually unknown or even unrelated socio-political elites,scientists, merchants, artisans and experts of different professions.What they shared together was never a clear portrait of a future sce-nario in the nineteenth century, but the diffused scientific institutionsand a consequent routinization of European scientific culture. As Inkster


48

Jerry C. -Y. Liu

argues, the build-up of mental capital, or effective transfer and diffu-sion of knowledge and information through scientific communitiesand academies, had generated within Europe a particular cultural mi-lieu that was conducive to the scientific and technological inventionsand innovations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.60 Thatscientific cultural milieu was not found in contemporary China (al-though other forms of academic institutions were).

Secondly, it should be remembered that there had been a well estab-lished ethic-centric regime of knowledge (with a network of sites ofknowledge production, reproduction, storage, diffusion and classifica-tion) in China by the Ming times. The implication of the well estab-lished regime of knowledge is that, in strictly institutional terms, Chinawas more than ready to adopt and diffuse the (European) useful andreliable knowledge (science and technology) quickly, systematicallyand creatively through the existing intellectual networks. What waslacking, however, was the collective cognition or motive to do so. Whyshould things be changed if all seems to function well? The diffusioninstitutions and sites need more than assets; they need motivation. Thepro-humanist-based Confucian cultural logic in China, unlike a reli-gious-derived moral system in Europe, had never been challenged: notany artistic renaissance, not any sort of religious reforms, not thescientific disproval of the Earth as the centre of the Universe, and noteven the doubt of God's existence. Indeed, there had been innovativeworks of useful knowledge in the Ming and early-Qing China. Yet, un-der such an ethic-centric cultural milieu, it is difficult to alter or sur-pass the ultimate principle of value and moral judgment in the hierar-chical Chinese regime of knowledge. Science and technology in Chinawas not an end of its own, but a means to contribute to the ethic moral-based social order. Despite sporadic intellectual creativities of usefulknowledge, China simply didn't accumulate enough internal momen-tum to transform its knowledge regime fundamentally. It can be ar-gued that culture had been influencing the practice of socio-politicalelites by saturating into their way of thinking and by containing themwithin certain value systems, within which a decision-making process isset into cultural debates. To ask China to change would require an ex-tensive conversion of the collective psychology - what Reinert andDaast01 labelled as the 'gestalt-switch', or a fundamental change inMan's worldview or mindset, as a necessary condition.61 This only camelater, in the nineteenth century.

Thirdly, major external encounters of China with Europe in the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries did not seem to have posed enoughthreat for China to consider a fundamental reform of its pro-humanistic cultural logics, either. The Portuguese did not have thechance to meet Zheng He's fleets, yet they did meet his successors inthe sixteenth century. The Portuguese first arrived at a small islet out-side Guangdong in 1514, and then 1516 and 1517 under Fernao Perezd'Andrade and Tome Pires in the name of tribute, while applying, at


49


the same time, for trading permission. The first European embassy toChina was not a success. The Ming government demanded the evacua-tion of Malacca, which was then a tribute state to China. On Fires' re-fusal to discuss the question, he was imprisoned later in Guangdong(until he died in 1524), and the Portuguese were expelled by Mingnavies in 1522. It was by informal agreement, paying bribery and fullcustoms dues (20,000 taels per year) to local government that Portu-guese ships were allowed to dry their cargoes in Macao.62 On similargrounds, the Dutch were refused to trade with China in 1601. However,they soon came with navies in 1607, and were quickly driven back. In1622-24, the Ming imperial navy twice defeated the invading Dutchfleets (with the help of Portuguese, Spanish and the Jesuits) off China'ssouth coast at Macao and Amoy, and off the Pescadore Islands nearTaiwan.63 The Hollanders reluctantly turned to Taiwan and were none-theless ousted again by Zheng Cheng-Gong in 1662 after naval battles.It was not until 1729 that they were finally allowed to trade insideGuangzou by paying tribute every five years, which was deemed as areward for helping the Qing government to 'recover' Taiwan. In otherwords, before the eighteenth century, in military or technologicalterms, the Europeans could hardly cast any serious doubts to Chinesebureaucracy that there was a need to change its existing regime of use-ful knowledge. Despite the Renaissance, Reformation and ScientificRevolution, the Europeans were not powerful enough yet, or at leastwere unable to prove themselves as superior enough for the Chinese toinstigate a fundamental change in the persisting cultural form. Chinabefore 1800 was influenced very little by European political economy,by science and technology, and by Christianity. It held itself pretty welluntil the early nineteenth century.64

Lastly, it is probably an understatement that there was never a puretransfer of useful knowledge from Europe to China during the Mingand early-Qing times. The Jesuit activities in China may serve as an im-portant indicator here. Chinese intellectuals, though they did not con-sider science and technology as a major component in the cultural sys-tem, were, after all, not indifferent to it. Michael Ruggiero arrived atMacao in 1579 with clocks, and Matteo Ricci arrived in China in 1582,introducing astronomy, mathematics, physics and geography to theMing court. The Ming officials Xu Guang-Qi and Li Zhi-Zao, whoworked intensively with the Jesuits, not only improved the Chinese cal-endars, but also translated many of the European scientific works (suchas Euclides's geometry and Archimedes's physics) into China. TheQing emperor Kang-Xi learnt mathematics from the Jesuits, and evenasked T. Pereyra and J. Bouvet to give him lectures in person.65 None-theless, nothing was ever simply a matter of diffusion of knowledge.The Catholic priests who brought them these machines and knowledgewere salesmen of a special kind. They sought to convert the Chinese tothe one true Trinitarian God of the Roman Church, and the clocksserved a twofold purpose: entry ticket and argument for Christian


50

Jerry C. -Y. Liu

superiority.'66 Against the Christian doctrines, Nicolas Longogardi,Emmanuel Diaz Junior and Jean Adam Schall von Bell helped theMing court to build fire weapons and cannons in Beijing, and weredirectly involved in the wars with the Dutch.67 During the early-Qingperiod, the Jesuits even engaged heavily in palace politics. Despite theearly success, the effectiveness of the Jesuits missions was suddenlyparalysed from home for their acceptance of Chinese family rites andbeliefs for honouring ancestors, and their sinicizing of Christian teach-ing since Matteo Ricci. It prompted the papal condemnation in 1704(by Pope Clement XI) and later, in 1715 and 1742, of 'improper flexi-bility in "accommodating" Christian teaching to Chinese custom'.68

Cultural and moral supremacy was then an unquestioned part of themental world of the educated Chinese. The contradiction with suchfundamental Chinese cultural logic could only result in the emperorKang-Xi's decree (in 1710) that 'all missionaries must accept the Jesuitview or leave the country'. Following his father, and unsatisfied withthe Jesuit's interferences for his succession, the emperor Yong-Zhengbanned Christianity strictly in 1723. All priests and missioners were ex-pelled from China.69 Ostensibly, it was not the Chinese intellectuals oreven emperors who had no curiosity for European science and tech-nology, but the European missionaries and colonists in China hadnever kept power, war-likeness and their superior religion out of thepure diffusion of knowledge. Whilst Europeans were asking why themoral-ethical-commonsensical-based cultural logics and regime ofknowledge in China could not have developed by itself or beenadopted from the West's modern science and technology to reach itshigh level of usefulness, the Ming and Qing Chinese, on the otherhand, were asking why the Christian moral and ethical system couldnot have mastered their own science and technology, and why theEuropean regime of useful knowledge could not have formulated a'useful' moral-ethical system to constrain their aggressive expansion-ism and imperialist behaviours. In the Chinese cultural context, theinability to provide an adequate moral protocol only demonstrated theuselessness of European scientific and technological knowledge.

True that, with the nineteenth century, everything changed. The 100years of closure from 1710 had secluded China from a systematic diffu-sion of European knowledge. The Opium War of 1840-42 and the fol-lowing two British and French military coalitions of 1857-60 relent-lessly taught the Chinese a lesson. The misfortune of China is clear: itwas that the European culture of science and technology especially wasdiffused (if it is still an appropriate term) to the Qing China in such acoercive and forceful way. Surely, humanistic reason had to play a sig-nificant role in China: anger, fear, panic, humiliation, abhorrence andunwillingness spilled over from the innermost mind to their pragmaticrationality. 'Resistance' there had been, yet it was only because the his-torical circumstances had left the Chinese no ground and no time toreceive European knowledge in any reflective manner. Would the


51


outcome have been any different if those Europeans who had cometo China had been real scientists, like Copernicus, Galileo or Newton,rather than missionaries and colonists?

Notes and References1. P. K. O'Brien, 'Regimes for the Production and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable

Knowledge in Western Europe and the Chinese Empire from the Accession of the MingDynasty to the First Opium War', paper delivered in the 4th Global Economic HistoryNetwork Conference, Leiden, Netherlands, 16-18 September 2004.

2. Ibid.3. The 13 provinces include Zhejing, Jiangxi, Fujian, Shandong, Guangdong,

Shanxi, Henan, Huguang, Shaanxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou. And thetwo municipal capitals are South Zhili (Nanjing) and North Zhili (Beijing). Yang Kuo-Chen (IHSM) and Chen Chih-Ping (^5^), The New Compiled History of the Ming

(Taipei, 1999), 44, 53; T. Brook, The Chinese State in Ming Society (London andNew York, 2005), 21, 34.

4. Guo Qi-Jia (||5ff^), Schools in Ancient China (t£HSft*K) (Taipei, 1994), 110,118.

5. Fan Ke-Zheng (9£®gO, History of Chinese Shuyuan CfSW^Sfe) (Taipei, 1995),171.

6. RenJi-Yu (fiitjlO et al. (eds), Chinese Libraries (^HiKWt) (Shenyang, 2001),Vol. I, chap. 1; Vol. II, 1157-8, 1536; Zhu Han-Ming (^g|g), Shuyuan in China

(Taipei, 1993), 118-19; Xue Hai Publisher (W§tHJ!gif±), History of ChineseShuyuan (^Mr^lS), (Taipei, 1985), 5-6.

7. P. K. O'Brien, op. cit. (1), 32.8. One juan in the ancient Chinese work is, in most cases, an equivalent to a book

chapter of the present day. Yao Guang-Xiao ($&§}*£) & o>l- (eds), d. 1408, Encyclopaedia ofYung-Lo (ylc^ft) (Taipei, 1977, reprints), Preface; Zhang Lian (H3), The Publica-tion under the Despotic Cultural Policy of the Ming'(^«*$K<tK3ITWHSai(ig«^), Sinology Research (SIWF^), 1992, 10(2): 355-69.

9. Sun Xun (J^lj) (ed.), d. 1584, Transcripts of the Royal Ming Memoranda(Mîy^); Jia San-Jing (JfjEjE) et al. (eds), d. 1586, Transcripts on the Royal Ming Memo-randa in the Reigns ofjiajing and Longqing (1522-1572) (M^MfeiSti^); Zhang Han ($IM)(ed.), d. 1551, Selective Compilations of the Royal Ming Official Letters (M^©fili<P§), col-lected in Compilation of the Sequel to Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries (8Hit£P3BtîJ),Vols 463-5 (Shanghai, 1995, reprints); He Chang-Ling (jffttij) et al. (eds), d. 1826,Imperial Collections on Works of Statecraft (MfîffiX®, Scripta Sinica(îFFIîtftlff^lK^4J¥), available online at www.sinica.edu.tw/ftms-bin/ftmsw3.

10. Fu Rong-Xian (-pj^jlf}), A Study on the Classification of Books in Ancient China(Taipei, 1999), 17.

11. Quote from Cao Zhi (WSl)> Studies on Versions of Ancient Chinese Books(^H**)E**) (Taipei, 1994), 532.

12. Tung Lun (IFffffl) and Hsieh Chin (ffi%§) et al. (eds), Veritable Records of the Ming), Veritable Records of Tai-Tsung (ifc^JKI), r. 1402-24, Vol. 53 (Taipei, 1984, re-

prints) .13. T. Brook, op. cit. (3), 109-10.14. Fan Ke-Zheng (5£4R), op. cit. (5), 194.15. Gao Ting-Zhen (i^jg3£) et al, d. 1733, Records of Dong-Lin Shuyuan

(J^^$Kl&\ quoted from Fan Ke-Zheng (5£&®0, op. cit. (5), 197-8.16. Guo Qi-Jia (fW^), op. cit. (4), 131-2.17. Zhu Han-Ming (ÎS), op. cit. (6), 122.18. Huang Zong-Xi (jlt^H), d. 1676, A Study on the Schools of Ming Scholars

(Taipei, 1962, reprint).19. Jin Guantao (^ffii) and Liu Qingfeng (fJWBO, Transformation in Opening Up

(Taipei, 1994), 50-1.20. R. Bin Wong, The Chinese State and Useful Knowledge: Criteria, Intentions

and Consequences', paper presented in the Conference of Regimes for the Generation


52

www.sinica.edu.tw/ftms-bin/ftmsw3

Jerry C. -Y. Liu

of Useful and Reliable Knowledge in Europe and Asia 1368-1815, Windsor Great Park,14-16 April 2000.

21. The Globe Publisher (ifeûBK/Tct), History of Chinese Civilization: Ming Dynasty, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Taipei, 1991), 143-5.

22. J. C. Y. Liu, 'Does Culture Matter? The Logics and Counter-Logics of Culture inState Finance, Taxation and Tributary Trade Policies during the Ming Times c. 1300-1600', The Icfai Journal of History and Culture, 2008, 2(1): 24-60.

23. Confucius said confidently that 'my life philosophy (or Tao) is simply that allpervading consistency WMr^^M^- See The Analects (Hip), Section 4 (Taipei, re-prints).

24. T. Brook and H. V. Luong, 'Introduction: Culture and Economy in the Post-colonial World', in T. Brook and H. V. Luong (eds), Culture and Economy: The Shaping ofCapitalism in Eastern Asia (Michigan, 1999), 1-21, quote p. 14.

25. Jin Guantao ( | S) and Liu Qingfeng (fJWtt), op. cit. (19), Vol. I, chap. 3.26. Tu Feng-Xian (tt^Bf), The Developmental Theory of Chinese History: A Comparison

between Marx and Weber's Theory on China(Taipei, 1997), 133-4.

27. O'Brien summarized it well that, in Europe, 'from its very inception everythingin the world could be represented as having been purposefully fashioned and rationallyorganized in ways that could: (a) be systematically investigated, validated by observationand controlled experiments and, (b) (and this powerful and productive notion ema-nated from Graeco-Roman-Christian traditions of intellectual representation) expressedin the logical and universally comprehensible and comprehendible language of mathe-matics. The gradual consolidation of a "belief in natural laws provided an increasingminority of educated Europeans inclined to conduct systematic investigations into natu-ral phenomena with the confidence required to recognize that success must crown theirefforts .... Furthermore, by deploying a rhetorically powerful mathematical logic to-gether with experimental methods, they gradually convinced political, economic andecclesiastical elites in Europe that traditional understandings of the celestial, terrestrialand biological domains of nature (based either on scripture or upon established classicaltexts of Ptolemy, Aristotle and Galen, let alone Aquinas) had run into diminishing re-turns and provided an inadequate basis for the accumulation of more useful and reliableknowledge', O'Brien, op. cit. (1), 38-40.

28. The National Central Library (lE^lflifli) (ed.), The Collected Prefaces andPostscripts to The National Central Library's Collections of Ancient Books

(Taipei, 1993), Preface.29. Chen Han-Ming (| IW|), 'The Confucian Studies of Statecraft and its Implica-

tions' (M |Itt |ISS;gil), Online Paper of the Website of Guoxuewww.guoxue.com/newbook/gx/002.htm, retrieved in March 2006.

30. Wang Guo-Nan's (ffiJHB), d. 1603, 'Preface to Royal Ming Compilation of State-crafts and Pragmatics (M^ffitlffflli), collected in The National Central Library

, op. cit. (28), Sec. of History, No. 4, 31.31. Chen Ren-Xi's (l^fHii), d. 1630, 'Preface to Royal Ming Exemplary Records on State

Affairs' (S^tSS^), collected in The National Central Library (Hlft^lIWft), op. cit.(28), Sec. of History, No. 4, 43.

32. Feng Ying-Jing (ilJKjjQ, cl 1603, 'Preface to Royal Ming Compilation of Documentson Statecrafts and Pragmatics (MÎffiKffl©, collected in The National Central Library

op. cit. (28), Sec. of History, No. 4, 32.33. Ming Emperor Ying-Zong (H^), d. 1461, 'Preface to Records of the Unified Great

Ming (•$$%—K&), collected in The National Central Library (HtZ^^BlrJt), op. cit.(28), Sec. of History, No. 3, 84.

34. QiJi-Guang (&K^), d. 1522-66, 'Preface to A Renovating Book of Effective Prac-tice (IcSfcfrlr), collected in The National Central Library (gj£4ÎIIlr!t), op. cit. (28),Sec. Zi, No. 1,260.

35. Feng Shi-Ke (?10f nj), 'Preface to Records of the Extensive Territory' (jjfrMIB), col-lected in The National Central Library (Hj^^Hirlf), op. cit. (28), Sec. of History,No. 3, 91.


53

www.guoxue.com/newbook/gx/002.htm


36. Ku Yen-Wu (Kjfej^), d. 1659, 'Preface to Records on Commencing Territories, collected in The National Central Library (BS^^Bittil), op. tit. (28), Sec.

of History, No. 3, 91.37. Yang Shen tff'K), d. 1542, 'Preface to Dan Qian General Collections'

collected in The National Central Library (Stz^^HlitlD, op. tit. (28), Sec. Zi, No. 2,466, 467.

38. Li Tai ($^), d. 1425, 'Preface to Collective Explications of Climates in the Four Sea-sons' (Mt^MIII^), collected in The National Central Library (Str^HlfflD, op. tit.(28), Sec. of History, No. 3, 53.

39. T. Brook, The Milieux of Scientific Activity in Ming China', paper presented inthe Conference of Regimes for the Generation of Useful and Reliable Knowledge inEurope and Asia 1368-1815, Windsor Great Park, 14-16 April 2000.

40. Feng Ymg-Jing UiffiM), op. tit. (32).41. Li Jin-Shin (^Mj), d. 1439, 'Preface to the General Principle to the Art of War

, collected in The National Central Library (gE^HlrtO, op. tit. (28),Sec. Zi, No. 1,249.

42. Wang Cheng (3i§), d. 1500, 'Preface to An Essential Outline of the Art of War' collected in The National Central Library (Hit^ftH*!!), op. tit. (28),

Sec. Zi, No. 1,251.43. Yan Qing (jH/ff), d. 1583, 'Preface to Comprehensive Records on Foreign Territories'

collected in The National Central Library (HiL^^Htfli), op. tit. (28),Sec. of History, No. 3, 534.

44. B. A. Elman, 'Jesuit Scientia and Natural Studies in Late Imperial China, 1600-ISW,JEMH, 2002, 6(3): 209-32, quote p. 210.

45. QiJi-Guang ($«#), op. tit. (34).46. Wang Yan-Shi (BjEtii), d. 1598, 'Preface to The Manual of Celestial Weaponry'

collected in The National Central Library (StL^^Hlril), op. tit. (28), Sec.Zi, No. 1,262-3.

47. Yang Shen (fill), op. tit. (37).48. Yang Ming-Shi (ll^Ht), d. 1709, 'Preface to The Travels of Xu Xia-Ke'

collected in The National Central Library (SiI^BHIil), op. cit. (28),Sec. of History, No. 3, 484.

49. Song Ymg-Xing (5HUI), d. 1637, The Exploitation of the Work of Nature(^XM^J) (Taipei, 1986), Vol. I, Reprints, Preface, 13.

50. Wang Xiang (EEft), d. 1621, 'Prefaced to Records on Fragrant Flowers ofErRu Pa-vilion (H^P^JI^Srilf); and 'Postscript to Records on Fragrant Flowers of Er Ru Pavilion'(—SP^S^W), collected in The National Central Library (HtZ^^HWH), op. cit.(28), Sec. Zi,No. 2, 332, 336.

51. Li Shih-Ymg ($BfH), d. 1581, 'Prefaced to Studies on the Rare Flowers, Plants,Birds and Animals in China and Barbarian Countries' (IjtlPf^TfCjIbBRîn/^), collected inThe National Central Library (Hia^^lIWtl), op. cit. (28), Sec. Zi, No. 2, 346.

52. Ko Zhen-Shi (?Lj?l Bvf), d. 1615, 'Preface to the Compendium of Astronomic Inquir-ies' OTpM), collected in The National Central Library (HiZl^HWilD> op. cit. (28),Sec. Zi, No. 2, 3.

53. Wu Wei-Zhong (S/fi^), d. 1627, 'Postscript to Selected Illustrations of Rare In-struments from the Far West' (MHtfli§H!ft$lli)> collected in The National Central Library

op. cit. (28), Sec. Zi, No. 2, 375.54. Song Ymg-Xing (^HM), op. cit. (49), Preface, 12.55. Liu Shi-Xue (SUift^), d. 1599, 'Preface to The Manual of Celestial Weaponry'

collected in The National Central Library (Sir^HHit), op. cit. (28), Sec.Zi, No. 1,263.

56. Liang Zuo (^fe), d. 1554, 'Preface to Dan Qian General Collections collected in The National Central Library (Sj^* SB If II), op. cit. (28), Sec. Zi, No. 2,467.

57. Chen Jin-Mo (KSig), c. 1628, 'Preface to Angle Measurement' (ffiBI), collectedin The National Central Library (HiI^^Htftl), op. cit. (28), Sec. Zi, No. 2, 40.


54

Jerry C. -Y. Liu

58. LiJian-Yuan (^jUjn), d. 1596, 'Memorial on Presenting the Systematic Pharmaco-poeia ($^f|g), collected in Li Shi-Zhen, d. 1593, Systematic Pharmacopoeia

(1999, reprint).59.1 owe this to the insightful advice of the reviewer.60. I. Inkster, Science and Technology in History: An Approach to Industrial Development

(Hampshire and London, 1991), chaps 2 and 4.61. E. S. Reinert and A. M. Daast01, 'Exploring the Genesis of Economic Innova-

tions: The Religious Gestalt-Switch and the Duty to Invent as Preconditions for EconomicGrowth', The European Journal of Law and Economics, 1997, 4(3/4): 233-83.

62. Guo Ting-Yi (fflgLkl), The Guideline History of Modern China (?5ft^Hifi), Vol.I (Taipei, 1994), 17-18; and S. A. M. Adshead, China in World History (London and NewYork, 2000, first published in 1988), 204-5.

63. P. K. O'Brien et al. (eds), Philip's Atlas of World History (London, 1999), 139;Rang Zhi-Jie dH^fo), 'Reasons Why the Jesuits in Ming and Qing China Defied theDutch' WmiZMffi*IPj»t-±ffi$!R§fBB65IIH), History Monthly (ffi££f!l), 1999, May:103-10.

64. Qien Mu (f§|fj|), An Introduction to Chinese Cultural History (Taipei, 1993), 211-14.

65. Li Guo-Qi ($H/]tP), Chinese History (^SH^) (Taipei, 1986), 304.66. D. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (London, 1998), 337.67. Rang Zhi-Jie (Ifcg^), op. cit. (63).68. J. M. Roberts, The Triumph of the West (London, 1985), 289.69. Chen Jia-Yen (fSHW) and Yang Jing-Xien (HMW), Chinese Modern History

(Taipei, 1988), 7-8.


55


Movers and Shakers of

Knowledge in China duringthe Ming-Qing Period*

K E N T D E N G

The period of 1600-1910 is commonly viewed as one of decline in Chi-nese science and technology in world history. This article examines themovers and shapers of knowledge in China to show how the Chineseelite tried to catch up with the advancing West. They were not as stub-bornly conservative as one might think. However, a degree of opennessdid not guarantee China's ability to modernize.

THE JESUIT PERIOD, c. 1600-1840

How Did It All Begin?The nineteenth century was a period when many twists and turns oc-curred in Chinese history. Changes undermined the old social orderand upset the previous economic equilibrium.

These shocks had come externally long before the nineteenth cen-tury, first in the form of persistent attempts by the Portuguese to settlein Macao (since 1557) and by the Dutch to colonize Taiwan (1624-61).1

Secondly, changes were brought about by religious conversion by Jesu-its such as Matteo Ricci (^fJSfJf, 1552-1610), who reached Macao in1582 and gradually worked his way to the top to obtain permission toenter Beijing in 1601.2 Giulio Aleni (3cff|B§, 1582-1649) arrived inChina in 1613 and followed the footsteps of Ricci.3 Both men spent therest of their lives there. Thirdly, changes came from trade by the im-port of goods such as silver (especially via the Manila Galleon Trade of1565-1815) and opium (from 1729 onwards) to China.4

So, by 1800, the Chinese had about 200 years' experience of contactwith Europeans and were exposed in a limited way to Western knowledge.Although increasingly frustrated by the Chinese ways of conducting

* I wish to thank my LSE colleague Professor Stephan Feuchtwang forhis invaluable comments on the final draft.


58 Movers and Shakers of Knowledge in China during the Ming-Qing Period

business (such as the notorious Cohong trade monopoly and the kowtowto the throne) and the occasional naval skirmish between the Chineseand Europeans,5 no European force really challenged China's sover-eignty and its Asia-wide influence. Instead, a great deal of respect waspaid by Europeans to the Celestial Empire of the Far East. Early Jesuitsall learnt and mastered the Chinese language and customs. Chineselaw was observed (or at least it appeared to be) by most foreigners.6

Those who managed to establish a relationship with China were onlyable to achieve what they did with extreme patience and readiness totake instructions from the Ming-Qing Confucian bureaucracy. Thebest example concerns the Portuguese stationed in Macao, who wereused by the Chinese government as watch-dogs and mercenaries todrive away unwanted attention from other Europeans (such as theDutch, Spaniards and British) - a tactic known as 'using barbarians tocheck barbarians (lil^0JM)'-7 From the European point of view, theyhad to appear sinicized and to ingratiate themselves with the Confu-cian elite to get anywhere in China.

From the viewpoint of the Celestial Empire, their confidence in deal-ing with Europeans was deeply rooted in China's accumulated experi-ence with nomads along its long frontiers over millennia. In the past,the empire successfully curbed those threats with 'carrots' (such asmarriages, bribes and invitations to join the empire) and 'sticks' (e.g.military campaigns to drive Huns out of Central Asia during the West-ern Han Period). Confucian cultural assimilation played an importantpart (especially the Sinicization of the Manchus during the Qing) .8

In this context, useful European knowledge was considered, at best,novel by the Chinese Confucian elite. Overall, very few took it seriouslyunless such knowledge served the empire directly to make public goodsbetter for China's traditional economy. European knowledge and in-struments were strictly limited to almanacs (astronomy), water controland cartography (geometry). The employment of European Jesuit as-tronomers continued until Emperor Daoguang (JH^, r. 1821-50)ended the practice in 1838.9

The late-Ming Establishment recruited these missionaries to work forthe Imperial Observatory in designing a more accurate calendar sys-tem. Matteo Ricci and Diego de Pantoja (JUJlSiJc, 1571-1618) set theprecedent.10 Ricci was succeeded by Sabbatino de Ursis (t^HfJt, 1575-1620),11 followed by Johannes Schreck (f^gf, 1576-1630)12 and Jo-hann Adam Schall von Bell (^pgg|, 1592-1666) ,13 The Ming projectgradually developed into the new Ming Imperial Almanac(^îl/HMlr) during 1629-34.14 Others, such as Nicolas Longobardi(tl^S, 1565-1655^)15 and Jacques Rho (JUfrg-, 1593-1638),16

joined by invitation. Schreck, von Bell and Rho were responsible forbuilding at least three instruments of European technology for the ob-servatory: a zodiac armillary sphere, a quadrant and a celestial globe.

The trend continued in the early Qing, which inherited the Mingapproach by employing Jesuits, including Johann Adam Schall von Bell


Kent Deng 59

(for his second time), Ferdinand Verbiest (j^ffeC, 1623-88),17 ThomaPereira (f£H^h 1645-1708),18 Philippus Maria Grimaldi 1639-1712),19Joachim Bouvet (gff, 1656-1730),20 Jean Francois Ger-billon (3Rf$, 1654-1707) ,21 Bernard-Kiliam Stumpf (|HS , 1655-1720),22 Joseph Giuseppe Castiglione (gfltftSp, 1688-1766) ,23 IgnatiusKoegler 1680-1747),24 Andre Pereira (&%$&, 1690-1743),25

Augustin de Hallerstein (Sljfelfj, 1721-74)26 and several others.27

Increasingly, those Jesuits who worked in Beijing had little to do withthe religious mission that they were meant to accomplish. Amongstthem, von Bell was the most successful politically. Despite his connec-tion with the Ming, von Bell was trusted by the Manchus after 1644 andconsequently appointed the Director of the Imperial Observatory

. From 1651 to 1658, he was promoted from Official of theFifth Rank in Waiting (f/tSpPp) to Official of the First Rank Proper(IE-^pp), reaching the very top of the bureaucratic ladder.28

During the early Qing, there was a continuation of the knowledgeflow from the missionaries to the Imperial Court, which circulated ex-clusively within the court itself. A recent television programme byChina Central Television claimed that Emperor Kangxi (Iff^B, r. 1662-1722) was a keen learner of European science (mathematics in particu-lar), and had a close relationship with von Bell, Verbiest, Bouvet andGerbillon. Like Kangxi, Emperor Qianlong (f2IH, r. 1736-95) also de-veloped a taste for European artefacts and hired a group of Europeansas court officials.

Those Jesuits who became officials were in the minority. Also, theydepended heavily on the support of Chinese scholar-officials who wereable to appreciate their technical knowledge and skills, meaning thatthey had to find their opposite numbers in the Qing bureaucracy inorder to prise the door ajar.

Apart from those highly specialized fields of study, such as mathe-matics and astronomy, the Jesuits led the horse to water but couldn'tforce it to drink their religious ideologies. So, judged by the end resultof knowledge formation, dissemination and impact, they were qualifiedas 'marginal movers and shapers of knowledge' in China. They were, atbest, ordinary knowledge providers instead.

Why Did Western Knowledge Not Take China by Storm before 1800?To employ foreigners and foreign knowledge was not unprecedentedby the time of the Ming and Qing. During the first century AD, Bud-dhism was introduced to China from India. During the Mongol Yuan,the bureaucracy hired Muslim astronomers and adopted and an Is-lamic Almanac (HHHIlf), which was used to compliment China's ownAlmanac (y^|jt®) from the early Ming. So, it was logical for the Ming-Qing authorities to recognize the utility of European astronomers andthe Christian Almanac. After all, China was an empire that appreciatedinput from different ethnic groups.



In terms of cultural influence measured by religious conversion,what the Jesuits achieved was marginal compared to the Buddhistmonks. Many emperors converted to Buddhism but none to Christian-ity. It is documented that a few officials were converted by the Jesuits,but only at the end of the Ming period. The best example was XuGuangqi (f^T^^, AD 1561-1633), who was born into a merchant-landlord family in Shanghai County (now Shanghai). He received stricttraditional Confucian training and took the traditional route to offi-cialdom. In 1581, at the age of 19, he passed the Imperial Examina-tions at the level of Cultivated Talent (^f) and earned a living byteaching, first in his home town and then in Guangdong and Guangxi,two of the southernmost provinces of China, where he came into con-tact with missionaries. In 1597, at the age of 36, he passed the Exami-nations at a higher level and became a Recommendee (IPA); at theage of 42, he passed the highest level of the Examinations to obtain thedegree of Presented Scholar (jUifc), after which he was selected to be afellow of the Imperial Academy. In 1607, he was appointed ExaminingEditor (fM^), a formal rank for scholars in the Academy. It took himanother 21 years to progress to History Tutor to the Emperor in 1628, aposition reserved exclusively for high-ranking scholar-officials. In 1630,he was accorded the title of Imperial Academician (^Î^Pdr) and, 2years later, at the age of 70, he was appointed Minister of the Rites

with the title of Second Grade Grand Secretary, which was the de facto Premier at that time. In 1633, he

was finally promoted to First Grade Grand Secretary (^MISAIPit),the highest position a scholar could hold. He was also dubbed 'GrandGuardian of the Heir Apparent' (yfc?yfciSO> an honour granted toonly a few outstanding ministers. Xu died at his post later that year andwas posthumously honoured by the emperor with the title of Most WiseLiterate Administrator (;$C$E).29

Through his life, Xu always kept abreast of science and technology.30

By 1600, he had met Matteo Ricci, who attracted him to Christianityand Western science and technology developed since the Renaissance.Xu converted to Catholicism on 15 January 1603 and adopted the nameof Paul, studying Western astronomy, geography, water control andphilosophy under Ricci's tutelage in 1604. From 1606 to 1607, he co-operated with Ricci to translate Fundamentals of Geometry (ilfnjjjrl^) inorder to enlighten his Chinese contemporaries. In 1612, with the col-laboration of Sabbatino de Ursis, an assistant of Ricci, he completed atranslation of Western Irrigation Methods ( |57JC/£) and produced somenew astronomical equipment for a more accurate calendar. When incharge of amending the calendar in 1629, he built three telescopes,just 21 years after its European invention. In short, Xu worked as a con-tact (|Sf^) f°r the Jesuits and European knowledge to make somemodest progress at the time.

Even so, Xu Guangqi is best known in Ming-Qing history as a pro-moter of best practice in agriculture because he believed that China's


Kent Deng 61

problems resulted ultimately from the regression of the rural econ-omy.31 In this context, Xu's search for alternatives in effective almanacmaking and water control was logical according to his Confucian train-ing; that Jesuit missionaries became a source of information was seren-dipitous.

Even if we consider his conversion to Christianity, the motivation wasto 'compliment Confucianism with Christian learning' (Îp^fff^) in-stead of replacing the former with the latter or absorbing the latterpurely due to curiosity. There was a political agenda. On this point, it isquestionable whether Xu was ever truly converted. However, Xu's ap-proach was echoed two centuries later during the later Qing by 'Chi-nese knowledge as the foundation and Western knowledge for utility'

Along with Xu, there were two other Ming ranking court officialswho took a similar route: Li Zhizao ($;£.ii, 1565-1630), who wasDeputy Minister of Public Works (IQ^Jt^f J$) and converted to Ca-tholicism on 3 March 1610, adopting the name of Leo, and Yang Ting-Jim (flgrff, 1557-1627), who was Imperial Inspector (lilllS^) andconverted to Catholicism during Easter of 1613 with the adopted nameof Michael.32 Also, compared with Xu, Li and Yang were less techno-logically intrigued by European knowledge. However, Xu Guangqi, LiZhizao and Yang Tingjun should be considered exceptions rather thanthe rule: open conversions of high-ranking bureaucrats to Christianitywere rare in the following Qing period.33

On the flipside, those Jesuit missionaries in China had to join theMing-Qing bureaucracy and behave like Confucians as a prerequisite.They had no choice but to convert to Confucian bureaucracy; MatteoRicci called himself a 'Western Confucian' ®f|f) to identify himselfwith the Chinese code of conduct.34

It is important to note that, before 1800, joint efforts were made be-tween scholarly Jesuit missionaries and Qing scholarly officials to trans-late European books or co-write textbooks in Chinese. Preliminary re-search indicates that 400-700 such works were produced,35 of which 120were works on science and technology.36 Ricci, a productive man, wasinvolved in 24 such works. Thirteen were included in The Qing ImperialComplete Collection of Books (UUKÛ) of 3,470 titles in all.37 Even so,European knowledge had only occasional publicity, subject to approvalat the highest level. For example, the second edition of the Ming calen-dar received the title The New Western Almanac (HîffSflMr) > only withthe endorsement of Emperor Shuizhi (J[[jT/n, r. 1644-61).

Given that a long time lag often appeared before adoption, it hasremained unclear how readily available these works were across theempire, or how well the knowledge in these works was actually ab-sorbed by the Chinese. The Ming Imperial Almanac project was in factabortive: by the time it had received permission for use from EmperorChongzhen (it/M, r. 1628-44), the Ming Dynasty was doomed. So thealmanac was never put into practice under the Ming.38 Also, there is no



evidence that the European water control technology recorded in West-ern Irrigation Methods (Î§7JQ£) jointly by Xu Guangqi and de Ursiswas ever put into practice on China's soil until the end of the Qing.Some very straightforward European techniques such as perspective inpainting were missing with even most talented Chinese court artists,despite works of Joseph Giuseppe Castiglione, who was Emperor Qian-long's favourite.39

Overall, for about two centuries from c. 1582, when the first Jesuitgroup was allowed to enter mainland China, until 1773, when the Jesuitmissions were finally ended by Pope Clement XIV, the European influ-ence on China's knowledge stock was hardly noticeable (quantitativelyspeaking). By 1800, there was no sign that China had been persuadedto adopt European knowledge on a large scale. There was no sign ei-ther that European knowledge was able to fundamentally affect ordi-nary Chinese life.

Meanwhile, China continuously and comfortably enjoyed trade sur-pluses with Europe and America. Emperor Qianlong claimed in a letterof 1793 to King George III of England (r. 1760-1820) that the CelestialDynasty of the Qing was so abundant that it relied on no goods fromthose Western countries, which, in contrast, lived on China's exports oftea, porcelain and silk and that he was doing the West a favour in per-mitting sea trade at Macao.40 No one seemed to dispute Qianlong'sconclusion at that time. The Emperor is criticized for his attitude ofcomplacency and arrogance, or Sino-chauvinism, but not for the verac-ity of the claim.

By the same token, China did not need European knowledge in mostareas. After all, it had developed independently a cluster of technolo-gies that allowed it to lead the world from c. 100 BC to c. AD 1550, ac-cording to Joseph Needham.41 Also, until the arrival of the Jesuits,China was a donor of technology to Europe, at least indirectly withsometimes very long time lags.42 Needham was adamant that:

The word 'stagnation' was never applicable to China at all; it waspurely a Western misconception. Continuing general and scientificprogress manifested itself in traditional Chinese society, but it wasviolently overtaken by the exponential growth of modern scienceafter the Renaissance in Europe.43

In Ricci's phrase, 'the Chinese believe that they themselves are the onlypeople to possess real sciences and technology'.44 Thus, traditionalChinese science and technology still had some 'shelf-life' by 1800. Withit came opportunity costs for change: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'This determined the slow and patchy dissemination of Europeanknowledge to China, even with the help of influential court officials.45

It also determined a new trend in which European knowledge be-came a spiritual refuge for Chinese intellectuals during the earlyQing period.46


Kent Deng 63

THE WESTERNIZATION PERIOD, 1840-1910

What Changed the Old Pattern, Rebellions on An Invasion?It is a commonly held perception that, at the turn of the nineteenthcentury, the Manchu rule over China was in big trouble internally, asthe Qing Empire was struck repeatedly by natural and man-made disas-ters, which, in turn, led to 'local militarization', social unrest and rebel-lions,47 as if all of these were unprecedented in the history of China.48

But, from the viewpoint of the long-term history of rebellions, uprisingsin the entire nineteenth century under the Qing were by no means themost frequent, the most lasting or on the largest scale. In effect, it wasone of the quietest periods since the Yuan Mongol rule.49 In otherwords, the Qing social unrest and rebellion were well within thethreshold of tolerance for a major dynasty.

Speaking of the possible causes for unrests and rebellions, there wasno evidence that the Qing state was more rent-seeking than the Ming.Overall, the Qing state performed better than its Ming counterpart intax burden control and disaster relief. Astonishingly, the Qing totalrural tax revenue was frozen from 1715 to 1840 (yjC^FJPlS), unprece-dented in both China's history and the history of Asia.50 In the absolutesense, the highest annual tax revenue collected in grain under theQing (in 1820) was only 29% of its counterpart under the Ming (in1502). In relative terms of tax burden per unit of land, the highest rateunder the Qing (in 1661) was only 17% of the peak of the Ming(1542).51 More strikingly, the per capita tax burden in 1766 was merely8% of that in 1381 under the Ming.52 So, surpluses of unprecedentedquantities were left in private hands. In addition, public goods werebetter provided by the Qing than that of the Ming seen from the scaleof the Qing disaster aid.53 Hence, there was no reason why the Qingstate could not put up with those rebellions and continue to rule thecountry longer than the Ming.

Clearly, what did change China was not internal unrest that formed abackdrop for the empire anyway, but foreign invasion. It was not aninvasion from northern nomads, but from Europe in the form of theOpium War in 1840. The defeat, humiliation and heavy costs of theOpium War served as a wake-up call for the pragmatic part of Chineseculture in general and that of Confucianism in particular. Indeed,Confucianism justifies changes if the country faces critical crises andchallenges. The vision of modernity and Westernization began to un-dercut China's timeless Physiocracy at both the ideological and mun-dane levels. Indeed, frequent changes became something that was un-changed in Chinese history between 1840 and 1940. Confucian prag-matism allowed the Qing system to be malleable and avoid brittleness.

New Ideology of Social Darwinism vs. Old Confucian CulturalismThe lesson that the Qing elite learned from the Opium War defeat wasvery different from what China had experienced previously. Before that



war, the Chinese had accepted their fate when under alien attacks andconquests at least three times: under the Jin Tartar (1115-1234), theMongols (1271-1368) and the Manchus (1644-1911). The Confucianideology aimed at gradual cultural assimilation of the alien conquerorsknown as 'cultivating the barbarians' (J^fH^LBlJ, literally 'removing therough edges with softness'). This was a game of 'Confucian cultural-ism', a competition of good behaviour according to a strict code ofconduct, rather than of military strength and brutality. The game ofConfucian culturalism was playable only on the condition that the alienconquerors accepted their cultural inferiority and that they wanted tobecome something higher. The tactic had worked repeatedly for theChinese.

All students of the Confucian classics know the description of theZhou system of 'five-level circles' (SIS) in the chapter Tribute to KingYu' (iSfJt) of Confucius's The Book of History (fpJd).54 According to thissystem, the capital city of the Zhou regime was considered the centre ofcivilization with its immediate domain of 500 li in radius (1 Zhou li isequivalent to 346.5 metres55), called the King's Land O&JJM). Secondly,as one moved outward, there were two circles under the names of theLords' Land and Vassals' Land (fHiM), both being parts of the civilizedworld, with the outer boundary 1,500 li away from the Zhou capital.Thirdly, there was a ring of the frontiers (ISHIx) where the Zhou civili-zation ends. Fourthly, it was a Semi-barbarians' Land (Ic)M), a periph-ery with half-civilized inhabitants, a half-way house between China-centred civilization and the aliens called the 'barbarians'. Finally, therewas the True Barbarians' Land (MM), where the population did notread or write, nor observed any of the rites observed by the Chinese.

In this system, Chinese civilization created a centripetal force, which,given sufficient time, would materialize the goal of the Confucian'Great Commonality' (^[q]).56 Indeed, the orthodox Confucian con-cept of being Chinese meant little in terms of ethnicity but a great dealregarding culture. In other words, a 'Chinese' person in the Confucianvocabulary is merely a cultural being. Thus, 'Confucianized' outsidersof non-Han origin were not only accepted into Chinese society, butwere also absorbed by the officialdom, including the aforementionedEuropeans, such as Matteo Ricci and Sabbatino de Ursis. On the otherhand, those Chinese who left China to live in foreign lands were re-garded as the 'de-Sinicized' and considered automatically to be 'aban-doned by the Celestial Empire'

It is worth noting that there exist some common misconceptions re-garding the Chinese view of the world order, much coming from theinterpretation, word for word, of Zhongguo (^ffl)* literally meaning'the centre/middle kingdom/empire'. Almost all Western writers haveaccepted such a judgment from which one can infer a vision of a tightlyclosed, xenophobic attitude.

But it would be wrong to assume that the Chinese elite were always inthe dark: from the fifteenth century, the Chinese closely noted and


Kent Deng 65

documented the rise of European colonialism along their traditionaltrading routes in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region. Theywere well aware of European technology in the form of ship design andweaponry.57 Studies were conducted of the Europeans themselves. Thisis evident in Chen Lunjiong's (|5tfwflql) Travels of the Seaswritten in as early as 1730.

The Qing elite were aware that the invaders of the Opium War weredifferent. Unlike the Jesuits, who were willing to learn from China andhence tacitly accept China's cultural superiority, the British refused tosubmit culturally. This alone threw the game of Confucian culturalismout of the window. On the other hand, the Qing elite did not wantChina to become a European colony. But everyone agreed that Chinawas weak; something needed to be done fast, before it was too late. His-tory proved that the Qing elite were pragmatic and the Qing system wasflexible, so changes began.

First and foremost, together with Confucian culturalism, the prefer-ence for benevolent rule and the distaste for military government hadto go. Rather than promoting competition for the most civilized, bestmannered and most highly respected, the new religion was Social Dar-winism - although Charles Darwin's book was not yet published at thepoint of the Opium War - meaning the survival of the fittest by wars ina new world of competition for hegemony amongst races. The Qingelite were also fully aware that the means to achieve a victory weremodern arms in the form of strong ships with powerful cannons

Undoubtedly, Social Darwinism changed China's statecraft. It wasthe key catalyst for all changes in post-Opium War China.58 This changein ideology ushered in an era of changes for which China was some-times unprepared.

New Movers and Shapers in the Era of Changes, c. 1840-1910The 1840 Opium War marked a failure of the Manchu regime, as theQing state was unable to maintain China's national security. The PaxManchuriana was over. This alone undermined massively the ever shakylegitimacy of Manchu rule. To allow China to be colonized by any for-eign group would have meant the end of the Manchu ruling clique,and it was vital for them to be seen as 'flawless'. They deliberately choseHan Chinese to carry out reforms; if they were successful, the Manchusclaimed credit and, if not, they blamed the Han. This determined thatall the new movers and shapers of knowledge during the Era ofChanges were ethnically Han Chinese.

In 1839, on the eve of the Opium War, Lin Zexu (Î0f^, 1785-1850), Imperial Commissioner (i^llyÊ) in charge of the ban on theopium trade from 1838 to 1840, began to have European knowledgeand information collected and translated into Chinese, includingnewspapers and magazines published in Portuguese-controlled Ma-cao,59 Emericide Vattel's Law of Nations (if-^M^Hf^M) written in



c. 1758, Hugh Murray's Encyclopaedia of Geography (|ZH$f[;£) published in1834 and Algernon S. Thelwall's moralizing essay on the British opiumtrade with China, entitled The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China

published in 1834. Immediately after theOpium War, there was a surge of information about Europe, such asWei Yuan's (fSM) A Comprehensive Survey of Off-Shoretice (IcSfcfrlr), collected in The National Central Library (gj£4ÎIIlr!t), op. cit. (28), Countries

written in 1841,60 Chen Fengheng's (Bfenif) A Brief Historyof England (HpfÎJfgllfg) written also in 1841, Wang Wentai'sA Study of England of Red-haired Barbarians (H^§^^^fJ^B§) writtenin 1842 and Liang Tingnan's (^Jifif) Four Essays on Off-Shore Countries

in 1846, Xu Jishe's ($$&£) Records of Lands and PeoplesOverseas (MIK^^) in 1848 and Xia Xie's (JUI) Main Events betweenChina and the West (^ffifBliO in 1850. It is important to note that,compared with the early works of the Jesuits, which involved religiouspursuit and pure science and technicality in their ivory tower, the newtrend in the 1840s was for a wider range of mundane and tangible in-formation concerning Europe, especially in terms of humanities (cus-toms, values, law and social conditions).

There was also heated discussion on how to play the game of SocialDarwinism against the Westerners. Lin Zexu, who had first-hand ex-perience in dealing with the invading British forces, pointed out thatnaval warfare was the British trump and that it would be self-defeatingif China did not build a modern navy with gunboats.61 Xu's contempo-rary, the scholar Wei Yuan (Stfe 1794-1857), changed the term yimeaning 'barbarians') to yang (^, meaning 'sea-borne' or 'foreign') inhis work written in the 1840s entitled Punitive Expedition of Foreign Fleetunder the Daoguang Reign [1821-50] (MT^ÎifjE^gB), in which heurged 'learning from Europe in order to turn foreign strength intoChina's strength to build a rich country with strong armed forces'

62 Earlier, in 1841, Wei Yuanput forward the slogan of 'learning advanced technology from Europe-ans to fight against them' (Bffi^^JlSi^0-M).63 In 1858, the DeputyMinister of Wars (J^n|£fcfÎ|$), Wang MaoyinjzEBollI, asked permissionfrom the throne to circulate A Comprehensive Survey of Off-Shore Countriesamongst all court officials and the royal circle. He argued that 'al-though hard, it is not impossible to resist against the Europeans'(Hfll! ' M^llM£^ttJIS).64 All this was the prelude of the path-breaking Westernization Movement, which commenced in 1860.

In a historical twist, the strongest push for change to take place oc-curred internally, when the pseudo-Christian Taiping Rebellion(^¥^Hllii) and Nian Rebellion ($£¥) both broke out in 1851 tothreaten the foundation of the Qing rule. Out of desperation, ZengGuofan (^H^f, 1811-72) and his subordinate, Li Hongzhang(^$|TJL, 1823-1901), both provincial officials at that time, were per-mitted to organize local armed forces: the Hunan Army (SUpC, formedin 1854) and the Anhui Army (^J|L, formed independently also in1854), which were financed independently by local taxes.65 They each


Kent Deng 67

ran large personalized quasi-government institutions called mufu meaning 'personal staff). Each mufu employed at any given time sev-eral dozen highly qualified people for different tasks.66 This was the defacto franchizing of the Qing state (administration and defence). Fromthen on, the Qing court could no longer monopolize the armed forces.These new armies proved to be more efficient than the Qing standingarmy of the Eight Banners (Affi): Zeng's Hunan Army eventually putdown the Taipings in 1864, while Li's Anhui Army eliminated theNians in 1868. During the military confrontations, both men appreci-ated the effectiveness of the European arms in life-or-death situations.This ushered in Westernization and modernity led by military technol-ogy. By now, Wei Yuan's slogan from the 1840s of 'learning fromEurope in order turn foreign strength into China's strength to makeChina a rich country with strong armed forces' had a more poignantmeaning.67

The shift of political power and military command to the Han Chi-nese was highly rational, at least in the short run, for the Manchu ruler.However, such a division of labour put the Manchus in a bad light as,inevitably, they appeared inadequate in a changing world. Also, thingsdid not always turn the way the Manchus initially wanted, as the use ofHan Chinese to pioneer changes cut both ways: it created an alterna-tive military-power centre in the Qing bureaucracy in the hands of theHan Chinese. Nevertheless, it proved that traditionally trained Chinesescholar officials were fully capable of looking to learn new ideas andnew tricks.

On the other hand, the crack-down on both the Taiping and Nianrebellions who once controlled a vast area and intended to drag Chinabackwards to its traditional agrarian growth path cleared a main obsta-cle at the grassroots level for dramatic changes to be implemented.68

Now, the reformers had undisputed leadership for changes to takeplace.

The most significant developments occurred during the entire periodof 1860-1910, when changes were pushed peacefully to rebuild China'sstrength. The emphasis was on the combination of maintaining Chineseideology as the foundation and introduction of Western knowledge forutility (îftBlffl) in the 'Self-Strengthening Movement' and 'Westerniza-tion Movement' (1860-94), and the 'One-Hundred-Day Reform' (1898),all aiming at altering China's growth trajectory towards modernity.

The masterminds of these changes were known as the Westernizers whose members were all ranked Qing officials, well educated

in Confucian tradition: Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zuo Zongtang 1812-85, Zeng's subordinate), Shen Baozhen (ftl^M, 1820-

79, also Zeng's subordinate) and Zhang Zhidong ('M^R 1837-1909,Li's subordinate). Their spiritual leader was Feng Guifen1809-74), who advocated the need for adopting Western knowledgeand producing Western tools and machines ($j$jSH, $[I^§§).69 Thegroup gained support from Prince Yixin (î/f, 1833-98). From time to



time, the Dowager Empress Cixi (WfjZ'fcJn, 1835-1908) also cut in tooffer her half-hearted support.

The Westernizers were succeeded after the 1894 Sino-Japanese Warby a more radical group called the Reformers (|f ffM), headed by YanFu (HH, 1854-1921), Rang Youwei (J^CJi, 1858-1927), Tan Citong

1865-98) and Liang Qichao (^FH, 1873-1929), wholaunched the '1898 Reform' (Jj^lttS), als° known as the '100-dayReform' (HBf§0r), in a bid to re-mould China into a Europeanmodel. They were even more Western than the Westernizers andbacked by Emperor Guangxu (%M, r. 1875-1908).

The 'Self-Strengthening Movement' and 'Westernization Movement'took place first in those provinces in which Westernizers were incharge, while the Reformers worked exclusively top-down.

Opening the Floodgate for European KnowledgeDuring the Jesuit period, European knowledge trickled to Chinamainly through the handiwork and services of the missionaries them-selves. The Chinese were yet to be fully convinced that there was a needto Westernize for modernity. This changed after China's historical de-feat in the Opium War. For the first time, the floodgate of Europeanknowledge was opened up and kept open.

Firstly, a new government organ, the Foreign Affairs Department(I1S^SWM§JP^), was established in early 1861. Apart from diplo-macy, the department dealt with customs, naval defence and the pro-curement of arms. The Foreign Affairs Department marked the begin-ning of modern foreign relations and diplomacy in China, in whichChina related to other nations as equals and recognized the impor-tance of trade with them.70

Secondly, there was a drive for knowledge modernization. The For-eign Affairs Department spearheaded the pro-active diffusion of ad-vanced knowledge from Europe by running the Capital Foreign Lan-guage Academy (]^Bf]5[^>Ci1t) and schemes for Chinese students tostudy in the West.

The academy ran an open system of recruitment to ensure the au-thenticity of knowledge from the West. In 1869, it appointed William A.Martin (Tfljl> 1827-1916), a Yale-educated missionary, as Dean

. Martin served in that capacity for 25 years. In the south, theTranslation Division of the Jiangnan (Kiangnan) Arsenal in Shanghai

was established in 1868 and became the mainsource of written information regarding European knowledge.71 In thesame year, it hired John Fryer (ffUfl, 1839-1928), a Briton, as Trans-lator in Chief.

Thirdly, the stock of European knowledge increased steadily after1860. Under Martin's leadership, international law received priority inboth the curriculum and the translation projects of the Capital ForeignLanguage Academy - something China urgently needed in engagingwith the West.72 Twenty-four textbooks were produced by translation or


Kent Deng 69

compilation including law (x 6), mathematics (x 3), astronomy (x 3),chemistry (x 3), linguistics (x 3), physics (x 2), medicine (x 2), eco-nomics (x 1) and world history (x I).73 Outperforming Martin in Bei-jing, Fryer was involved in the production of 129 books in his three-decade-long service in the Jiangnan Arsenal. He also established thefirst popular modern scientific journal in China called Magazine of Na-ture in 1875 and ran it until 1892.74

In Translated Works from the Last Forty Years with Brief Descriptionspublished in 1909, the technical subject areas

covered included mathematics (calculus and analytical geometry),electricity, metallurgy, chemistry, medicine, physics, astronomy, geol-ogy, geography and cartography. Countries covered included the Brit-ish Empire, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium,Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Greece,Poland, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Persia, India, United States, Mexico,Peru and Brazil. There were also specific publications on foreignarmed forces: the British, French, German, Italian, Austrian, Russian,Persian, Indian and Japanese, regarding steam-engine ships, shipyards,marines, weapons, communication, navigation, sea routes, naval war-fare, coastal defence, ship deployments, battle formation and annualbudgets.75

According to Liang Qichao's (^@M) statistics in 1896, there were352 translated Western books available in China overall, under thethree categories of knowledge (H), politics (iEfc) and morals (i&).76 Bythen, China had a decent range of the European knowledge. Also, acritical mass had built up to change the knowledge structure of theChinese elite.

Fourthly, the formation and improvement of human capital becamethe priority. It is documented that, in 1866, Zuo Zongtang sent his ap-peal to the Foreign Affairs Department that to learn from the West'depends much on education, .... After the training China will have theright specialists to supervise production of ships and to navigate a fleet;and everything will work for China'.77

This target was largely realized in China's new educational system.The aforementioned Capital Foreign Language Academy, designed tointroduce European knowledge systematically, was the beginning ofmodern education in China, which departed gradually from the oldConfucian tradition.78 It had an eight-year system to train competentlinguists and diplomats.

On the military front, the first naval academy (JIMf6i$#P^) was es-tablished in 1867 in Majiang (Jiff), Fujian Province, to train officers.The academy employed several dozen French instructors to train tenChinese youngsters.79 This trainer-trainee ratio demonstrates just howserious the Chinese authorities were when dealing with naval affairs.The second naval academy was established in Tianjin (5^1) in 1880;the third in Huangpu (ilfif), Guangdong Province, in 1887; the fourthin Nanjing (|tfj?0 in 1890; and the fifth in Yantai (g?l|) in 1903.80



The training in those academies was predominantly Western. Ac-cording to Regulations of the Northern Sea Fleet (^t^S^^fM), a gov-ernmental publication in c. 1890, the Northern Fleet Training School

ran 4-year courses to train young cadets. The basic sub-jects included (1) English, (2) geography, (3) mathematics (extrac-tion of a root, algebra and logarithms), (4) geometry, (5) physics, (6)chemistry, (7) astronomy and (8) meteorology. The specializedcourses included cartography, steam-engine operation, hydrome-chanics, calculation of longitude and latitude, reckoning, pilotage,artillery and surveying.81 The Northern Fleet Seamen's Training Cen-tre (If HP^) adapted the British standard in training 16 and 17-year-olds with minimum literacy but knowledge of cables and knots,handling of sails, steering, use of the compass, rowing, swimming anduse of firearms and swords.82

Moreover, from 1876 onwards, naval cadets were sent to foreign na-val academies and shipyards in Western Europe, mainly Britain andFrance, to learn the latest technology and crafts. From 1905 onwards,naval cadets were also sent to Japan for the same purposes. Foreignadvisers and technicians, often in their dozens, were always on the pay-roll of the Chinese naval establishments, some reaching the rank ofadmiral of the Qing navy.83

However, progress was not always made in a linear fashion. Therewere hiccups even amongst the most devoted Westernizers. In the wakeof the Opium War until the beginning of the Westernization Move-ment, there was a period when efforts were made to upgrade China'stechnology without the help of Westerners or their knowledge. In1841, local officials in Guangzhou built a human-powered paddle-wheel boat in an attempt to make it look like a British steamboat usedduring the Opium War.84 In the following year, two more ships of theEuropean appearance were built, one with a copper-clad hull and theother with a primitive engine. Neither ship seemed sea-worthy.85 Thiswas low-level, almost child-like imitation that did not show any under-standing of the essence of steamboat technology.

Twenty years later, in 1861, Zeng Guofan established China's firstfactory, the Anqing Arsenal (^SIRilM^Jf), m Anhuitice (IcSfcfrlr), collected in The National Central Library (gj£4ÎIIlr!t), op. cit. (28), to produce firearms of the European style. It employed only Han Chinese and its pro-duction depended on small-scale traditional handicrafts. In 1862, ithired four technicians - Xu Shou, Xu Xianyin, Hua Hengfang andHua Shifang 1818-84; 1845-1901; 1833-1902;3pt&5:7 > 1854-1905) - to experiment on steam-engine design by guess-work. The factory eventually managed to build China's first wooden-hulled steamer, the Huanghu (HfSI) in 1865.86 But the performance ofthe ship was deeply disappointing: according to Zeng Guofan's judg-ment, the ship was useless: '... too slow in manoeuvring and not quitegetting it right.'87 So, the first attempt to reinvent the wheel withoutthe input of proper knowledge did not succeed in opening theblack-box of European steam-engine design and shipbuilding.


Kent Deng 71

Zuo Zongtang thus reached the conclusion that copying from theEuropeans was the way out if China still wanted to be in the SocialDarwinian race.88

A new approach began in 1866, when Zuo sent a report to thethrone to ask permission to hire European technicians in Qing ship-yards.89 Soon, in 1868, John Fryer joined the Jiangnan Arsenal in Shang-hai. Thanks to the Translation Division of the Arsenal, Xu Shou and XuXianyin (now transferred from the Anqing Arsenal) were in close part-nership with John Fryer, who functioned as a channel of reliable in-formation on European technology. The partnership soon paid off: in1868, the Huiji (ITa), a 60-metre-long (180 chi), 600-ton gunboat(eight cannons) with nearly 400 horsepower, was launched. It was thefirst functional modern naval vessel built on Chinese soil.90 In the fol-lowing decade, until 1876, seven more steamships were built in the Ji-angnan Arsenal. The largest was the Yiyuan (IXJs), with a displacementof 2,800 tons.

Also in 1866, the Fuzhou Shipbuilding Bureau OlSWfpiWm) and theFuzhou Shipyard (iSJtljifSJôrMSjifpJ^) were established by ShenBaozhen, the Minister of Naval Affairs (f&j$C^|5) at that time. Moreradical measures were taken during the first decade (until 1875) to getaccess to European technical knowledge by not only hiring Frenchtechnicians, but also putting them in charge of all the technical aspectsof the shipbuilding operation. The gamble paid off: during the first 10years, the shipyard launched 15 large steam ships with an aggregatedisplacement of 170,000 tons. The shipyard became the backbone ofthe Qing modern shipbuilding. It went on to build another 25 shipsfrom 1876 to 1907 with a total displacement of 300,000 tons.

Qing shipbuilding easily matched that of the Meiji Japan by 1885(see Table 1). Before the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War for Korea,China's ownership of modern warships was not too far behind that ofMeiji Japan, either.91

Finally, the Westernizers also took a shortcut by importing ships andarms from Europe (and later Japan), which accounted for 55% of allnaval ships in the new Qing navy (Table 2).

Difference Made by the New Movers and Shakers: The Case of a NewNavyThe Westernizers were responsible for the establishment of a wide ar-ray of modern industries and infrastructure ranging from cotton tex-tiles, shipping, railroads and banking. But their priority was alwaysgiven to modern arms, which provides a good case for us to see theeffectiveness of the new movers and shapers.

Firstly, from 1865 onwards, the Jiangnan Arsenal mass-producedmodern arms, soon becoming the largest arms production centre inEast Asia and one of the largest in the world at that time.

Secondly, the Qing navy came a long way from its humble start withonly 30 traditional warships.92 By 1875, China had a new navy with two



Table 1 Chinese and Japanese naval shipbuilding compared, 1870-85.

Name

A. Shanghai (Jiangnan

W«)ing(J^Sl870)Hai-an (J§3cl872)Zhiyuan (gdfl875)Baomin ({^^1885)

B. Yokohama

Seiki (1876)Banjo (1880)Jingei (1881)Kaimon (1884)Tenryu (1885)

HuU

Arsenal)

WoodenWoodenWoodenWooden

WoodenWoodenWoodenWoodenWooden

Length

205.5 chi300.0300.0225.3

203ft153249210210

Beam

30.6 chi42.042.036.0

35ft2531

3235

Draught

11.0 chi19.021.014.3

13ft

12141617

Horse power

6051,8001,8001,900

443659

1,4501,2671,267

Source: (1) Chinese ships: based on Wei Yungong (ifcfc©, A History of the Jiangnan Arse-nal (ffiSfSBiliJte) (Shanghai, 1905); Wang Er-min Of SO, Rise of the New ArmsIndustry during the Qing Period (iff^ffR^Jji^jMffi) (Taipei, 1963), 82. (2)Japanese ships: H. Jentschura, D.Jung and P. Mickel, Warships of the Imperial Japa-nese Navy, 1869-1945, translated by Antony Preston and J. D. Brown (Annapolis,1977).

Table 2 Modern naval ships obtained by the Qing Navy, 1862-81.

Year

1862-71

1872-81

Total (1)

Total (2)

Br

13

12

25

Imports

Fr Gm US

1 1

3 2

1 4 2

Locally built

FZ JN SY

2 2 1

18 3 -

20 5 1

Total

20

38

32

26

Source: Based on Hao, A Naval History (Beiping, 1929), 9-185. Br, Britain; Fr, France;Gm, Germany; USA, United States; FZ, Fuzhou Shipyard; JN, Jiangnan Arsenal; SY,

individual shipyards.

modern fleets - equipped with modern ships and Western methods ofrecruitment, training and management: the Northern Sea Fleet(4t^$§^) and the Southern Sea Fleet (j^¥$S|l).93 There were alsoprovincial naval forces in Fujian and Guangdong Provinces.


Kent Deng 73

Table 3 Qing Naval Tours, 1870-1911.

Year Places visited

1870 Singapore, Pinang, Korea Bay

1875 Singapore, Pinang, Luzon, Japan

1886 Pusan, Hungnam, Nagasaki, Vladivostok, Inch'on, Seoul

1887 Korea

1890 Korea

1891 Tokyo

1907 Singapore, Saigon

1909 Singapore, Batavia (Jakarta), Surabaya, Pontianak, Yogyakarta,Ujung Pandang, Saigon

1911 South China Sea, Saigon, Batavia, Portsmouth and London*

Source: Based on Hao, A Naval History (Beiping, 1929), 10, 12, 54, 59, 65, 71, 75, 172,176, 186-7.

* For the occasion, in May 1911, of the coronation of George V (r. 1910-36), King of theUnited Kingdom and Emperor of India.

Such progress impressed Western observers. In the 1870s, they re-ported that 'China was rapidly becoming a formidable adversary','Chinese military power was vastly different from what it had been inI860', 'the output of factories and shipyards was impressive', 'Chinese-built warships would soon equal the highest European standards' with'the whole official class determined to restore China's internationalposition'.94 Overall, China was reported as having fire power that couldvie with the most powerful nations in Europe.95

Soon, the new navy began to show off in foreign and internationalwaters. Table 3 contains the main events of its overseas tours. On the1886 and 1891 tours, the fleet had two cruisers accompanied by three tofour frigates.96 These tours demonstrated the sailing range of the fleet.

China had its first opportunity to try out its new navy in 1873 afterJapan sent 3,000 marines to invade South Taiwan. The Minister of Na-val Affairs, Shen Baozhen, led a fleet with 7,000 marines to force theJapanese to withdraw.97

During the Franco-Chinese War in 1883-85 and the Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95, the new Qing navy caused severe damageto the French and Japanese fleets, respectively. In the case of theFranco-Chinese War, the Qing navy threw more war materiel than theFrench and thus won the sea battle. China lost the war only due to itsdiplomatic failure. In the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, Japan won



the war by a narrow margin, with heavy losses on its side. Japan tri-umphed by its military tactics (with the help of the British militaryadvisers) rather than its firing power.98 In comparison with the daysduring the Opium War in 1840, when the naval advantage was socompletely on the British side, during the 1880s and 1890s, Chinabecame a naval power for the industrial world to recognize. In 1899,the Italian navy sent six warships to China with an ultimatum to estab-lish a concession in the coastal Zhejiang Province. After sizing up theItalians, Qing officers convinced the Imperial Court that the Qingnavy was fully capable of defeating the invaders. The Italians withdrewempty-handed.

It is important to note that the Qing naval capacity was not destroyedafter these two wars. After the 1911 Revolution, as many as 41 of theships were inherited by the navy under the Nationalist government,with a total displacement of 39,795 metric tons and a total propulsiveforce at 126,200 units of horsepower, 370 cannons and 47 torpedotubes. These ships continued their services into the 1930s."

FINAL REMARKS

During the Ming-Qing period, there were two patterns of knowledgediffusion from Europe to China. The first was a Jesuit-centred top-downpattern. It proved to be very slow. From the year that Matteo Ricci ar-rived in Beijing in 1601 to the Opium War in 1840, the Jesuits' efforts,at very best, reached the Imperial Court circle but more or less wereconfined to the ivory tower. For two-and-a-half centuries, knowledgefrom Europe failed to make a significant difference in a society that wassubmerged in Confucianism and was obsessed with a competition forthe best behaviour in a neatly woven structure. Among many things, itdid practically nothing to help China's national security.

A new group of elites who acted as movers and shapers of knowledgeemerged only after the Opium War, with the adoption of Social Dar-winism. The new ideology marginalized the need for a moral highground of benevolence in the later Qing social policies. Only then wasthe floodgate for practical European technology and knowledge to flowquite freely in society and tackle more immediate and tangible chal-lenges. So, in terms of the scale, scope and speed of changes, the 50years of the post-Opium War period (1840-90) broke all the records inthe history of the empire of China.

This observation implies that China did not have the necessary con-ditions to develop its indigenous capitalistic industrialization. Capital-ism and industrialization had to be introduced from the outside.

Notes and References1. After da Gama established a cross-ocean sea route to Asia in 1498, it took about 15

years for Portugal to trade directly with China: around 1513, Jorge Alvares became the firstEuropean merchant to reach Da-ao (or Tamao) near the Guangdong coast; see J. M. Braga,The Tamao of the Portuguese Pioneers', Tien Hsia (World Monthly), 1939, 5: 420-32; also


Kent Deng 75

Hao Peiyun, A Naval History of Modern China (^ffiSS^) (Helping, 1929), 163, 175, 178.It took another 4 years for the Portuguese under Fernao Peres de Andrade to establishrelationships with Canton officials and to send their first ambassador, Tome Pires, toBeijing; see C. R. Boxer (ed.), South China in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1953), xx.

2. He got his work permit to stay in Beijing as a clock-repairing artisan, not as aJesuit missionary; see M. Ricci (flRHS), c- 1610, Matteo Ricci's Diary on China

, translated by He Gaoji (MiSW) (Beijing, 1983), 582. Ricci was men-tioned in the official history of The History of the Ming Dynasty ffl^); see Zhang Tingyu(ed.), 1735, 'Entry Biography 214, Foreign 7' (?IJft HH+K, ^ffl-tr), in The History of theMing Dynasty (H^lfe) (Beijing, 1974, reprint).

3. Francis Xavier (1506-52) attempted to establish a mission in Macao. He did notsucceed in entering mainland China.

4. It is stated that 1571 was the year when the first recorded commercial shipmentof silver from the West arrived in China; see D. O. Flynn and A. Giraldez, 'Cycles of Sil-ver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century', Journal of World His-tory, 2002, 2: 391-427. However, von Glahn sets the date as far back as 1550; see R. VonGlahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700 (Berkeley,1996), 140. In 1729, the Portuguese shipped the first recorded 200 chests of opium toMacao, ushering in the age of the opium trade with China; see J. Phipps, A Practical Trea-tise on the China and Eastern Trade (Calcutta, 1835), 208. The first British opium cargoarrived half a century later, in 1773; see E. H. Pritchard, Anglo-Chinese Relations during theSeventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Urbana, 1929), 150.

5. Small-scale naval friction between the Chinese and the Portuguese and then theDutch first took place in the first half of the seventeenth century; see ZBK (ZhongguoDabaike Quanshu Chubanshe (Encyclopaedia Sinica Publisher)), 'Chinese History'(Ûllfli), in Encyclopaedia Sinica (^HIAH^^tf) (Beijing and Shanghai, 1992), 676.

6. The Ming judiciary system was considered fair by Europeans. During Zhu Wan'santi-smuggling campaign in China's East Coast, the unlawful Portuguese traders cap-tured in Zhejiang were sent into exile in Guangxi Province, some 1,200 kilometres away.Only four were executed for their killing of Chinese soldiers. The Portuguese offenderswere very impressed by their fair trial in the Chinese Court; see Boxer, op. cit. (1), xxix.

7. The Ming state created an incentive by treating the Portuguese differently fromother Europeans so long as the Portuguese were 'well behaved' by Chinese standards; seeH. B. Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635-1834, Vol. 1(Oxford, 1926-29), 29, 47; see also W. L. Schurz, The Manila Galleon (Manila, 1938, re-print 1985), 61 and chap. 3.

8. See G. Deng, The Premodern Chinese Economy: Structural Equilibrium and CapitalistSterility (London and New York, 1999), chap. 5.

9. Gaetano Pires Pereira (Ijllp^g) (P-1838), a Portuguese Jesuit who died in hispost as the Director, was the last foreigner employed by the Imperial Observatory.

10. Diego de Pantoja, a Spanish-born Jesuit, is believed to have accompanied Riccito Beijing after 1599 to work for the Ming government.

11. Sabbathin de Ursis, an Italian-born Jesuit, first came to China in 1606 under therecommendation of Matteo Ricci. He succeeded Ricci in 1611 to take charge of the Im-perial calendar project.

12. Johannes Schreck, a German-born Jesuit, first came to Macao in 1619, enteredChina in 1621 and reached Beijing in 1623. He died on his post as Officer of the MingImperial Observatory working on the new Ming Imperial Almanac

13. Von Bell, a German-born Jesuit, came to China in 1622. He was the successor ofJohannes Schreck by the invitation of the then Ming Premier Xu Guanqi (f^TfcU) in1630. In 1623, he took advantage of repairing a piano for Emperor Chongzhen to try,unsuccessfully, to persuade the Emperor to convert to Christianity. His biography wasincluded in Zhao Erxun, 'Entry Biography 59' (?!|flffi+A), in Draft of the History of theQing Dynasty (rff^fe) (Beijing, 1927, reprint 1977).

14. ffl^-W-): 'BÊ^ftJSS^ ... ' mJesuit missionary; see M. Ricci (flRHS), c- 1610, Matteo Ricci's Diary on Chinam (*»f 89'. SeeZhang, op. cit. (2), chap. 'Imperial Almanac One'.

15. Nicolas Longobardi, an Italian-born Jesuit, was another successor of MatteoRicci. It remains unclear when he first entered China.



16. Jacques Rho, an Italian-born Jesuit, first came to China in 1624. He was invitedto Beijing in 1630 to join the Ming Imperial Observatory.

17. Ferdinand Verbiest, a Belgian-born Jesuit, entered China in 1659. He was in-volved in the Qing firearms design in 1675. Like von Bell, Verbiest was appointed thepost of Director of the Imperial Observatory in 1669. He supervised the construction ofsix new instruments for the observatory from 1670 to 1674: a zodiac armillary sphere, anequatorial armillary sphere, two altazimuths, a quadrant and a celestial globe. His biog-raphy was included in Zhao, op. cit. (13).

18. Thoma Pereira, a Portuguese-born Jesuit, came to China in 1672. He worked inthe Imperial Observatory in the 1670s and 80s. He worked for the Qing as one of theofficial translators and interpreters for the 1689 Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk(/b^Sffel^). It was documented that he did all he could to protect China's interestsagainst the Russian attempt to encroach its territory. Incidentally, the treaty has beencommonly regarded as an equal and fair treaty for China, very rare during Qing history.

19. Philippus Maria Grimaldi, an Italian-born Jesuit, was the successor of FerdinandVerbiest to work for the Imperial Observatory.

20. Joachim Bouvet, a French-born Jesuit, first arrived in China in 1688 and wasemployed by the Qing state from 1707 to 1717 to map the entire Qing Empire with theEuropean technology of cartography.

21. Jean Francois Gerbillon, a French Jesuit, first arrived in China also in 1688 andwas employed by the Qing court in 1689 as an official interpreter and translator for theSino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk.

22. Bernard-Kiliam Stumpf, a German Jesuit, was employed by Emperor Kangxi in1696 to build China's first glass-making factory. He joined the Qing Imperial Observataryin 1715 and was responsible for building a European-style theodolite.

23. Joseph Giusepp Castiglione, an Italian Jesuit, arrived in China in 1715 and wasemployed almost immediately as the court artist for 50 years until the end of his life. Heheld the post of Official of the Third Rank (Hnp) of the Qing.

24. Ignatius Koegler, a German Jesuit, arrived in China in 1716 and reached Beijingin 1717 to take up his position in the Imperial Observatory. He was promoted to Directorof the Imperial Observatory (Ifc^SEtlE) in 1725.

25. Andre Pereira, a Portuguese Jesuit, worked in the capacity of Deputy Director ofthe Imperial Observatory alongside Koegler.

26. Augustin de Hallerstein, an Austro-Hungarian Jesuit, was the successor of Igna-tius Koegler in charge of the Imperial Observatory.

27. They did mainly house-keeping for the Imperial Observatory: Antonius Gogeis(Itteff, 1701-71), Felix da Rocha (fffpS, 1713-81), Jose de Espinha (SfXJS, 1722-88), Jose Bernardo de Almeida (S^gJi, 1728-1806), Andre Rodrigues (ÎPPs 1729-96), Alexandre Gouveia (i|±lf, 1787-1807), Vervissimo Monteiro da Serra (BnRi, ?)and, finally, Gaetano Pires Pereira (Ifll^g, P-1838).

28. His fast-track promotion eventually got him into trouble. He was imprisoned ondeath row in 1664 after the death of Emperor Shuizhi, but Emperor Kangxi (Jit!?B, r.1662-1722) pardoned him in 1669.

29. Zhang, op. cit. (2), Vol. 251, No. 9.30. H. Bernard, Matteo Ricci's Scientific Contribution to China, translated by E. C.

Werner (Westport, CT, 1973), 67-93; F. Bray, 'Section 41: Agriculture', in J. Needham(ed.), Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 6. (Cambridge, 1984), 64-9.

31. Kang Chengyi (Jjt$ct§), An Enquiry into the Literature Sources Quoted in the'Nongzheng Quanshu' (î&^l^lK RUgHS) (Shanghai: Agriculture Press, 1960), 7.

32. They were later called the Three Pillars of the Catholic Church in China'(îi^Hftîi), due to Church propaganda rather than their actual impact on Chinesesociety.

33. The best known case was Wei Yiji (itS/N 1616-86), a Qing official of the FirstRank(—qa

p).34. See Xu Haisong (f^$|fi£), Chinese Literati and Western Knowledge during the Early

Qing (rff#J±AflS*) (Beijing, 2000), 90.35. The lower figure comes from Li Nanqiu (SÛfA), A Draft History of Translated

Science Literature in China (^H^&XtRWISÎ) (Hefei, 1993), 61. The higher figure is


Kent Deng

based on Xu Zongze (f^^gl), Abstracts of Translated Works by Jesuit Missionaries during theMing-Qing Period (Beijing, 1989).

36. Hou Wailu (f^Hl), A General History of Thought in China (tfHS^SSt), Vol. 4(Beijing, 1960), 1254.

37. See Jijun (JSB%) (ed.), The Qing Imperial Complete Collection of Books (Taipei , 1772, reprint 1983), The Third Category

'- See Zhang, o/?. al (2), chap. 'Imperial Almanac One'.39. To be fair, Chinese artisans did copy rather religiously European designs for ex-

port porcelain pieces. But they may not have been able to create their own. See E.Gordon, Treasures from the East, Chinese Export Porcelain for the Collector (Pittstown, 1984); C.Clunas, Art in China (Oxford, 1997), 194-8.

40. It reads

I;', see Anon., Veritable Records of Emperor Gaozong of the Qing DynastyVol. 1435 (Beijing, 1985, reprint), 15.

41. Needham developed a chart to show how science and technology evolved inChina and Europe. In his conclusion of his life-time of work on science and civilization inChina, Needham asserted that it was Galileo who marked the turning point, after whichEurope overtook China gradually; see J. Needham (ed.), Science and Civilisation in China,Vol. 7 (Cambridge, 2004), 28, 217-24.

42. See Needham, ibid., 214.43. See Needham, op. cit. (41), 20.44. See Ricci, op. cit. (2), 94.45. It is commonly known as|§4pj|CSf, literally 'Western knowledge trickling to

China'; see Xu, op. cit. (34), chap. 1.46. Including Huang Zongxi 1610-95), Fang Yizhi ( 1^1611-71),

Zhang Erqi (3HBM& 1612-77), Gu Yanwu (JBifeE, 1613-82), Wang Fuzhi1619-92), Wei Xi 1624-80) and Lu Liuliang (SfiJI, 1629-83).

47. For example, P. A. Kuhn advocated the hypothesis of an irreversible crisis acrossthe empire; see P. A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarizationand Social Structure, 1796-1864 (Cambridge, MA, 1970).

48. Attempts have been made even to provide archival data to support the theory ofcrisis; see Chen Zhenhan (|^fM8l) (ed.), Economic History Materials from Veritable Records ofthe Qing Dynasty (Beijing, 1989), passim.

49. See Deng, op. cit. (8), 223-5.50. Zhao, op. cit. (13), 467.51. G. Deng, Maritime Sector, Institutions and Sea Power of Premodern China (New York,

London and West Port, 1999), 124.52. Liang Fangzhong (^Jjitf*), Dynastic Data of China's Households, Cultivated Land

andLand Taxation (^HKf^DfflifefflKgEft) (Shanghai, 1980), 428.53. P.-E. Will and R. B. Wong, Nourish the People: the State Civilian Granary System in

China, 1650-1850 (Ann Arbor, 1991).54. Wuîenyou (^ffi^) (ed.) The Annotated Four Books and Five Classics of Confucian-

ism (HllSg) (Beijing, 1993), 118-19.55. See Liang, op. cit. (52), 540-4.56. Datong (^|oj) is commonly translated into 'Great Harmony'.57. See F. W. Drake, China Charts the World: Hsu Chi-Yii and His Geography of 1848

(Cambridge, MA, 1975), chaps 8-9.58. It is commonly agreed that Social Darwinism was the corner-stone of all political

thought in China during the post-Opium War period; see J. R. Pusey, China and CharlesDarwin (Cambridge, MA, 1983); J. A. Fogel and P. G. Zarrow, Imaging the People, ChineseIntellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890-1902 (Armonk, NY, 1997), 15; A. Ong andD. Nonini, Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism(New York and London, 1997), 46; K. Wang, Modern China: An Encyclopaedia of History,Culture and Nationalism (New York, 1998), 321; E. S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A SocialHistory of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley, 1998), 2; T. Brook and T. B. Wakabayashi,Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952 (Berkeley, 2000), 71; H. Harrison,



China (London, 2001), 73; K.-W. Chow, K. M. Doak and Poshek Fu, Constructing Nation-hood in Modern East Asia (Ann Arbor, 2001), 53-4; G. Wei and Xiaoyuan Liu, ExploringNationalisms of China: Themes and Conflicts (Westport, CT and London, 2002), 12; S. L.Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953 (Berkley, 2003), 2; G. Arrighi, T.Hamashita and M. Selden, The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives(London and New York, 2003), 54; A. D. Voskressenski, Russia and China: A Theory ofInter-State Relations (London, 2003), 91; K.-C. Liu and R. Shek, Heterodoxy in Late ImperialChina (Honolulu, 2004), 17; P. F. Williams and Y. Wu, The Great Wall of Confinement: TheChinese Prison Camp through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage (Berkeley, 2004), 13.

59. They included The Chinese Repository (glHîlg), The Canton Press and The Canton Register (StJUIB^Sz).

60. The main body of text was Lin Zexu's Encyclopaedia of Geography (0jffl;£). It wasintroduced to Japan in 1854 and became an instant best-seller.

61. It reads 'J¥ffi7JcK, '*JMfnîaS*§*¥, SS^^-fe'; see YangGuozhen (HSfi), Collection of Lin Zexu's Letters, Enlarged(Fuzhou, 1985), 193.

62. Wei Yuan (HM), n.d., 'Military Glory' (HKIB), in Punitive Expedition of ForeignFleet under the Daoguang Reign (1821-50) (M^ffSfiES&lfi, T), Vol. 10 (Shanghai, 1936,reprint), 336. It is important to note that Meiji Japan copied exactly the same approachfrom Qing China after their 1868 Restoration, despite that fact that the kanjiwas pronounced as fokoku kyohei.

63. See Preface of his A Comprehensive Survey of Off-Shore Countries64. See Jia Zhen and Bao Yun (Hffi, &H), Qing Diplomacy with the West, 1851-61

, Book 3, Vol. 3 (Beijing, 1979, originally published 1862), 1049.65. This was 'local militarization in Qing China'.66. Li Zhiming (^£3?), Four Major Mufu in the Late Qing (Kr/ffKABW) (Shang-

hai, 2002). See also Ling Linhuang (^>f^JS), 'Investigation of the Total Number of ZengGuofan's Mufu and Its Related Organisations' (^H^Slff^ffiliffll^lSMliR^^), inSpecial Issue of the Association of Chinese History (^SM^Sli^^lfefO), 1997, 29: 363-91.

67. Prince Yixin (86§f) wrote to the throne in 1860 that learning from Europewould help fight against the peasant rebellions; see Shi Zhongwen ($,fItl>0, Records ofProminent Figures in Early Modern China (ÎKfiÂSSFJi • illicit) (Beijing, 1997),46.

68. The Taiping Rebellion, the most powerful rebellion since 1368, swept the rich-est regions in the 1850s; the Qing government lost as much as 90% of its regular reve-nues.

69. Association of Chinese History (^lll'fcSNI"), 'Protests from the Xianbin Hut,On Adopting Western Knowledge' (SS3F, 'f&^JS$lli, £RHHH')> in Chinese EarlyModern History Series, 1898 Reform, One (^SM^SWKf0, jktftiKfc, —) (Shanghai,1957), 27-31.

70. See R. Gilbert, The Unequal Treaties, China and the Foreigner (London, 1929), 54-5.71. The Jiangnan Arsenal was established by Li Hongzhang in 1865.72. Martin spoke fluent Chinese. His first Chinese translation was Henry Wheaton's

1836 work of Elements of International Law (MS^&), which was first published in 1864.This work was re-translated into Japanese in 1865. He went on to translate two more lawtextbooks - Outline of International Law (îKMJI) and Guide to International Law(ÂiU'M) - and wrote two of his own - Essence of Foreign Diplomacy (S>5C8llc) and Inter-national Law in Ancient China (^HSffi&ffilWfe). See Xiong Yuzhi (^£), WesternKnowledge Approaching China and Late Qing Society (S^P^ÛBftSfift^) (Shanghai,1994), 322; Wang Tieya (zESlJlt), Encyclopaedia of Law, International Law Section(t^gf^tfm) (SUfeS^g) (Beijing, 1996), 101; Wang Jian (i<!t), Western Knowl-edge Approaching China - Foreigners and Law Changes in Early Modern China (jSffijflSf -^HAH^fflffiftJjJrffiSS^) (Beijing, 2001), 11; and Zou Zhenhuan (JBffi|3S), ^CapitalForeign Language Academy and Its Translation Output' (MSBH^tl§S.Kl?Sffi^l)» mHistory of the Press (ti$fc$M), 1989, 2: 83.

73. W. A. Martin (TStJsU, Translated Titles by Translation Division of the JiangnanArsenal in Shanghai (|pK|JtIt&») (Shanghai, 1989). See also Tian Tao (fflSI), The


Kent Deng 79

Introduction of International Law and Late Qing China (P^ffiUfAI^B^gS^ffl) (Jinan,2001), 59.

74. Wang Yangzong (HiS^f), John Fryer and Scientific Enlightenment in Early ModernChina (Beijing, 2000).

75. Anon., Translated Works from the Last Forty Years with Brief Descriptions(Shanghai, 1909).

76. Liang Qichao (S^F@), 1896, 'Bibliography of Western Learning' (HHH @^),in Liang Qichao f^gjg), Readings for Ice Drinkers' Hut (&&j&&^), Vol. 1 (Beijing,1936, reprint 1989), 122-5.

77. It readsJ&^—7H7'; see Zuo Zongtang Cfcg^l), c. 1885, 'Report to The Foreign Affairs De-partment' (JlflS^&H^f^fpfr^), in Anon., Collected Materials of China's Early ModernHistory, Archives of Coastal Defence, Fuzhou Shipyard ,

/TiffiftM), Vol. 2 (Taipei, reprint 1957), 53.78. In 1876, the curriculum of the Academy included English, French, Russian,

German, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, navigation, international law, poli-tics, world history and world geography. It merged in 1902 with the newly establishedCapital Academy (j^S^f^), the predecessor of Peking University

79. Hao, op. at. (1),8.80. Hao, op. cit. (1), 17, 65, 71, 167.81. See Anon., Regulations of the Northern Sea Fleet (Jt}¥$8¥¥?M) (Taipei, c. 1890,

reprint 1968), 179-97.82. See Anon., ibid., 199-204.83. Hao, op. cit. (1), 12, 13, 18, 20, 41, 45, 70, 82, 159, 170-1, 174-5, 218, 222.84. It is documented that the vessel was 67 chi long, 20 chi beam, equipped with 36

oars and two paddle-wheels. It took ten men to paddle the wheels; Wei Yuan (MM), AComprehensive Survey of Off-shore Countries (iffllfl/g), Vol. 84 (c. 1841), 23.

85. It is reported that one ship was launched in a river but it did not steer wellSmil'); see Wen Qing (3t]H), Qing Diplomacy with the West, 1821-50Steffi) (Beijing, 1964, reprint), 711, 2470-1.

86. The ship had one cylinder steam engine, about 18 metres long (55R, chi), 25tons' displacement. It travelled at a speed of about 10 kilometres (20M, #) per hour.

87. It was reported as 'fri£2Hffi, ^Hffffi'; see Zen Guofan (HHlif), 'Report ofNew Ship' (ffjsfmfpj/f), in his Complete Works of Zen Guofan, Memorials to the Throne

Vol. 27 (Shanghai, c. 1876, reprint 1936), 10.88. Zuo believed that by copying European technology, China would be able to re-

move Europe's comparative advantage and fight back '^tJ&fi^^LP/f'KF/ 'B^^zill^ffj'J/^L';see Luo Zhengjun (UlEixJ) (ed.), n.d., Chronicle of Zuo Zongtang (T^^SÎIf) (Chang-sha, reprint 1983), 113.

89. See Zuo Zongtang C^H^), 'Memorial to the Throne on Purchasing Machines and Em-ploying Foreign Technicians to Build Steam Ships' , inComplete Collection of Zuo Zongtang's Works, Memorials to the Thrones (y^H^^H, Hfe), Vol. 18(Shanghai, c. 1885, reprint 1986), 5-6.

90. See Hao, op. cit. (1), 8-9.91. T. C. Smith, Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan: Government Enter-

prise 1868-1880 (Stanford, 1955), 9.92. Hao, op. cit. (1), 1.93. See Xia Zhengnong (SffijR) (ed.), Encyclopaedia (j$ft§) (Shanghai, 1989), 157,

382.94. M. C. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism (Stanford, 1957), 220.95. See Wright, ibid., 212.96. Hao, op. cit. (1), 75.97. Hao, op. cit. (1), 11.98. Wright, op. cit. (94), 220.99. See Hao, op. cit. (1), 227-9.



China and Science on the Eve

of the 'Great Divergence51600-1800: A Review of

Recent Revisionist Scholarshipin Western Languages

H A R R I E T T . Z U R N D O R F E R

ABSTRACT

The first part of this study considers both general and specific publicationsthat have re-framed the way China specialists and others have conceivedChinese science and attempts to relate these representations to divergingpatterns of economic development between China and Europe before thenineteenth century. In the second part, this essay focuses on the Jesuittransmission of European science to China, and its consequences. It arguesthat the Ming and Qing governments' efforts to control the Jesuit-transmitted knowledge in these fields stimulated ever more interest amonglocal scholars in Chinese traditions of mathematics and astronomy, whichculminated in the eighteenth-century 'evidential research' movement. Butbecause the scientific knowledge the Jesuits conveyed was already out ofdate, before their arrival in China, local scholars never had the possibilityto make a complete reassessment of their own mathematical andastronomical practices. As the primary and — at times, the only —translators of Western scientific thought to China, the Jesuits had anenormous historical impact on how Chinese scholars became trapped in apre-Copernican universe in which Chinese natural philosophy, with itsfocus on metaphysical interpretations of the natural world, remainedentrenched until the nineteenth century.

INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF CHINESE SCIENCE IN A GLOBALPERSPECTIVE: OLD AND NEW DEBATES

In 1603, the famous Chinese intellectual and Christian convert, XuGuangqi (1562-1633), offered the local magistrate of his native Shanghaicounty a proposal outlining the methodology to measure the length, width,


82 China and Science on the Eve of the 'Great Divergence' 1600-1800

depth and water flow of a river. Xu's document (later printed in hiscollection, Nongzheng quanshu (Comprehensive Treatise on AgriculturalAdministration, comp. 1639), employed conventional surveying practicesas well as calculating techniques based on the Pythagorean theorem.Although it is tempting to attribute Xu's achievement here as a directconsequence of his meeting the Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) inNanjing that same year, it is not certain from extant documentation thatthis encounter with the European was the defining influence on his waterstudy. Growing up in a region of well connected networks of waterwaysand extensive wall-building, Xu had already, at an early age, acquiredan interest in water control and military matters, pursued mathematicalstudy in that regard and familiarized himself with relevant sixteenth-century Chinese mathematical texts. But it does seem that this proposal,featuring an illustration of a circle divided into 360 degrees, diddemonstrate some Western influence. Xu would go on to translate withRicci the first six books of Christophorus Clavius' edition of Euclid'sElements, known in Chinese as Jiheyuanben (Geometry by Euclid] 1608), anaccomplishment that would earn him distinction and respect amongChinese and European scholars alike.1

Recent modern scholarship on Xu Guangqi has depreciated Euro-centric portraits of this polymath transmitted in the first instance by theJesuit mission in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and conveyedlater, in twentieth-century secondary writings, as a 'component in themaster narrative of the European civilization mission in China'.2 Instead,as Timothy Brook advocates, Xu's life should be viewed in a 'Ming-centred approach', with his science and his religion considered integral to'a knowledge system that prized practical solutions to worldly problems,and a world view that strengthened (Confucian) statecraft concerns with adesire for salvation'.3 In other words, Xu Guangqi was a man of his times:a talented scholar and a dedicated Confucian official committed to thepropagation of agricultural knowledge, the relief of subsistence crises, theencouragement of military defence and, not least, the promotion of freetrade between China and Japan as a way of curbing piracy.4 According toBrook and other critical scholars, one needs to regard Xu primarily as amember of that stream of late-Ming-dynasty (c. 1580-1644) thinkers whoendorsed concrete solutions to concrete problems, namely shixue (concretestudies). Thus, in this context, the significance of Xu Guangqi's exploitslies less with what impact Jesuit science had on him, and more with how hemay have attempted to solve a number of contemporary problems byutilizing facets of the knowledge conveyed by the Jesuits.

This revisionist scholarship may be judged as one more step inovercoming the 'Great Divide' that has castigated the 'scientific West'against the 'exotic, intuitive East' or, in other words, the 'single-mindedhistorical teleology of Western European "success" and non-Western"failure" '.5 The preoccupation with the economic, social and politicaltransformation that constitutes the recent history of Western Europe andNorth America has frequently indicted other regions and, in particular,


Harriet T. ûrndorfer 83

China for not fulfilling the potential to modern realizations in the spheresof industrial production or military prowess before the nineteenthcentury.6 In this way, modernity and the diffusion of science (such asthat once propagated by the well known historian of science, GeorgeBasalla) become a unilinear narrative expressed in rigid models of centre/periphery or metropole/colony.7 Invariably, such accounts point to therole of science and scientific-related technologies used in agricultural andindustrial production as the West's triumph, and even rightful privilege.

Such thinking has met a provocative challenge with KennethPomeranz's volume, The Great Divergence, in which the role of science inthe making of the modern world economy is quietly set aside.8 Pomeranzhas argued persuasively that economic data are sufficient to demonstratethe foundation on which European industrialization was built. Hecompares the constraints on China's richest and most productive region,Jiangnan, with similar factors affecting the English economy in theeighteenth century. Pomeranz demonstrates how Jiangnan's problemswith the growing population's demand on food, fuel, housing andhandicrafts prohibited sustainable growth there, and contrasts England'sadvantages in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Britain benefitedfrom the 'geographical accident' of having accessible deposits of coal andiron, profited from its acquisition of colonies in the New World with itswealth of resources, and thereby overcame its own limitations to developan industrial economy.

But this kind of refutation is exceptional and, until the last few decadesof the last century, the study of China's path to modern development wasan opportunity to cast praise for what Europe developed and possessed,and blame for what China did not, and, in particular, science. Thepositivistic view of science favours the notion of the transmission of scienceas transparent: since scientific knowledge is positive, how can one resist it?And so, when the first Europeans visiting Ming China expressed howadeptly officialdom supervised practical matters such as salt production,iron manufacture, flood control and agricultural development, they alsovoiced surprise that these administrators achieved their responsibilitiesthrough an examination system testing moral and literary values. In hisletters to Europe, Ricci communicated about this matter and noted thatthe Chinese were 'trapped' in a humanist civilization that valued literaryideals exclusively. As he commented, 'The study of mathematics and thatof medicine were held in low esteem, because they are not fostered byhonours as is the study of philosophy, to which students are attracted bythe hope of the glory and the rewards attached to it'.9

Thus, beginning with Matteo Ricci's writings, and continuing well intothe eighteenth century with proclamations such as those uttered by thedirector of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Dortous deMairan, or even Voltaire, there has been a continuous repudiation ofChina's failure to generate 'science', namely a certain kind of mathema-tical and theoretical reasoning along with systematic experimentation.10 Inthis regard, the disavowals made in the first half of the twentieth century



were particularly vociferous. For example, Bertrand Russell, after a year'slecturing in East Asia, wrote in his 1922 volume, The Problem of China, thatuntil European influence had reached that region, there had been neitherscience nor industrialization.11 Russell's assertions were repeated 20 yearslater in the writings of the Yale University philosophy professors, FilmerNorthrop and Wilmon Sheldon, and a decade after that in a well knownletter written in 1953 by Albert Einstein, who communicated hisastonishment that the Chinese sages did not make the steps '[to] inventthe formal logical system (i.e. Euclidean geometry) nor to find out [the]causal relationship by systematic experiment'.12

It was against this kind of intellectual disclaimer that Joseph Needham(1900-95) began his Science and Civilization in China project, which hasculminated in more than 30 volumes documenting China's contributionsto mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and to mechanical, civil andnautical engineering.13 Needham proposed that Chinese attainments inthese fields were part of a 'grand titration' in which China was an equalcontributor among the tributaries that flowed into the river of modernscience.14 Instead of a radical civilizational divide between the West andChina, Needham emphasized that there had been a radical temporalbreak between 'primitive science' (originating both in ancient China andancient Greece) and 'modern science', which he claimed culturallyuniversal but uniquely Western in origin. Over time, his study of thisdivide became known as the 'Needham problem': why did modern science,the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implicationsfor advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the timeof Galileo?15

While Needham will always be credited for his most importantbreakthrough, namely to put European inventiveness in a widerperspective, he also attracted critics and even during his lifetime. Asidefrom those historians of science, such as the late A. C. Crombie or Derek deSolla Price, who became even more convinced of science as a uniquelyWestern accomplishment after familiarizing themselves with Needham'swork,16 the most important challenge has been the critique by the Chinascholar, Nathan Sivin. On the one hand, Sivin censured 'the excesses' ofNeedham's rehabilitation of Chinese science and, on the other hand, hedoubted the usefulness of attempts to compare the science and technologyof civilizations in their entirety.17 In Sivin's perception, there were manydiverse traditions - 'from techniques, to institutional settings, to views ofnature and man's relation to it' - originating in various locations, which'interacted . . . continuously until they were replaced by local versions ofthe modern science that they all helped to form'.18 Moreover, in contrastto Needham, who dismissed the contribution of Confucian scholars toscience, Sivin has demonstrated the specific achievements of a number ofliterati (e.g. Wang Xishan (1628-82)) in mathematics and astronomy, anddirected attention to the importance of careful analysis of their writtenworks. He views the primary preoccupation of this tiny, educated elite tobe the preservation and revivification of its own culture and, in that way,



their interest in science and, in particular, mathematics as integral to thehistory of Chinese intellectual development. Sivin's own path-breakingwork, which still goes on, has also been enriched by the importantpublications of Benjamin Elman.19 Elman has demonstrated the centralityof the concepts of appropriation, translation and innovation to the historyof science in China, and that the establishment of Western science in Chinawas a complex narrative, rather than a singular historical teleology ofEuropean triumph over Eastern diffidence.

Sivin's reproach of Needham has also extended to the matter of hissynthesis of science and technology. The second part of the 'Needhamproblem' asks why, between the first century BCE and the fifteenth centuryCE, Chinese civilization was much more efficient than occidental in applyinghuman natural knowledge to practical human needs. But Sivin discounts therole of science in technology and argues that during these 1600 years or so,science and technology were separate entities (technology not being 'appliedscience') and that Chinese superiority in technology was not indicative ofmore advanced science. He believes technology and manufacturingtechniques were matters of craft traditions inherited from one generationto the next without written instruction, while science was carried out on thewhole by members of the minority of educated people in China, andtransmitted in books.20 Thus, the written history of China's agriculturalpractices and industrial arts, such as that illustrated in the Tiangong kaiwu(The Exploitation of the Works of Nature] 1637), originated not with thosepeople who fired porcelain or spun cotton and weaved cloth, but from literatiobservers eager to communicate the achievements of the lower orders.

In that regard, it is interesting to point out the differences between howQing China and Tokugawa Japan diffused agricultural knowledge.21

While both regimes printed agricultural handbooks (nongshu (Chinese)/nosho (Japanese)), the Japanese aimed these manuals at the educatedpeasant who would have found the level of technical informationcomprehensible. In the case of China, where official government policywas indeed to encourage agriculture (quannong], these books were writtenby bureaucrats for bureaucrats, and the dissemination of improvedagricultural knowledge probably followed the age-old process of person-to-person, word-of-mouth that paralleled the bureaucrats' communication.

Recent revisionist modern scholarship has also raised the significance ofthe role of magic to the development of Chinese science. Despite theConfucian self-image of a secular and pragmatic society, most of China'smost well known inventions, ironically, originated in the mantic arts.22

Writing probably grew from the requirements of divination; printing fromthe desire to gain merit by multiplying prayers and chants; magnetism,geology and the navigator's compass from the geomancer's arts;gunpowder from the use of fireworks to scare off evil spirits; astronomyfrom astrology; and, not least, chemistry from alchemy.23 And, as for thelatter, it is noteworthy that the world's richest depository of knowledgeabout chemical reactions and their products up to around the year 1200may be found in Chinese alchemy texts.24



Finally, we should regard another facet of this revisionist scholarship ofthe last decades, namely the focus on China's 'fertile relations' with othercultures in a global concourse. China could boast about long-termexperience with the world-wide flow of useful and reliable knowledge thatsometimes came 'bundled' with foreign religion.25 Buddhism originating inIndia was the most important stimulus in China for printing. Thereproduction of identical Buddha images led to the use of wooden blocks topublish Buddhist sutras, and eventually to the printing of the Confucianclassics as well as vernacular literature, and the creation of the well knownbook industry that flourished from the eleventh century.26 And Islam, soclosely connected to international trade, brought China in contact withastronomers, mathematicians and medical doctors of other civilizations.

But, unlike these two religions, which acquired social and economicfunctions in China and thereby integrated into local life, Christianity wasnever institutionalized in such ways. New revisionist scholarship on theJesuit mission in China has also cast a critical eye on the entire ventureand, in particular, the so-called 'superior technical and scientific training'the Jesuits were supposed to have introduced to a small, educated elite.27

Liam Brockey's work, which finds the efforts of the China Jesuits a tributeto the genius of the Society's publicity enterprise, has raised a number ofserious questions about this mission. And so, given how much attentionWesterners have paid to the Jesuit project in China with regard to thetransmission of European science, we should now probe more deeply intothe circumstances of this contact and how revisionist scholarship hasexposed the difficulties that ensued.

In this paper, we will focus on three aspects of the encounter betweenthe Jesuits and their Chinese interlocutors: how the Chinese authoritiesaccommodated the Jesuit mission for their own purposes; how the Jesuitscontrolled what 'useful and reliable knowledge' they conveyed to Chinesescholars; and how Chinese intellectuals re-evaluated their own scientificlegacies in relation to what the Jesuits communicated with them. In theprocess, we hope to dispel a number of myths and illusions about Chinesescience and mathematics as well as to demonstrate the centrality of politicsin late imperial China to the propagation and reproduction of knowledge.

JESUIT SCIENTIFIC MISSION IN CHINA: FLATTERY AS STRATEGY

As is well known, the first Jesuit mission arrived in China in 1583 with theaim of converting the Chinese masses to Christianity. The Jesuits wereamong the best educated men in sixteenth-century Europe and, ascontenders to the Reformation's humanist scholars, 'they made learning,both religious and secular, a major tool in the defence and propagation ofCatholicism'.28 They established numerous schools and colleges in whichthey emphasized mathematical skills so as to prove that they stood at thefrontiers of modern knowledge. The 236 Jesuit colleges scattered aroundvarious regions in Southern Europe and Germany as well as in the Spanish


Harriet T. ûrndorfer

and Portuguese colonies in Latin-America and Asia made this Order'seducational programme truly a global enterprise. Although other Catholicorders - Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and the secular FrenchSociety of Foreign Missions - also entered China in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, it was the Society of Jesus that dominated, but withfinite success. With a total of some 900 Jesuits working in China during thisperiod, the Society could claim only limited numbers of converts -probably no more than 200,000 in sum over the two centuries (out of atotal population of some 300 million). And yet, this relative accomplish-ment was also the key to the Jesuits' long-term problems: as Brockeyconvincingly argues, with ever more converts, but a dwindling number ofnew priest recruits, there was not enough trained manpower and the entireoperation became 'a massive house of cards'.29

At the start of the mission, however, there was promise of success. It wasRicci who, after having become fluent in written classical Chinese andspoken Mandarin, first set the parameters by which the Jesuits establishedtheir undertaking. His strategy consisted of three main principles:propagation from the top down, namely focusing on the Chinese literatielite; secondly, maximal 'accommodation' to the lifestyle of that elitewhich included a certain tolerant attitude towards the Chinese ritualtradition; and, thirdly, 'indirect propagation', namely combining thereligious message with elements of Western science and technology thatshould serve to impress educated Chinese with the superiority of Westernculture. Interestingly, because the first decades of the Jesuit mission inChina coincided with a major Buddhist revival that attracted literatisympathy but official condemnation, the Ming authorities did not halt theJesuit efforts in their religious propagation to negate Buddhism and, to alesser degree, Daoism.

But Ricci himself had difficulty with these circumstances. According tothe modern scholar, Jacques Gernet, Ricci did not understand the stakesinvolved in the anti-Buddhist reaction of the period, which he used to formalliances with educated Chinese. Nor did he comprehend the cosmicmysticism of neo-Confucianism or the philosophical aspects of Buddhism.30

The very first Chinese scholars whom Ricci entertained believed him to bean alchemy wizard who could extract silver from quicksilver mercury.31

But he did not turn these potential converts away, and amused them bydemonstrating his prowess in the fields of astronomy, mathematics,cartography and mechanics. For example, in 1584, he arranged to have amappa mundi (based on Mercator's 1569 and Ortelius's 1570 maps) issued,which showed China at the centre of the world and with all the placenames transcribed in Chinese.32 This mappa mundi also attracted imperialattention: the Ming Wanli Emperor (r. 1573-1620) ordered a giganticversion composed of six panels, each over 6 feet wide, for display in theinner chambers of his Beijing palace.33 Ricci's map went through sevenmore editions before 1609.

Through extensive discussions with these Chinese literati, Ricci beganto perceive their knowledge of astronomy and concluded, as he wrote to his


87

China and Science on the Eve of the 'Great Divergence' 1600-1800

Jesuit superiors, the 'absurdities' (le cose absurde) of their conceptions. Bythe time he died in 1610, he had developed a well versed programme forflattering the tastes of the Chinese scholar elite for the science, technologyand arts of Europe while he communicated with his Jesuit brothers 'hisopinion . . . that the Chinese possess the ingenuous trait of preferring thatwhich comes from without to that which they possess themselves, once theyrealize the superior quality of the foreign product. Their pride, it wouldseem, arises from an ignorance of the existence of higher things and fromthe fact that they find themselves far superior to the barbarous nations bywhich they are surrounded'.34 And so Ricci laid one of the first stones inthe vast edifice of European belief that the Chinese were rich, arrogant andincompetent.35

One of the goals that Ricci had achieved for himself before his deathwas to gain the right to residence in the capital. There, he had furtheropportunity to convert several high-ranking officials and, not least, tosecure permission to bring more Jesuits to Beijing. This second cohort ofmissionaries also stationed themselves in some of China's leadingintellectual centres in the Lower Yangzi region (Nanjing, Hangzhou,Shanghai) and in Fujian and Shaanxi provinces, where literati wereknown to congregate for scholarly exchange and intellectual pleasure. Anumber of Ricci's successors were expressly recruited by Nicolas Trigualt(1577-1628) for their accomplishments in the calendrical arts. CatholicEurope's own major 1582 calendrical reform, which had institutionalizedthe intercalculating leap year, had prepared these missionaries for theirwork in China, and gave them impetus to gain further acceptance inimperial circles and thereby the power and opportunity to acquire thefaithful - a process that Jonathan Spence has described as 'to God throughthe Stars'.36

The second cohort, who entered China in the early seventeenth century(including Adam Schall von Bell (1592-1666); Johann Terrenz (d. 1630)and Giacomo Rho (1590?-!638)), got their breakthrough in 1629, whenXu Guangqi, by then holding the influential office of vice-president of theBoard of Ceremonies, arranged a comparison of solar eclipse predictionsby the conventional Chinese, Muslim and newly introduced Europeanmethods. Although the matter of Ming dynasty calendar reform had anextensive history long before Ricci's arrival, these previous efforts toeradicate errors had all ended in failure.37 Because the European methodproved to be the only accurate one, imperial approval was granted forreform of the Chinese calendar according to the Westerners' calculatingprocedures. From then onwards, a team of Jesuits and Chinese scholarsunder Xu's direction began an extensive programme of the manufacture ofinstruments and translation of scientific books at court. In a certain sense,imperial patronage of the Jesuits in this way followed a long-standingconvention of appointing foreign 'technicians' for calendrical work. Likethe Indian astronomers of the Tang dynasty (618-906), or the Persiansand Central Asians recruited by the Mongols during the Yuan dynasty,the Jesuits were utilized by the Chinese because they were outsiders. Since


88


astronomy and calendrical science had great politico-religious importancein China - with the Emperor regarded as the mediator between Heavenand Earth, and the calendar issued in his name - it was more prudent todesignate foreigners to oversee time-keeping and other calendrical mattersthan local experts, who might use the opportunity to usurp the throne. Fortheir part, namely lending their scientific expertise, the Jesuits alsoexpected returns from their Chinese hosts, but such a presumption was notoutrageous, given the mores of the times. The practice of giving 'scientificmarvels' to gain social status and patronage or to acquire access to anetwork of communication was common among the learned in theRenaissance courts.38 In that way, the Jesuits were not initiatingsomething new with their behaviour in China.

Although the Ming authorities allowed the Jesuits to help to preparethe calendar, the Europeans remained under the authority of the Muslim-led Directorate of Astronomy. It was only with the collapse of the Mingdynasty that the Jesuits could overcome their subordinate status; in theirhaste to assume power, the Manchus called upon their expertise inmathematics and astronomy to consolidate their claims to the Mandate ofHeaven with an accurate calendar. The new Qing dynasty (1644—1911)accepted the evidence of Adam Schall's superior skills at predicting solarand lunar eclipses, and therefore made him director of the Bureau ofAstronomy.39

But, before Schall ascended to this new position, he had shared withMing officials another of his talents: his ability to cast cannon. During thelast months of the dynasty, in the hope to defend the capital against attack,Ming officials asked the Jesuit to improve the indigenous cannon, whichwere too heavy to wield in rapid deployment. Schall produced more than500 'forty-pounders' and, with a Chinese colleague, wrote a work ongunnery, the Huagong jieyao (Essentials of Gunnery}*® This would not be thefirst occurrence a European was requested to share 'useful and reliableknowledge' about weaponry, and it would seem that both the Ming andQing authorities, no matter what they thought about Western science andtechnology or the general ineffectiveness of firearms in warfare on thesteppe, did perceive the advantages of European fire power when theoccasion arose.41 By yielding to this 'call to arms', the Jesuits were onceagain forced to accommodate their hosts.

In his new position in the Qing government, Schall took advantage bydemanding that all those working under him in the Bureau would have toconvert to Christianity. But it was only a matter of time (actually, some 20years) before his enemies, led by a nativist literatus, Yang Guangxian(1557-1669), would have him vilified and threatened with death forspying, intrigue and, not least, scientific incompetence in 1664.42 Evenafter he was proved innocent of the latter accusation, thanks to the help ofanother Jesuit, the newly arrived Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-88), the othercharges were never dropped; Schall died a broken, shattered man,Catholicism became proscribed and all the missionaries banned to Macao.Schall's Christian foes, who also were exiled, circulated the joke 'One



Adam having driven us out of Paradise, another has driven us out ofChina'.43

Verbiest spent his early years in China under house arrest but obtainedthe chance to change his status when the accuracy of the calendar, nowunder the charge of Schall's successor, Yang Guangxian, and the Moslemofficial, Wu Mingxuan, became doubtful. In the same way that Schall hadproved his astronomical skills in 1644, Verbiest dared to demonstrate tothe Manchu authorities the errors of Yang and Wu. The young KangxiEmperor (r. 1662-1722) ordered the accuracy of Verbiest's calculationsconfirmed and, on that basis, assigned him in 1664 to the directorship ofthe Astronomy Bureau. He gained further favour with the throne when hehelped cast cannon (like Schall had done in 1644) that helped support theManchu arsenal. Verbiest also carried on the Jesuit tradition ofcartography and produced another world map; it synthesized newknowledge and updated the geographical treatise that another Jesuitmissionary, Guilio Aleni, had produced in 1623.44

Verbiest and the Emperor enjoyed a good relationship that culminatedin his appointment as personal tutor to the monarch; in that capacity, theJesuit taught him Euclidean geometry and, later, spherical trigonometry,and supervised for him practical experiments in astronomical observationand terrestrial measurement. Nevertheless, the Qing ruler continued torestrict the religious activities of the mission, overcoming any papalattempts to subjugate the missionaries or their converts during the RitesControversy (1705—07); this Emperor even claimed personal control overthe calendar. Spence sums up Verbiest's years of imperial service asdominated by trivia:

At the Emperor's request he spent weeks on end perfecting a system of pulleysto lever giant stones over a rickety bridge, making gay sundials and a waterclock, building pumps to raise the water in the royal pleasure gardens, andpainting tiny trompe d'oeil figures to be viewed through a prismatic tube.45

Nevertheless, to his dying day, Verbiest remained convinced that themonarch, in the face of such delights, as well as the insights of Westernastronomy, would swing to the faith behind the science.

Neither the Kangxi Emperor's son, the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723-36), nor his grandson, the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-95), flaunted muchinterest in science or mathematics and both descendants had little patiencewith the proselytizing activities of the Europeans. The YongzhengEmperor expelled all foreign missionaries to Macao except those whorendered technical services to the court; and the Qianlong Emperorcontinued to issue edicts banning Christians in the provinces. It was duringthe reign of Qianlong that the extent to which the Jesuits had misled Mingand Qing authorities about the true nature of the universe was firstrevealed. In 1760, the Jesuit Michel Benoist (1715-74) informed theEmperor on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday of the heliostatic worldmodel. Sivin reports the Emperor's reaction as simple and dismissive: TnEurope you have your way of explaining the celestial phenomena. As for



us, we have ours too, without making the earth rotate.'46 As missionaryinfluence in China steadily declined, the Society of Jesus also lost supportin Europe. In 1773, the Pope suppressed the organization around theworld.

Thus, by the time the famous Macartney mission from Britain arrivedin China in 1793,47 the Qing court had long ceased any specific fascinationfor European products.48 Although the purpose of this particular embassywas quite different from that of the Jesuit mission, namely to establish freetrade relations and a permanent embassy in Beijing, the British strategyhere was not all that different from the missionaries'. Like the Jesuits,Macartney and his government believed a demonstration of the super-iority of the European sciences would access them favour and eventuallypower in China.

HELPING TO MAKE THE EARTH STAND STILL: THE JESUIT AGENDA ANDCHINESE PRIORITIES

Modern scholars who have examined closely the extensive (and, not least,diflicult-to-read) Chinese documentation on the Jesuit scientific enterprisein China have disagreed on how to interpret Chinese efforts to master, intheir own terms, what they called Western learning (Xixue] in the sixteenthto eighteenth centuries. From a broad perspective, the debate falls into twocamps. On the one hand, Nathan Sivin has argued that the Jesuits, bywithholding the knowledge of the Copernican system, did not introducemodern science to China. The Church's injunction of 1616 against theteaching of heliocentrism led the Jesuits to present the Tychonic system asthe most modern but which, in its essentials, had not gone beyond thebounds (set) by Ptolemy.49 According to Sivin, not only did the Jesuits nottranslate any work by Copernicus or Galileo, Kepler or Newton, Descartesor Huygens, but they also 'strategically' simplified and rewrote the texts ofoccidental astronomy to conform much more to their own priorities. 'Tothe very end of their presence in China, the Jesuits presented the rivalriesof cosmologies as that between one astronomical innovator and another,for the most convenient and accurate methods of calculation.'50 Thus, bythe eighteenth century, when Newton's great Principia Mathematica wasbeing popularized throughout Europe, and Newtonian mechanics andcontinental calculus were common foci of scientific study in Europe, theChinese remained convinced of a pre-Copernican universe. Sivin has alsoargued that the Jesuit presentation of Western astronomy made itincomprehensible. Chinese mathematics and astronomers who pursuedcosmological study found inconsistencies and contradictions.51 In sum,China's first encounter with modern science from the West was incompletebecause of Jesuit distortions.

The other camp of modern experts who, too, have researched theextensive contemporary record in Chinese (born out of Jesuit-transmittedknowledge) has laid emphasis on the common and shared concerns of themissionaries and their Chinese interlocutors but also the ultimate



incompatibility of their world views, which inhibited further scientificdevelopment in China. The French scholar Jean-Claude Martzloff regardsthe Jesuits as responsible for stimulating Chinese interest in, and use of,European-imported reckoning techniques, including calculating instru-ments, plane and spherical trigonometry and, to a certain level, infiniteseries.52 In his view, the Europeans and Chinese shared the ideals of acommon conception of time and space as measurable and quantifiableelements, and of the validity of astronomical prediction based on thecorrespondence between calculation and observation.

But this does not mean, as Martzloff makes clear, that the Chinesemathematicians and astronomers appreciated the value of reasoning bydiscourse in mathematical theorizing. For example, the popular Chineseversion of Euclid's Elements was expurgated of nearly all the demonstrativediscourses. In the eyes of the shixue proponents of Euclidean geometry, suchdiscourses were 'reminiscent of religious quibbling, whether Christian orBuddhist . . . and the root of all evil in view of its uselessness andindulgence'.53 Martzloff adds that discursive logic did not form a part ofthe astronomer Wang Xishan's treatises. In conclusion, Martzloff believesthat the Chinese authors of mathematical and astronomical studiesacknowledged the utility of European predictive systems but refused, atthe same time, to endorse the conceptual structure on which they werebuilt.

MartzlofFs analysis complements Jacques Gernet's well known argu-ment that late-Ming/early-Qing China lacked the motives and thepeculiar intellectual framework that led to the development of classicalscience in Europe.54 His focus on the linguistic barriers between theEuropeans and Chinese has a philosophical basis: '... in Chinese, it is sodifficult to express how the abstract and the general differ fundamentally,and not just occasionally, from the concrete and the particular.'55 Thismeans, in Gernet's view, that the Jesuits could not be expected topenetrate the Chinese (Confucian) unitary vision of man, ethics, politicsand the universe. Gernet sums up this divergence with the observation:

Chinese thought at that time [i.e. seventeenth century] knew only of one sortof time, which was evolutionary, of one physics, heavenly as well as terrestrial(that of the combinations ofjym andyang), of very long durations in astronomy[and] in [the history of] the earth and of man. It appears modern to us in itsindependence from any dogma and in the importance it attached to change,but at the same time, devoid of the motifs and of the very peculiar intellectualframework that in Europe allowed for the development of experimentalscience.56

These contrasting points of view between Sivin and Martzloff/Gernet arenot necessarily exclusive, and other modern contributors have pursued thecourse of other forms of Jesuit-generated knowledge in China. RichardSmith, in his penetrating and provocative studies of Chinese cartography,has concluded that 'despite a long tradition of sophisticated geographicalcartographic scholarship, an equally long history of foreign exploration(and conquest), . . . the "outer" world remained relatively unimportant to



the vast majority of Chinese - elites and commoners alike'.57 He arguesthat unlike the West, where the great voyages of discovery ignited flames ofinterest, Zheng He's dramatic naval expeditions from 1405 to 1431, whichsailed through the seas of Southeast Asia to India, to Hormuz in thePersian Gulf, and as far as Malindi on the east coast of Africa, met no suchreaction. Smith also refers to the surveying techniques first conveyed byVerbiest that enabled the Qing dynasty in the early eighteenth century tocreate a far more mathematically 'accurate' map of the empire than hadever been produced: the Huangyu quanlan tu (Map of a Comprehensive View ofImperial Territory; 1718) remained the most authoritative atlas of the realmfor nearly two centuries. He argues that such cartography was appreciatedfor its military and strategic value, but had little effect on Chinesemapmaking in the long term. He claims that Chinese mapmakersborrowed little of cartographic substance from the Jesuits, and preferredto arrange foreign locations topologically rather than topographically.Moreover, Chinese scholars saw the various mappa mundi as evidence of theJesuits' recognition of the centrality of Chinese culture in a universe inwhich everyone paid tribute to the Emperor.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FIRST ENCOUNTER: INTELLECTUAL DEAD END?

Modern scholars have also observed that one of the effects of China's firstencounter with European scientific knowledge was the genesis of a nativistmovement to retrieve the ancient Chinese mathematical and astronomicaltraditions, and to help revive them.58 Benjamin Elman argues that XuGuangqi inspired a later generation of Ming thinkers associated with theFushe (Return (to Antiquity) Society] to reject Confucian philosophicalspeculation, and to reaffirm the original Confucian texts and doctrines.Such intellectual 'purification' in the spirit of'concrete studies', he claims,became the basis for the kao^heng (evidential research) movement of theeighteenth century, which stressed exacting research, rigorous analysis andthe collection of evidence drawn from ancient artefacts and historicaldocuments and texts. According to Elman:

. . . abstract ideas and a priori rational argumentation gave way as the primaryobjects of discussion among literati scholars to concrete facts, verifiableinstitutions and historical events. This research program placed proof andverification at the centre of the organization and analysis of the classicaltradition.59

Henderson has suggested that for seventeenth and eighteenth-centuryChinese literati, the more accurate astronomy brought by the Jesuits alongwith geometry became a model for the classical scholarship of phonology,philology and textual criticism. With these disciplines, scholars now had away of gauging the degree or quality of their intellectual and moralenlightenment.60

The question arises as to what extent Chinese intellectuals re-evaluatedtheir own scientific legacies in relation to what the Jesuits conveyed to



them. As we have indicated earlier, mathematics and calendar reformwere important concerns among Ming literati before the arrival of theEuropeans and, thus, the Jesuits did not 'rescue' Chinese science fromdecline. Elman's study of the Chinese examination system asserts thatduring the Ming dynasty, candidates were expected to demonstrate manyof the technicalities of the calendar, astronomy and music. Questions onmethods to measure time, to predict eclipses or to evaluate mathematicalharmonics were common on Ming-era examinations.61 Moreover, as Elvinhas shown, in his study of the Wu za zu (Fivefold Miscellany] 1605) by XieZhaozhe (1567-1629), there was evidence already then of a kind ofexperimental-style thinking and 'hints of hypothetical modelling, and acertain insight into the problem of taxonomies'.62 Such revisionistscholarship has helped us to reconsider how much 'science' was availablein Ming China.

While the first Qing rulers banned any focus in the civil exams onastronomical portents and the calendar, probably because they pertainedto Qing dynasty legitimacy, they did not dismiss the value of scientificstudy. The Kangxi Emperor institutionalized mathematical calculationand calendrical studies by creating a special academy in which he couldconverse informally with scholars versed in mathematics and science. Inthe Studio for the Cultivation of Youth (Mengyangzhai), first established in1712-13 on the model of the Parisian Academy of Sciences, he invitedQing literati and Manchu bannermen only (and, thus, not Jesuits, toensure undue foreign influence) to explore Chinese mathematics andsciences, with the goal to promote native talent. In this regard, he alsoinitiated a project to update Ming compendia on mathematics inspired bythe Jesuits, and another to issue new compilations that introducedEuropean algebra and logarithms to the base 10, again in the spirit thatlocal scholars could improve their knowledge of both Western and Chinesecalculating techniques.63

In a certain sense, it was the Kangxi Emperor who 'domesticated'Western learning. He appealed to scholars like Mei Wending (1633-1721),a leading mathematical astronomer who already in 1680 had written atreatise ^hongxi suanxuetong (The Synthesis of Chinese and Western Mathematics],to find the correspondences between the orthodox Confucianism (daoxue) ofthe Song dynasty and Jesuit astronomy. In effect, what the Emperor didhere was to propagate the idea that Western science had Chinese origins(Xixue ^hongyuan) - a concept that generally became accepted amongeighteenth-century scholars. Here, again, there was a clear politicalpurpose: by endorsing Western science in this way, the Manchu monarchattempted to convince Han Chinese that he was not advocating something'foreign', but rather restoring the most authentic Chinese traditions. Hewas asking them to consider how the ancients' lack of trigonometry wasremediable; he stimulated the literati to reconstruct a new line oftransmission from ancient China to contemporary Jesuit astronomy.64

Such authorization helped 'civilize' the Jesuit importation of science andmathematics into native status and, with the incorporation of a number of



Jesuits into China's first formal collection of 280 life histories (including 37Europeans) of those well versed in mathematics and astronomy, theChouren zhuan (Biographies of Mathematicians and Astronomers', 1796-99) byRuan Yuan (1764-1849), the assimilation of Western science into theChinese record took on its final formal encapsulation.65

Such official endorsement of native science also allowed Chinesescholars to question openly the scientific value of what knowledge theJesuits had conveyed. For example, Xu Guangqi's preface to a study onpractical arithmetic translated by Ricci, which claimed the superiority ofthe Western mathematics over earlier Chinese works, was removed and thevolume itself, Tongwen suanzhi (Translations of Guidelines for PracticalArithmetic, 1611?), was no longer printed in the eighteenth century. Itwas Mei Wending who set the tone of the Xixue ^hongyuan movement withcomplaints about the internal contradictions of European astronomy,many of which later Chinese scholars were to demonstrate emanated fromthe Jesuits' failure to teach heliocentrism.66 Mei's work was 'followed-up'by Jiang Yong (1681-1762), an intellectual well versed in the complexitiesof practical astronomy, who expressed the demerits of Chinese methods ofcalculation and the merits of Western computing techniques while hedisdained the conceptions upon which they were built.67

It was for the men of the following generation, those of Ruan Yuan'stime, that the contradictions between the exacting measurements ofWestern mathematics and astronomy and Chinese cosmology becamecentral in kaozheng discourse. With Ruan, Qian Daxin (1728-1804) helpedto complete the incorporation of the technical aspects of Westernastronomy and mathematics into the Confucian tradition. Qianproclaimed the legitimacy of Western mathematical methodology for thereconstruction of antiquity, revising ancient writings and broadening theliterati tradition, thus reversing centuries of Confucian scholars' focus onmoral and philosophical problems. In that way, Qian and his colleaguesdiscouraged any potential to view 'science' as an independent field ofinquiry.68 Unlike seventeenth-century English practitioners of mathe-matics, who dedicated their writings especially to artisans, seamen andcraftsmen, Qian and company aimed to elevate and to situate the study ofmeasurement with classical learning. This meant that by the mid-eighteenth century, knowledge of mathematics and related disciplines inChina would continue to remain the exclusive preserve of a relatively tiny,literate elite.69

Finally, a few words should be said about the particular environment inwhich Chinese intellectuals communicated with each other and theimplications thereof. As mentioned above, the Kangxi Emperor favouredacademies as a vehicle for intellectual communication and, consequently,he encouraged provincial officials to establish local institutions in whichliterati could exchange information and participate in the massive literaryprojects he initiated, and which his grandson, the Qianlong Emperor,would continue. Both the gigantic officially sponsored compilations QindingGujin tushu jicheng (Imperially Approved Synthesis of Books and Illustrations Past



and Present; 1726-28, consisting of 852,408 pages divided into 6,109 sub-sections) and the Siku Quanshu (The Complete Library of the Four Branches ofLiterature] 1783, incorporating 2.3 million (hand-written) pages) encour-aged literati to commit to 'evidential research', and to do so in the flood ofacademies that emerged by the mid-eighteenth century. Academiesbecame the framework in which textual scholarship was debated,deliberated and discussed.70

Although academies were located all over the empire, the regions of theLower Yangzi and the southeast coast (Fujian and Guangdong provinces),where a flourishing commercialized economy sustained intellectual life,had the highest concentration of these institutions.71 And, interestingly, thenative place of many of the intellectual giants (including some of thosenamed above) who attended these academies in the Lower Yangzi areawas one particular region, namely Huizhou. Huizhou was a locale famousfor its merchants and their far-reaching empire-wide trading and businessactivities.72 The extended families of Huizhou literati, commonlyorganized in corporate lineages, were known to mobilize their economicand cultural resources to support academies, libraries, book productionand special learning institutes, with the result that the major forms ofknowledge production and reproduction in eighteenth-century China werein the hands of this relatively small group of people who were boundedtogether through marriage, patronage and friendship.

It would not be until the mid-nineteenth century that the intellectualtransformation of China's second encounter with 'useful and reliableknowledge' through Protestant missionaries would exceed the intellectualboundaries of textual scholarship and China's 'intellectual map [would be]redrawn'.73 In the process, the narrow confines of the small Chineseintellectual elite would dismantle, but the institutional structure for thecreation of modern science would still await the twentieth century and the'third encounter' with Western science. Moreover, the transfer of Westerntechnology did not fare much better in China during the first half of thenineteenth century. On the one hand, Europeans would still seek thetechnological secrets for silk production, textile weaving, porcelain-makingand large-scale tea production from the Chinese.74 As late as 1849, anotherof Xu Guangqi's most important studies, his compendium on silkmanufacture and the cultivation of the mulberry tree, was still beingtranslated into French and English. And, on the other hand, Westernerstried without much success in the mid-nineteenth century to convinceChinese manufacturers of the advantages of machines.75 After 1861, whenthe British import-export firm of Jardine, Matheson and Co. established asteam-powered silk-reeling filature in Shanghai, Chinese entrepreneursand silk guild leaders would shut the foreign plant down after a few yearsby making sure the foreigners had an inadequate supply of silk cocoons,and thereby protecting their own industry from encroachment. SimilarChinese organizational efforts curtailed foreign intrusion into the soybeanpacking industry in north China in the 1870s.



SOME FURTHER OBSERVATIONS

In this paper, we have reviewed the conditions in which China firstexperienced 'useful and reliable knowledge' from the West. AlthoughChina had, for centuries, incorporated technological and scientificdiscoveries from other regions into its material and intellectual well-being,the Jesuit transmission of European science only really confirmed thatthere existed alien ways of thinking. A deliberately incomplete transmis-sion of European astronomy, mathematics and other scientific informationcoupled with a foreign religion that lacked a certain appeal, and thatignited repulsion by the imperial authorities (despite their tolerance of thecreed up to a point), formed the background to this encounter. The Mingand Qing governments treated the Jesuit missionaries like they did allforeign 'technicians', as minions to serve the court and to support theastronomical, military and geographical needs of the regime.76 And, in apolitical environment in which the manipulation of scholarship was thenorm, it was only a question of time before native scholars wouldincorporate the Jesuit-conveyed 'useful and reliable knowledge' into thecorpus of local learning, and thereby exclude the possibility of Europeanscience becoming freed from the entrenchment of Chinese metaphysics.Finally, we have tried to elucidate the limitations of the knowledgediscourses that preoccupied Chinese intellectuals on the eve of the 'GreatDivergence'.

The question remains of how we can evaluate this encounter betweenEurope and China in the context of contemporary global and localdevelopments. One answer to this question may be found in theobservations of the modern scholar P. E. Will, who views China in theeighteenth century experiencing modernization 'but without science'. Willproposes that in the more dynamic regions of the empire, then, there werecertain conditions that hinted of transformation, places where we havesomething not unlike what certain historians, dealing with early modernWestern Europe, have termed 'Smithian growth' - a multifaceted processincluding market expansion, more complex and more efficient tradeorganizations, regional specialization of production and increasedmonetization of social relations, a process that does not necessarily entailany scientific breakthroughs, or even any significant increase in per-workeror per-acre activity.77 Will also points to the efficacy of the eighteenth-century Sino-Manchu state's fiscal and bureaucratic reforms to construct abetter integrated, more efficient and more productive society. Moreover,this state did not discourage individual initiative, namely the efforts byambitious peasants, landowners or merchants to promote crop specializa-tion, expand handicraft production or generate new market organizations.Ironically, he suggests, it may have been the very success of this stateflexibility and widespread integration that made a dismantling oftraditional social and economic relations in the nineteenth century moreproblematic. Certainly, in the matter of China's absorbing the transfer ofEuropean technology up to the twentieth century, as mentioned above, theproblem of 'success' seems paramount.



In other words, Will's presentation leaves us with the thought that thereis sufficient evidence to argue the framework of China's indigenousmodernization before the nineteenth century, but without the abstractreasoning so often associated with the speculative sciences of the West.78

While the best Chinese minds did employ European mathematical scienceto revitalize their own traditions, they could not see its potential for otheruses, except calendrical calculation.

Notes and References1. P. Engelfriet, Euclid in China: The Genesis of the First Translation of Euclid's 'Elements' in

1607 and Its Reception Up to 1723 (Leiden, 1998).2. T. Brook, 'Xu Guangqi in his Context: The World of the Shanghai Gentry', in C.

Jami, P. Engelfriet and G. Blue (eds), Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China: TheCross-Cultural Synthesis of Xu Guangqi (1562-1633) (Leiden, 2001), 72-98, citation from p. 72.

3. Ibid., 97.4. T. Brook, 'Japan in the Late Ming: The View from Shanghai', in J. A. Fogel (ed.),

Sagacious Monks and Bloodthirsty Warriors: Chinese Views of Japan in the Ming-Qing Period(Norwalk, CT, 2003), 42-62.

5. B. Elman, 'Jesuit Scientia and Natural Studies in Late Imperial China, 1600-1800',Journal of Early Modem History, 2002, 6(3): 209-32, quotation from p. 209; cf. H.Zurndorfer, 'La Sinologie immobile: Note critique', Etudes chinoises, 1989, 8(2): 99-120.

6. D. Landes, The Wealth and Power of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor(London, 1998).

7. G. Basalla, 'The Spread of Western Science', Science, 1967, 156: 611-22; cf. Fan Fa-ti,'Redrawing the Map: Science in Twentieth Century China', Isis, 2007, 98: 524-38.

8. K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern WorldEconomy (Princeton, 2000).

9. L. J. Gallagher, trans., China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci 1583-1610 (New York, 1953), 32.

10. M. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of WesternDominance (Ithaca, 1989).

11. B. Russell, The Problem of China (London, 1922).12. Quoted in A. F. Wright, 'Review of Science and Civilisation in China vol. 2: History of

Scientific Thought', American Historical Review, 1957, 62(4): 918-20, quotation from p. 918; cf. R.Hart, 'Beyond Science and Civilization: A Post-Needham Critique', East Asian Science,Technology, and Medicine, 1999, 16: 88-114.

13. H. T. Zurndorfer, 'Oecumenical or Parochial? Reflections on Recent PublicationsConcerning the History of Chinese Science', Etudes chinoises, 1992, 11(1): 141-56. In recentyears, Needham's personality and oeuvre have come under scrutiny. See J. Goody, 'Scienceand Civilization in Renaissance Europe', in his book, The Theft of History (Cambridge, 2006),125-53; and S. Winchester, Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China(London, 2008).

14. J. Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London, 1969).15. The 'Needham problem' has been the topic of much scholarly discussion and debate.

See G. Blue, 'Science(s), Civilization(s), Historie(s): A Continuing Dialogue with JosephNeedham', in S. Irfan Habib and D. Raina (eds), Situating the History of Science: Dialogues withJoseph Needham (New Delhi/Oxford, 1999), 29-72, esp. 47-51.

16. A. C. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History ofArgument and Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts, threevolumes (London, 1996); D. de Solla Price, Science since Babylon (New Haven, 1961); for abrilliant refutation to Crombie, see M. Elvin, 'Some Reflections on the Use of "Styles ofScientific Thinking" to Disaggregate and Sharpen Comparisons between China and Europefrom Song to Mid-Qing Times (960-1850 CE)', History of Technology, 2004, 25: 53-103; andM. Elvin, 'Vale Atque Ave', in K. G. Robinson (ed.), Science and Civilisation in China, Part 2:'General Conclusions and Reflections' (Cambridge, 2004), xxiv-xliii.

17. N. Sivin, 'Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not Take Place in China-Or Didn't



It?', Chinese Science, 1982, 5: 45-66; N. Sivin, 'Max Weber, Joseph Needham, BenjaminNelson: The Question of Chinese Science', in E. V. Walter (ed.), Civilizations East and West: AMemorial Volume for Benjamin Nelson (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1985), 37-49.

18. N. Sivin, 'Science and Medicine in Chinese History', in P. S. Ropp (ed.), Heritage ofChina: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization (Berkeley, 1990), 164-96, quotation fromp. 164.

19. In particular, B. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 (Cambridge,MA, 2005) and B. Elman, A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

20. Sivin, op. at. (17) (1982).21. P.-E. Will, 'Modernisation Less Science? Some Reflections on China and Japan

before Westernisation', in K. Hashimoto, C. Jami and L. Skar (eds), East Asian Science:Tradition and Beyond (Osaka, 1995), 33-48.

22. R. J. Smith, For tune-Tellers and Philosophers: Divination in Traditional Chinese Society(Boulder, CO, 1991).

23. E. Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 666.24. Sivin, op. at. (18), 186.25. J. Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York,

1999), chap. 1.26. T. Barrett, The Woman Who Discovered Printing (New Haven, 2008); L. Chia, Printing

for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (llth—17th Centuries) (Cambridge, MA,2002).

27. L. Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (Cambridge,MA, 2007); and see Jonathan Spence's important discussion of Brockey's book in the The NewYork Review of Books, entitled 'The Dream of Catholic China', appearing in Vol. 54, No. 11(June 28, 2007). Brockey's volume is a major critique of Jesuit missionaries in China.

28. Engelfriet, op. cit. (1), 11. Cf. J. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York,1984).

29. Spence, op. cit. (27), uses this expression to refer to the Jesuit enterprise.30. J. Gernet, 'La societe chinoise a la fin des Ming', Recherches de science religieuse, 1984,

72: 27-36.31. W. Peterson, 'Learning from Heaven: The Introduction of Christianity and Other

Western Ideas into Late Ming China', in D. Twitchett and F. W. Mote (eds), The CambridgeHistory of China, Vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 2 (Cambridge, 1998), 789-839, esp797; see also Spence op. cit. (28), 185-6.

32. Elman, op. cit. (19) (2006), 127-30.33. Spence, op. cit. (28), 96-7.34. J. Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620-1960 (Boston, 1969), 6.35. J. Spence, 'The Dialogue of Science', his, 1984, 75: 180-9.36. Spence, op. cit. (34), 3-33.37. W. Peterson, 'Calendar Reform Prior to the Arrival of Missionaries at the Ming

Court', Ming Studies, 1986, 21: 45-61.38. M. Biagioli, 'Galileo's System of Patronage', History of Science, 1990, 28: 1-62, esp.

22-5; P. Findlen, 'The Economy of Scientific Exchange in Early Italy', in B. T. Moran (ed.),Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court, 1500-1750 (NewYork, 1991), 5-24.

39. H. T. Zurndorfer, 'One Adam Having Driven Us Out of Paradise: Another HasDriven Us Out of China: Yang Kuang-hsien's Challenge of Adam Schall von Bell', in L.Blusse and H. T. Zurndorfer (eds), Conflict and Accommodation in Early Modern East Asia (Leiden,1993), 141-68.

40. Waley-Cohen, op. cit. (25), 118.41. Cf. H. T. Zurndorfer, 'Ming China, the Imjin Waeran, and the Dynamics of Peace

and War in East Asia 1550-1600', Leidschrijft: Historisch Tijdschijft, 2004, 18(3): 17-31; and seealso P. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb (Cambridge, 2008), 66-87.

42. Zurndorfer, op. at. (39).43. Spence, op. at. (34), 22.44. Elman, op. at. (19) (2006), 32.45. Spence, op. cit. (34), 28.



46. N. Sivin, 'Copernicus in China', Studio Copernicana (Warsaw), 1973, 6: 63-122,quotation from p. 98.

47. J. L. Cranmer-Byng and T. H. Levere, 'A Case Study in Cultural Collision:Scientific Apparatus in the Macartney Embassy to China, 1793', Annals of Science, 1981, 38:503-25 claim that Macartney never presented to the imperial court the pulleys, air pump,chemical and electrical contrivances or even steam-engine models that his ship had on board.Instead, the apparati were returned to the British East India Company or to the ship'smechanic and mathematician James Dinwiddie (1746-1815), who gave demonstrations toChinese merchants in Guangzhou. See also B. Elman, 'Who Is Responsible for the Limits ofJesuit Scientific and Technical Transmission from Europe to China in the EighteenthCentury', in C. Wing-chung Ho (ed.), Windows on the Chinese World: Reflections by FiveHistorians (Lanham, MD, 2009), 45-66, esp. 59-60.

48. H. T. Zurndorfer, 'Comment la science et la technologic se vendaient a la Chine auXVIIIe siecle: Essai d'analyse interne', Etudes chinoises, 1988, 7(2): 59-90; J. Waley-Cohen,'China and Western Technology in the Late Eighteenth Century', American Historical Review,1993, 98: 1525-44; M. Berg, 'Britain, Industry and Perceptions of China: Matthew Boulton,"Useful Knowledge and the Macartney Embassy to China 1792-94'", Journal of GlobalHistory, 2006, 1: 269-88.

49. Sivin, op. at. (46), 66-70.50. Ibid., 63.51. See Zurndorfer, op. cit. (48).52. J.-C. Martzloff, 'Space and Time in Chinese Texts of Astronomy and of

Mathematical Astronomy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', Chinese Science,1993-94, 11: 66-92.

53. Ibid., 71.54. J. Gernet, La Chine et christianism: action et reaction (Paris, 1982); J. Gernet (J. Lloyd,

trans.), China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures (Cambridge, 1985); cf. H. L.Goodman and A. Grafton, 'Ricci, the Chinese, and the Toolkits of Textualists', Asia Major(3rd series), 1990, 3(2): 95-148.

55. Gernet, ibid. (1985), 239.56. J. Gernet, 'Introduction', in C. Jami and H. Delahaye (eds), L'Europe en Chine:

interactions scientijiques, religieuses et culturelles aux XVHe et XVIIIe siecles (Paris, 1993), v—xiii,quotation from p. xii; cf. H. T. Zurndorfer, Review of C. Jami and H. Delahaye (eds),L} Europe en Chine: interactions scientifiques, relegieuses, et culturelles aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles inEtudes chinoises, 1995, 16(2): 262-5.

57. R. J. Smith, 'Mapping China's World: Cultural Cartography in Late ImperialTimes', in Wen-hsin Yeh (ed.), Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society (Berkeley, 1998),52-105, citation from p. 95; cf. R. J. Smith, Chinese Maps: Images of'All under Heaven' (HongKong and Oxford, 1996).

58. J. Henderson, 'The Assimilation of the Exact Sciences into the Ch'ing ConfucianTradition', Journal of Asian Affairs, 1980,5: 15-33; J. Henderson, The Development and Decline ofChinese Cosmology (New York, 1984); B. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and SocialAspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA, 1984); Elman, op. cit. (19) (2005);Elman, op. cit. (19) (2006).

59. B. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley,2000), xxvi.

60. Henderson, op. cit. (58) (1984).61. Elman op. cit. (59) (2000), 477-81.62. M. Elvin, 'The Man Who Saw Dragons: Science and Styles of Thinking in Xie

Zhaozhe's "Fivefold Miscellany'", Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, 1993-94, 25/26: 1-41, quotation from p. 39; cf. M. Elvin, 'Space and Time: Science and Religion in theEncounter between China and Europe', Chinese Science, 1993-94, 11: 93-102.

63. Elman, op. cit. (19) (2005), 180.64. Hu Minghui, 'Provenance in Contest: Searching for the Origins of Jesuit Astronomy

in Early Qing China, 1664-1705', The International History Review, 2002, 24(1): 1-25.65. Bai Limin, 'Mathematical Study and Intellectual Transition in the Early and Mid-

Qing', Late Imperial China, 1995, 16(2): 23-61; J. Porter, 'The Scientific Community in EarlyModern China', his, 1982, 73: 529-44; Wei P'ei-t'i (Betty), Ruan Yuan, 1764-1849: The Life



and Work of a Major Scholar in Nineteenth Century China before the Opium War (Hong Kong,2006).

66. Zurndorfer, op. at. (48) (1988), 80-3.67. Ibid., 83-6. Cf. Chu Pingyi, 'Ch'eng-Chu Orthodoxy, Evidential Studies and

Correlative Cosmology: Chiang Yung and Western Astronomy', Philosophy and the History ofScience, 1995, 4(2): 71-108.

68. Elman, op. at. (58) (1984), 81-3.69. Bai, op. cit. (65); Horng Wansheng, 'Chinese Mathematics at the Turn of the 19th

Century: Jiao Xun, Wang Lai, and Li Rui', in Cheng-Hung Lin and Daiwie Fu (eds),Philosophy and Conceptual History of Science in Taiwan (Dordrecht, 1993), 167-208.

70. Elman, op. cit. (58) (1984), 121-9.71. H. T. Zurndorfer, 'Lineages, Learning, and Locality in Late Imperial China: A

Comparative Study of Education in Huichow (Anhwei) and Foochow (Fukien) 1600-1800',Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 1992, 35(2/3): 109-44, 209-38.

72. H. Zurndorfer, Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History: The Development of Hui-Chou Prefecture, 800-1800 (Leiden, 1989).

73. D. Reynolds, 'Redrawing China's Intellectual Map: Images of Science in NineteenthCentury China', Late Imperial China, 1991, 12(1): 27-61; D. Wright, Translating Science: TheTransmission of Western Chemistry into Late Imperial China, 1840-1900 (Leiden, 2000).

74. Elman, op. cit. (5) (2002), 209.75. H. T. Zurndorfer, 'The Transfer of Industrial Technology from the West to China

1780-1870: Some Theoretical and Practical Considerations', in Y. Keiji (ed.), The Transfer ofScience and Technology between Europe and Asia, 1780-1870 (Kyoto, 1994), 79-94.

76. Elman, op. cit. (5) (2002), 229.77. P.-E. Will, 'Development quantitatif et development qualitatif en Chine a la fin de

1'epoque imperiale', Annales: Histoire et Sciences sociales, 1994: 863-902; P.-E. Will, op. cit. (21);cf. H. Zurndorfer, 'Review of P. E. Will, "Development quantitatif et development qualitatifen Chine a la fin de 1'epoque imperiale'", Annales: Histoire et Sciences Sociales, 863-902, in Revuebibliographique de sinologie, 1996, 14: 110.

78. Cf. J. Mokyr , The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Society (Princeton,2002).



Special Issue:The Mindful Hand

E D I T E D B Y L I S S A R O B E R T S A N D I A N I N K S T E R


Introduction: TranscendingBoundaries: Mindful Hands in

the History of Technology

L I S S A R O B E R T S

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY?

Time once was when the history of science was dominated by intellectualhistories of theoretical formation and application. The history oftechnology was about engineers and inventors and the objects they built.In the past few decades, however, historians of technology have launchedother visions of their field. Edward T. Layton, for example, is often citedfor urging that technology be seen as 'science's mirror-image twin'. He andothers have taken pains to argue against the image of technology astinkering by portraying it as 'knowledge' and 'technologists' as knowledge-makers. This collection of essays, however, isn't concerned to settechnology on a par with science, to raise its status by associating it withknowledge rather than 'mere' material production or, even, to demon-strate its power over science.1 Rather, it has a double agenda. First is torecover the practical entanglement of material production and knowledgeproduction between the late Renaissance and early industrialization - anentanglement that belies the very supposition that science and technologyare historically separable into spheres of reflective inquiry and materialinvention. Second is to trace the historical struggles during the same timeperiod whereby the work of reason came to be seen as separate from andsuperior to know-how (henceforth identified pejoratively with manuallabour) - a distinction put to work by elites as a way to organize andmanage both material and knowledge production.

This special issue is an outgrowth of a volume published in 2007 entitledThe Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to EarlyIndustrialization, which traces these twin processes in detail. Co-edited byLissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer and Peter Dear, and featuring an epilogueby Ian Inkster, it charts the hybrid nature of material and knowledgeproduction in Europe between the sixteenth and early nineteenthcenturies.2 Both involved a two-fold, intimate collaboration - betweennatural inquiry and invention and between mind and hand - that thebook's essays discuss in terms of 'the mindful hand'. But the booksimultaneously traces the asserted separation of knowledge production


106 Introduction: Transcending Boundaries

from material production, as well as the separation of contemplation frommanual labour, revealing how elite claims to the ownership of reason andits dominion over physical work were used to buttress attempts to gaincontrol over the processes of production. Hence, readers encounter artisansand skilled labourers whose work manifested the intimate interplay ofmental and manual dexterity. These were individuals who regularly reliedon mathematics, models and various other forms of abstraction andrepresentation, picking them up as instruments in combination with theother tools of their trade. Readers are also re-introduced to more famousfigures - natural philosophers such as Descartes, Galileo and Newton,whose deliberations not only brought them into contact with those usuallyidentified as 'hand-workers'. Their active collaborations frequentlytransgressed the declared divisions between philosophy and craft, betweenreflection and physical labour. Descartes' oeuvre thus rested as much on hisown hands-on experiences with grinding lenses, drawing and manipulat-ing diagrams, performing anatomical examinations and other suchactivities, as it did on his advertised reliance on 'clear and distinct ideas'.But, at the very same time that natural inquiry and invention wereinterlocked endeavours, both engaging the hand and mind, socio-culturaldynamics fed the realization of separate, hierarchically arranged realms,often projected as the pristine world of polite, gentlemanly examinationand the rough, dirty world of work. Already present in the practicalcollaborations that co-existed with the institutional divisions of earlymodern European society, this tension visibly heightened by the earlynineteenth century as reason was increasingly wielded as a managerialweapon with which to discipline both nature and labour, the elements ofwhich were so often characterized in mechanical terms.3

Chances are that readers of this journal are most familiar with the last-mentioned facet of this story - that is, with the disciplining of labour incontexts of increasing mechanization and standardization. Our challengehere is to point to ways in which that understanding can be profitablyjoined to the other facets of this project's historical outlook. But, especiallybecause The Mindful Hand is already published, we would also like to usethis special issue as an opportunity to take up some points that were eitherneglected or treated only implicitly in the book. The four essays in thisissue are situated in a broad range of geographical locations, from Dutchgardens and French streams to Russian academies and Japanese markets.They likewise span from the early seventeenth century to the dawn of thenineteenth and introduce us to a wide range of actors, none of whom canbe pigeon-holed as belonging strictly to the history of science or the historyof technology as these disciplines are more narrowly construed. Rather,these essays examine episodes that transcend recognized boundaries andfeature both actors and artefacts whose careers were shaped by the tensionsdescribed above. They are joined by an afterword that explores theimplications of considering the patterns and processes of innovation - bothpast and future - in terms of 'mindful handedness'.


Lissa Roberts 107

STUDIES OF THE MINDFUL HAND

The first essay, by Alette Fleischer, anatomizes the resonant relationsbetween the seemingly distinct realms of material and knowledgeconstruction by examining the tripartite career of some seventeenth-century crystals. Beginning with their extraction by mine workers from'the bowels of the earth', she analyses how they were simultaneouslyimplicated in the construction of a garden grotto on the estate of a Dutchnobleman and in the composition of Christiaan Huygens' Traite de laLumiere, one of the most important texts in the history of optics. One mightassume that mining crystals was strictly a technical matter. But Fleischerreveals how local miners and craftsmen combined hard-won knowledgewith artful skill to extract and fashion crystals as objects thatsimultaneously embodied claims of nature's fertility (crystals were under-stood to 'grow' in their natural habitat), market value and the added valueof symbolic worth.

Once freed from their earthy womb, some of these crystals weretransported to new and seemingly quite different homes - an artificialgrotto in a nobleman's garden and the Parisian study of a naturalphilosopher. We normally think of a garden as the product of nature'stransformation by a combination of artful design and varyingly skilledlabour. But, if this already opens the door for recognizing the hybridnature of art and skill, both of which engage the tools of contemplationand manual dexterity, Fleischer goes farther to show that the constructionof a seventeenth-century garden harnessed the processes of materialconstruction and knowledge production to enhance and deepen eachother. For the guiding purpose of contemporary garden architecture wasto artfully re-sculpt and augment the environment so as to reveal thebeautiful, law-bound order with which God originally undergirded hercreation. Once this marriage of natural inquiry and inventive work was inplace, visitors could marvel at the beauty and wisdom displayed in apleasurable setting.

Likewise, Huygens and his network of collaborators did more than sitand ponder the natural knowledge embodied in the crystals he collected.An extended and difficult process of cutting, polishing, modelling andmeasuring, corresponding and contemplating, drawing diagrams andfabricating formulae went into the composition of Huygens' justly famoustreatise on light. Ironically, to return to the key role of crystals in this storyand the importance of their various settings, Huygens was ultimatelyunable to tame all his crystals to the point that the divine law governingtheir structure was revealed, leading him to suppress this topic from hisfinal publication. It was their resplendent setting in a garden grotto thatdid most to illustrate the underlying regularity claimed to reside innature's bounty. Even more ironically, perhaps, this seeming inversion ofthe revelatory powers of art and natural philosophy was countered by eliteinsistence that gentlemanly pursuits were separate from and superior to thework done by physically engaged labour and that knowledge productionwas best pursued in increasingly institutionalized locations. Natural



philosophy remained enshrined in elite institutions and leather-boundtexts that outlived the transient character of garden structures, leaving uswith the impression that, indeed, here lies the source of wisdom and truth.

The second essay of this issue, by Chandra Mukerji, takes us back to asubject area that is no doubt more familiar to historians of technology, as itexamines the construction of a portion of the Canal du Midi in the lateseventeenth century. But Mukerji's story likewise holds a number ofsurprises whose mysterious presence can only be resolved by recourse to anin situ analysis of'mindful-handedness'. The focus of her essay centres onthe building of an extremely complicated eight-lock staircase that wasneeded to convey water-borne traffic across a particularly hilly area insouthwest France. As the story unfolds, readers are introduced to thisphase of the larger canal project as simultaneously a technical and politicalchallenge. Canal building was generally the site of much technologicalinnovation during the seventeenth century, but much of this took place inthe relatively flat lands of the Netherlands and Lombardy's plains. And,most staircase locks connected no more than two or three basins. Thisproject, on the other hand, called for the construction of eight succeedingsteps in highly inauspicious terrain. But not only were the engineeringchallenges enormous. The entire Canal du Midi project was an ongoingdrama that pitted the aspirations and resources of its managingentrepreneur Pierre-Paul Riquet against those of Louis XIV (representedby his minister, Colbert) and various local governing interests. Thisparticular phase in the project came at a point when resources, reputationsand trust were already stretched to the limit. And yet, amazingly, thisdemanding engineering and construction task was placed in the hands oftwo apparently uneducated brothers and their crew of largely peasantwomen.

Management of such a complex engineering undertaking called onhybrid skills that ranged from practical mathematics and hands-onengineering expertise to the ability to negotiate with and manage bothemployees and patrons. Because the written sources provide limited detailsof just what this entailed in the case of the brothers Medailhes, Mukerjimakes recourse to evidence embodied in the project itself, situated as it wasin a broader culture of Ancien Regime engineering practice. This is evenmore so for the recovery of details regarding work carried out by theproject's predominantly female crew and, here, Mukerji acquits herselfmasterfully. We learn that women from the Pyrenees (whence theseworkers must have come) had a long tradition of expertise in hydraulics,with roots going back to Roman engineering, the traces of which could stillbe found under the centuries-old layers of adaptations engineered by localwomen. Combined with the equally local experience of their male co-workers, who brought their hard-won expertise in mining and forestry tobear on the task of domesticating the forbidding slopes through which thecanal and its locks would have to pass, this workforce achieved just theengineering feat that Riquet needed to keep his project afloat.

Of special interest here is that Mukerji chooses to equate these workers'


Lissa Roberts 109

'mindful-handedness' with the more common term 'tacit knowledge'. Thisis explicitly intended to open the door to discussions with sociologists ofscience and technology who recognize that skill embodies more thanpractical abilities garnered by rote. But tacit knowledge is generally takento be local in nature and, as such, remains opposite to the kind ofknowledge taken to be entailed in universal laws and standards. Does thisthreaten to return us to the very sort of divisions that our 'mindful hand'project is intended to overcome? As explained in the preface to ourvolume, the answer is a historically grounded no. For, between the localgeographies of tacit knowledge and the universalizing urges of laws andstandards lies the historical field of cunning intelligence, known already tothe ancient Greeks as metis.4 Greek commentators argued that it was thevery nature of things that granted cunning intelligence its power. Becausethe phenomena of nature and society were multiple and shifting, theirmastery required multiply shifting skills. Standards for shipbuilding, forexample, were well and good, but individual ships had to carry differentloads and sail the constantly changing seas. While cunning methodscontinued to be denigrated by the Platonizing tradition of separating outand granting priority to reason over practice (a view still embodied inmuch current intellectual history), it remains the case that the historicalengagement of metis with the recalcitrance of local circumstances andmaterials was coupled with its involvement with the very sorts of projectsfrom which standardization sprouted and universal laws were induced.Mukerji's locally situated history of engineering practice and managementcan and should be seen as an episode of this larger history.

The gist of our third essay, written by Simon Werrett, is somewhatdifferent. By focusing on the multi-faceted biography of a single individual,Werrett is interested to demonstrate that the categories of 'mind' and'hand' are, in fact, historically and geographically contingent - theunstable products of specifically located socio-cultural claims andnegotiations. The complicated career trajectory of the eighteenth-centuryRussian instrument-maker and inventor, Ivan Petrovich Kulibin, showshim to have been a man on the move, frequently crossing apparentboundaries of practical, social and cultural engagement as he took on newpositions and projects. Thus, he was, in turn, a provincial craftsman, anurban instrument-maker, the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences' foremostinventor and a semi-independent entrepreneur who managed the'mechanical labour' of others. As Werrett explains, each of these positionspractically demanded the collaborative engagement of mind and hand.And yet, they simultaneously situated Kulibin in successive localeconomies of both practical and socio-cultural negotiation in which'philosophical contemplation' and 'mechanical work' were key labels fordefining and evaluating the worth of one's activities.

Within such a geography, success depended on fashioning convincinglyawe-inspiring instruments and automata, on one hand, and an equallyconvincing persona on the other. Understanding the well timed andlocally determined need to project one's identity as an exotic craftsman,



pliant servant or philosophical inventor was crucial to advancing Kulibin'scareer. But the choice of identifying characteristics - especially one'sasserted position on the continuum sliding from mental to manualengagement - could not be solely determined by the individual. Themicro-cultures of court patronage, academy politics and market dynamicswere replete with their own hierarchies and aspirants to status whoassertively ascribed identities to others. Mind and hand, then, were notsimply markers for the opposition between knowledge and skill orcontemplation and material engagement. They were all too abbreviatedstand-ins, whose analysis helps us recover a practical world in which onealmost always acted in concert with the other, and a cultural geography inwhich identifying ascriptions located individuals and their activities on amanagerial map of hierarchical value.

Werrett mentions one identifying category in passing that might deservefurther attention as we seek to come to terms with the history of minds andhands and mindful-handedness. What is the significance of ascribing thestatus of 'genius' to someone? In the case of Kulibin, this label created aspace that individualized him and his work, setting them beyond thecalculation of value that opposed mind and hand. Though seen by some asa materially engaged, untutored artisan, Kulibin's reputation as a geniuscould yet place him on a par with those contemplative souls who sulliedtheir hands with nothing more than pen and ink. Isn't this the very sameruse used to glorify 'great' inventors such as James Watt and ThomasEdison, the same vehicle placed on the alter of nineteenth-centuryRomanticism as a way to free individuals from the claimed constraints ofEnlightenment reason?5 Might a companion historical analysis of geniushelp us fill out our historical understanding of natural inquiry andinvention as key elements in the interactively material and culturaldevelopments that we usually speak of as the history of science andtechnology?

The fourth and final essay, written by Lissa Roberts, opens with acriticism of The Mindful Hand for its predominantly Eurocentric focus.Noting that the history of natural inquiry and invention between thesixteenth and early nineteenth century cannot properly be seen asexclusively European, she cautions that this should not be read as a callfor a comparative history that examines contemporary developments inother parts of the world. Rather, if the intimately related arenas ofmaterial and knowledge production engaged the hybrid exertions ofmindful-handedness, so too did they depend on a global network ofmaterial and knowledge exchange through which European-basedendeavours were inextricably linked to resources and activities in variousparts of the world.6 The body of her essay, however, focuses onconsumption rather than production and poses a set of questions thatlink Europe and the world in another way by asking what happened whenmaterial goods and embodied knowledge bearing the stamp of Europeanprovenance were exported and taken up by local goals and circumstances.What became of their identities and the identity of the European culture


Lissa Roberts 111

they were often taken to represent? Did the historical tension between themind and hand's practical collaboration and assertively official claims oftheir hierarchical separation give way to other visions as exploration andcommerce spread Western captains, commodities and concepts around theworld?

The vehicle for this essay's analysis is the exclusive trade carried onbetween the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) and Japan during thesecond half of the long eighteenth century; between 1641 and 1853, theNetherlands was the only Western nation allowed to enter and trade withJapan. Along with resident Chinese traders, the VOC was the only conduitthrough which European texts and artefacts reached the Japanese. Ofspecial interest is the fact that among the post popular European exports toJapan were optical and other scientific instruments, eye glasses, glassware,mirrors and books dealing with topics such as natural history, anatomyand artisanal techniques. As recorded by the work of contemporaryJapanese artists and authors, this trade clearly left its mark in arenasranging from urban markets and theatres to court discussions, popularliterature and medical reform. But the central point of the essay is to showthat the mark it left gained form, not through the influence of Westernknowledge and know-how so much as through highly complex processes oflocal demand and appropriation.

This sort of story used to be told (and too often still is) frequently interms of science and technology 'transfer' and 'diffusion' - words thatimply a level of passivity on the part of foreign 'consumers'. Suchconceptions project producers as inhabiting active centres for the creationof ideas and goods, which move uni-directionally to peripheral areas wherethey are adopted and consumed (or not). Not surprisingly, such centre-periphery talk carries with it claims of (relative) advancement andsuperiority. As a model for inter-cultural relations, it suggests the need/reality of peripheral emulation (or perverse rejection) of Western culture,science and technology - the measure of which is expressed in terms of'progress'. But, if revamping the history of science and technology as ahistory often inhabited by 'mindful hands' helps to overcome theorganizing claim of reason's practical dominance over manual skill,revising the related history of global exchange as one of local demand andappropriation can help to free us from simplistic narratives of the diffusionof 'Western' science and technology to other parts of the world.

The 'mindful hand' approach eschews the kind of comparative historyentailed in identifying (natural) knowledge production with 'science',which is simultaneously projected as 'Western' and universal. In hisintriguing afterword, however, Ian Inkster argues that rather than closingoff any possibility of global comparison, the 'mindful hand' actually offersa more fitting (because it is non-Eurocentric) frame for evaluating localdifferences in the patterns and processes of innovation around the world,both past and future. If productive material innovation is neitherdependent on the application of previously produced 'scientific' knowledgenor the result of organizing the production of knowledge directly in



'contexts of application', examining past performance and advising forfuture growth demand a different mode of investigation.7 If we identifymaterial productivity with sites in which contemplation and manipulationare practically intertwined, might it be possible to evaluate local regimes ofproduction and governance in terms of the extent to which unfettered andminimally hierarchical collaboration between the mind and hand is eitherstimulated or hindered? If so, the 'mindful hand' is promising on threeimportant fronts. It holds the key to understanding the politics andpractice of material and knowledge production in European history. Itopens the door to developing a similar history on a global scale that is notbased on Eurocentric categories. And, finally, it offers a new analyticframework for strategic foresight studies that seek to chart futurechallenges and productive possibilities. We look forward to the responsesthat our project elicits.

Notes and References1. E. T. Layton, 'Mirror-Image Twins: The Communities of Science and Technology in

Nineteenth-Century America', Technology and Culture, 1971, 12: 562-80; E. T. Layton,'Technology as Knowledge', Technology and Culture, 1974, 15: 31-41. The most recent variationon this theme is P. H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan (Chicago, 2003), in which she argues thatwhat she calls 'artisanal epistemology' was actually a crucial resource for the ScientificRevolution. For an insightful critique of technology as knowledge, see M. Hard, 'Technologyas Practice: Local and Global Closure Processes in Diesel-Engine Design', Social Studies ofScience, 1994, 24: 549-85.

2. L. Roberts, S. Schaffer and P. Dear (eds), The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention fromthe Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization (Amsterdam, 2007). The volume is available for freedownload at www.knaw.nl/cfdata/publicaties/detail.cfmPboeken ordernr = 20041102 .

3. Since the mechanization of labour was first celebrated by Andrew Ure and criticizedby (among others) Karl Marx, much has been written on the demeaning mechanization oflabour in conjunction with the growing dominion of standardizing reason. This topic iseloquently handled most recently in S. Schaffer, 'The "Charter'd Thames": NavalArchitecture and Experimental Spaces in Georgian Britain', in Roberts et al., op. cit. (2),279-305.

4. M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (London,1978).

5. See, e.g. C. MacLeod, 'James Watt, Heroic Invention and the Idea of the IndustrialRevolution', in M. Berg and K. Bruland (eds), Technological Revolutions in Europe: HistoricalPerspectives (Cheltenham, 1998), 96-115; C. Macleod, Heroes of Invention (Cambridge, 2007).

6. This perspective is persuasively argued for in K. Raj, Relocating Modern Science:Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900 (London, 2007)and forms the backbone of S. Schaffer, L. Roberts, J. Delbourgo and K. Raj, The BrokeredWorld: Go-Betweens and Global Networks of Knowledge, 1770-1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA, 2009).

7. For the idea of producing knowledge in contexts of application, also known as 'modetwo knowledge production', see M. Gibbons, C. Limoges, H. Nowotny, S. Schwartman, P.Scott and M. Trow, The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research inContemporary Societies (London, 1994) and H. Nowotny, P. Scott and M. Gibbons, RethinkingScience: Knowledge and the Public (London, 2001).


www.knaw.nl/cfdata/publicaties/detail.cfm?boeken__ordernr=20041102

Into the Light: Crystals andthe Recreation of Nature in

Seventeenth-Century GardenCaves and Cabinets

A L E T T E F L E I S C H E R *

INTRODUCTION

Mylord Bentings . . . delicate Gardens, Walks, Ponds, Motes, Grottoes,Fountaines and figures, Bridges and Gates and great Plenty of fruit andflowers very Curious and various; A place so neatly composed that here Artand Nature seem to go 'hand in hand'.1 (Thomas Penson, 1690)

There are many bodies, vegetable, mineral, and congealed salts, which areformed with fixed angles and regular forms. . . . All these things are worthy ofbeing carefully investigated to ascertain how and by what artifice nature thereoperates.2 (Christiaan Huygens, 1690)

In the same year, the English gentleman Thomas Penson and the Dutchmathematician Christiaan Huygens commented in their writings on therelation between art and nature. Penson admired the garden of HansWillem Bentinck's estate, Zorgvliet (Flight from Care), near The Hague,for the way art ordered nature and the well designed composition of thedifferent artificial and natural elements. Zorgvliet was a fine example ofhow the mundane act of gardening entailed combining aesthetics andengineering techniques to restore the ordered splendour of pre-lapsariannature. Like other contemporary garden designers, Bentinck and hisconstructors sought to make manifest the dominion of nature's laws, whichGod had hidden from sinful humans.3 A garden thus became arepresentation of or a clever allusion to divine design, where its layoutmanifested mathematical rules and its movements were mechanical.Imposed by garden constructors, art rendered nature more 'natural'.4

Christiaan Huygens' remark records his enthralment with the beauty ofnature's hidden order, which he found lodged in plants, minerals and salts.He declared artifice to be the designer of nature. In this case, art was not ahuman activity, but a grand design that sprang from God. Huygens soughtto reveal nature's laws by using mathematical rules and the vision of amechanically operating nature. While he experimented with natural


114 Into the Light

elements and processes to expose these divinely imposed rules, Pensonexperienced the garden as a site where human art applied rules andaugmented nature in order to recover the beauty and order of God'soriginal design. Mr Bentinck, his garden constructors and Huygensmanipulated and contemplated nature for reasons that were bothenlightening and entertaining, in order to reveal or recreate nature'sworking. This essay focuses particularly on one specimen of nature toillustrate how both constructors and examiners of nature sought tocompose a compelling expression of nature's orderliness: rock crystal.

Unearthed as a by-product from a mine in Germany, rock crystalentered both Bentinck's garden and Huygens' cabinet. Various groups ofcollaborating actors simultaneously transformed rock crystal into an objectof adornment and an object of revelation. The outcome in which thisprocess played a part were Bentinck's Grotto of Ganymede and Huygens'Traite de la Lumiere. This essay discusses how different groups of peoplemanually and mentally appreciated the embodied qualities of the crystaland for different reasons, in order to reveal what they took to be thecrystal's 'true' nature. The crystal was an ingredient of the reconstructionof nature in a garden grotto, where its refractive nature formed part of acunning spectacle with light. At virtually the same time, it led to the re-presentation of nature in a natural philosophical treatise on light, where itsrefractive nature was explored to reveal the law that governed it.

The rock crystal brought together a network of people from variousbackgrounds and with different skills and talents. There was the noblemanand diplomat Hans Willem Bentinck, the gentleman Gonstantijn Huygens,who was secretary to the Dutch Stadholder William of Orange,Constantijn's younger brother the mathematician Ghristiaan Huygens,the silk merchant Philips de Flines, Prince Johan Maurits of Nassau andvarious anonymous engineers, miners and garden constructors. The waythis circle interacted and exchanged information, ideas and objects wasessential to both material and knowledge production. Importantly, thisentailed a history of collaboration rather than one of distinction in whichtheory held sway over manual labour and mindless tinkering.

Although noblemen, mathematicians, merchants, miners and othersmundanely interacted and collaborated, potent social and culturalconventions prevailed to distinguish groups from each other. Thenobleman Christiaan Huygens, for example, donned the label 'geometre'to set himself, as a gentleman scholar, apart from those who practisedmathematics in the field, such as engineers.5 Elites socially and culturallystood above manual work, keeping labourers at bay. But actual practiceoften revealed a different pattern of interaction. Huygens depended asmuch on his extended network of patrons, merchants, miners and family ason his connections with Newton and other geometers. Objects and ideascirculated within this network, whereby they were transformed intoelements of natural inquiry and invention. One outcome of thistransformation was a hugely important treatise on the nature of light;another was a much appreciated garden grotto.


Alette Fleischer 115

Historians of science such as Alan Shapiro have chosen to focus theirwork mainly on Huygens' relationship with other scholars while discussingthe generation of his treatise on light and the 'internal' development of hisoptics. But, to do so leaves out the larger theatre of his collaborations andinteractions.6 The history presented here is not one of the great hero-scientists Descartes-Huygens-Newton or of the construction of a theorythat informed the work and understanding of amateurs and artisans.Rather, it sets out to show that the construction of Traitede la Lumiere was acollaborative effort. Huygens' knowing and doing as well as those of theother members of this broad network together provided the formativecomponents of this inventive treatise.

This essay, thus, places Huygens' inquiry into light and refraction in adifferent light. It connects the construction of a grotto and a treatise,thereby stressing how examining and recreating nature were two sides ofthe same coin. Following the journey of rock crystal from the dark recessesof the earth into the limelight reveals how this circulation and interactionled to the construction of a garden grotto and a treatise on light. As itpassed through the mindful hands and handy minds of constructors andexaminers of nature, the crystal's path traced the contours of the ways inwhich members of this diverse network simultaneously adapted anddisplayed their apprehension of the orderly beauty and workings of nature.

Creating a garden grotto involved the transformation and embellish-ment of natural elements into an artful nature. Garden owners and theirgardeners restructured nature by contemplating and manipulating therules of geometry, jointly engaging their hands and minds as theystructured the landscape and populated it with plant beds, orangeries,statuary and fountains. In a garden grotto, more specifically, theymanipulated and contemplated the movement of light in order to createoptical trickery. Natural philosophers jointly engaged their hands andminds to investigate nature in their cabinets by examining specimens withinstruments and working with pen on paper, in order to understand therules that order nature's operations. Restructuring and investigatingnature were mutually reinforcing ways of producing embodied naturalknowledge, whether in the form of a garden grotto or a book.

In order for nature to be transformed into an intriguing ornament or anobject of inquiry, its elements and/or processes had to be removed fromtheir natural surroundings.7 In their original habitat, elements of natureremained invisible in a way; untouched by art or contemplation, naturehid its secrets from prying humans. Once removed and transported to agarden grotto or a study, humans could investigate, transform andexchange naturalia.8 Both sites can be considered as laboratories whereinvention teamed with natural inquiry in order to domesticate nature. Inthese laboratories, the reconstruction of nature, the recording of ideas andan exchange of information took place. The objects and elementsthemselves or the information about them found their way - permanentlyor temporarily - into other gardens, grottoes and workrooms, where theywere further manipulated and contemplated.


116 Into the Light

To map out the complex transformative journey of the crystal, this essaystarts at the site from which the rock crystal was extracted: a mine in thecounty of Lingen (today's Germany). Then, we follow its trail to the Grotto ofGanymede in Bentinck's garden just outside The Hague, and further to thequarters of Christiaan Huygens in the Bibliotheque Royale in Paris. Theconcluding section links these last two locations, where mental and manuallabour created objects of revelation in order to explain the workings of nature.

THE BELLY OF THE EARTH

Passing through Lingen, on the way to Celle, I was shown large pieces thatwere half earth and half rock, upon which a number of points grow thatresemble and have the same hexagonal shape as rock crystal. I take thesepoints to be about a half inch [pouce] in diameter, but the Magistrate of Lingentold me that larger ones have been found, which could be cut into seals andother things. They are so little valued there that he told me that he had sentvery large pieces from this mine to Mr. Benting, solely to decorate thefountains being built at Sorgvliet. (Constantijn Huygens to Christiaan, 3October 16809)

In the autumn of 1680, Constantijn Huygens accompanied the DutchStadholder Prince William III, as secretary, on a political mission. One ofthe stopovers was the city of Lingen in the county of Lingen. This area wasa protectorate of William III, who appointed his courtier and diplomatHans Bentinck as sheriff of Lingen in 1675. Huygens witnessed that themagistrate of Lingen, Mr Tollius, had shipped a whole load of large piecesof crystal to Bentinck in The Hague as ornaments for his garden. Thepolitical connotation of this gift underlined the patronage of William III tothe County of Lingen, since this industrious mining area was under hisprotection and managed by Tollius and Bentinck.

Constantijn seemed surprised that the people of Lingen valued thecrystals so little, that they would give them away as mere ornaments. Hecalculated that these hexagonally shaped rocks would certainly bevaluable to his brother's inquiry into nature. The Lingen miners, so itappeared to Huygens, did not realize that this crystal contained knowledgeof nature. Huygens, however, did not understand that for the mineworkers, the crystals did signify something. For them, the gifting of rockcrystal expressed a political message whereas bits of rock crystal, polishedinto little ornaments, bore a symbolic meaning.

Seen from a commercial standpoint, it made sense to say that the localsconsidered the pieces with small crystal points of little value. They usedonly the bigger pieces of crystal to carve and polish marketable ornamentssuch as seals. The Lingen craftsman transformed elements of nature intoart objects - a process that entailed a certain knowledge of nature.10

Carved with images of saints, biblical figures or of miners' tools, theseornaments became precious talismans.11 This gave an added and divinemeaning to the crystals, which the Lingen miners understood as a way toprotect them while doing their dangerous work.



There were three mines in the county of Lingen: a limestone quarryclose to the village of Rheine and, in nearby Ibbenburen, a stone quarryand a coalmine.12 The still active coalmine is known today as a site wherethe type of rock crystal described by Constantijn Huygens might befound.13 The excavated rock crystal was a by-product from one of thesemines. Constantijn told his brother, 4 years later, that the crystal 'grew ina grotto' deep in a mountain.14 This 'grotto', tucked well into the earth,did not at all resemble Bentinck's idyllic and well designed garden grottothat would become the rock crystal's new environment. The dark quarrywas an inhospitable, irregular and eerie place.15 It 'lacked symmetry andproportion', if we follow the view of Andre Felibien, who also described theGrotto of Thetis in Versailles.16 He regarded caves as the natural bowels ofthe earth, where the mysterious growth of rocks and plants occurred.17 Inhis description, he opposed natural caves with artificial garden grottoes.The latter exposed and resolved the mystery of a natural cave throughtheir symmetry and proportion, order and variety.18

In mines, nature's dark secrets were only visible to the miners. Withtheir tools and torches, they extracted the crystals from the earth, thusmaking the first step in the crystal's transformation from an undisclosed'invisible' part of the earth's interior to an object of contemplation andmanipulation. Working in a hostile environment, the mine workers reliedon their accumulated knowledge of the earth's textures, to find theirprecious ores and minerals, while keeping an eye out for their own safety.This involved close teamwork and a sharing of skills and knowledge, acombination of on-site experience and years of manual and mentalunderstanding.19 This hierarchically organized skilful workforce knewwhat to do and how to do it, thereby passing their accumulated wisdom onto younger generations.

The art of mining was a complex activity, which entailed amassingknowledge of the mine area through calculation, experience andexperiment. Before anything else, the miners - usually those withsurveying experience - had to gain information regarding the whereaboutsof the deposits of the natural riches. They used surveying instruments bothon and below the earth's surface to measure the borders and determine thedepth of the mine; investigated the composition of the earth's layers beforeconstructing vents and shafts; took steps to control the water level insidethe mine; established the routes and method of transportation of people,tools and goods in both vertical and horizontal directions; and, finally,obtained the various mining equipment that they would need to retrievethe coal, rocks and rubble from dark mine shafts and galleries.

The examination of minerals and other unearthed rocks and stones tookplace above ground.20 Below the earth's surface, invisible to all except theminers, the mine was constructed according to a pattern of vertical shaftsand horizontal galleries. The miners transformed the belly of the earth intoa geometrical environment in order to free its hidden treasures using theirtools, carts, baskets, ropes, candles, geometrical devises and theiraccumulated knowledge of the terrain. While reshaping the earth into


118 Into the Light

an organized and accessible underworld, they obtained an understandingof nature's construction. These miners retrieved the once hidden mineralsfor the world above ground by imposing order upon nature.21

During the final stages of the mining process, the miners separated thecoal from the rubble, thereby distinguishing the rocks with minerals fromthose without. The coal fuelled the local lime-kilns, which was Lingen'smain economic pillar. The rocks containing large crystals also formed asource of income for the miners, since the local craftsmen transformed thelarge crystals into ornaments to be sold as talismans. For the Lingeninhabitants, the rocks with the small crystal points served to pay tribute tothe first visit of an Orange Stadholder and to Bentinck, Lingen's far-flungsheriff. The miners' manipulation of nature in order to reveal its hiddensecrets was thus motivated by a combination of mundane economical andpolitical reasons, for the Lingen people hoped that with this gift theStadholder and the sheriff would, in return, ease the taxes and allow themto remain Roman Catholic.22

Returning to Constantijn's remark that the people of Lingen valued therock crystal insufficiently, we can say instead that they valued the rockcrystal differently. They appreciated it for its use to express a politicalunion with the Dutch Republic. Constantijn may have found the workersan ignorant lot because they did not consider the crystals as a potentiallyvaluable step towards the examination of light and refraction. However,without the miners' ways of knowing and doing, their skilful knowledge ofnature, the crystals would not be 'freed'. Finally out in the open, the rockcrystal could continue its journey of transformation.

Having arrived in a fully manmade environment, crystals weredomesticated by nature's examiners and constructors, transformed intoobjects of study, appreciation, delight and wonder. In the grotto, crystalsreminded constructors and observers of the fertile mysteries occurring inthe earth's bowels. In the study, crystals prompted examiners to revealnature's hidden laws. From their perspective, nature's beautiful orderremained unexplained in 'the wild', but could be further transformed,contemplated, examined, explained and manipulated in these 'labora-tories'. Previously unseen, the crystal's exposure in these controlledenvironments clarified nature's laws in various ways. Aestheticallyreplaced in a grotto, this new vision of nature's variety and unity couldbe projected back out to make sense of the world at large.23

By the end of 1680, the shipload of crystals arrived at Zorgvliet. Theconstructors began to alter these stones into grotto ornaments. For this,they used their artful knowledge and skill, thereby adapting grotto-building conventions to fit local requirements. Ensconced in Bentinck'sgrotto, the crystal's meaning transformed to symbolically reveal the earth'ssecrets and emphasize the political bond between Bentinck and theStadholder. Ganymede, as the cupbearer of the gods, pointed to Bentinck'sposition as servant to the Prince of Orange. The Grotto of Ganymedebecame a complex construction filled with natural and artificial objects forreasons that were both entertaining and enlightening.



Some 2-3 years after Constantijn Huygens left Lingen, pieces of therock crystals arrived in his brother's cabinet, where Christiaan examinedthem as part of his inquiry into the nature of light.24 From 1672 to 1690,Huygens tinkered with both Iceland and rock crystals in his quest touncover nature's laws and explain the nature of light. With art andreflection, he transformed his crystals so that they would reveal theirsecrets. This entailed a process of manipulating and contemplatingdifferent types of crystal. His findings were made public to the worldthrough his treatise on light, the Traite de la Lumiere of 1690.25 But, beforeturning to Christiaan's handling of crystals and light, we trace the crystal'sadaptation from an unadorned rock into a stunning ornament in thegarden of Bentinck.

THE GROTTO OF GANYMEDE

From 1674, when Bentinck became the owner of Zorgvliet, he begahuge overhaul of the existing garden by redesigning and enlarging it toalmost triple its original size. Its new overall layout consisted of variousrectangular sections filled with intricately designed parterres, a labyrinthwith an artificial mount, a pyramidal-shaped mount, two grottoes, a largeorangery, various kitchen gardens and orchards, an aviary and fishponds.The garden housed a wealth of plants and objects from both northern andsouthern garden traditions adapted to fit local requirements (Figure 1).

The construction of the Grotto of Ganymede started in 1679 and wasprobably finished in 1681. To reach it, one walked from the house, passingthe semicircular conservatory and an enclosed orchard filled with fruittrees. Then, at the end of a lane with clipped linden trees alongside it,Bentinck's garden pavilion appeared. Bentinck himself, most likely withthe advice of the Stadholder William III, chose this location.26 As anamateur gardener, Bentinck was actively involved in the architecturaldesign of his garden and grottoes, but whom he hired as architect, landsurveyor, fountain-maker, carpenters, stonemasons and gardeners remainsunknown. Nor have any sketches or plans of this building (or of thegarden) survived, provided that these ever existed. This also is the case fora similar grotto, built in 1647-49 for the Stadholder Frederik-Hendrik'sgarden at Honselaarsdyk. But, here, the accounts provide certain names,such as the grotto-builder Joseph Dinant. He was paid for his services, hismaterial and his workforce, without any specification regarding thevarious tasks or names of artisans; just one master carpenter wasmentioned by name.27

Unfortunately, Bentinck's workforce remains invisible, but we can drawon one other example close to this case for reference: the garden grotto ofPrince Johan Maurits of Nassau in The Hague, which was built between1668 and 1670 and demolished in 1679.28 Bentinck was acquainted withPrince William Ill's elderly cousin and thus knew the Prince's house andgarden in The Hague well.29 In 1679, when Johan Maurits learned thatthe courtier wanted to build a grotto, he offered part of his grotto's


120 Into the Light

FLAX vA.N 11 ET 5 c' H o ON E P E, R K V A N S O R G V 1.1 E T , j>, v .< G i< A v F x H v <; *

Figure 1 Jan van den Avelen, Map of ôrgvliet, printed in Amsterdam, circa1690, Collection Haags Gemeentearchief, nr. z.gr. 191.

contents to Bentinck: a set of 39 looking-glasses, together with a collectionof conches, shells and three ceramic animals (two snakes and a tortoise).30

The prince furthermore suggested that Bentinck hire his architect,Maurits Post. Bentinck may have contemplated using the services of theyoung architect, who had worked also on other royal gardens and grottoesin The Hague. This promising architect could have done the job, but hisuntimely death prevented it.31 Being so close to the Prince of Orange,Bentinck probably employed people from this circle, since the Stadholderhad always been very keen on the Zorgvliet's garden.32

In a short period of time, Bentinck needed to assemble a skilledworkforce, acquire information on different types of grottoes, collectvarious grotto ornaments, find a setting for his grotto and have everythingbrought together as a fine example of artful nature. To render the grottomore 'natural', Bentinck wanted an indoor fountain - something thePrince's grotto did not have. An indoor fountain symbolized the origin ofwater: hidden well below the earth's surface. Constructing a fountain andwater conduits was a delicate and costly affair. Water had to be collected,transported, stored and led to the fountain inside. While building thepavilion, the constructors had to take into account how and where theconduits and water container should be constructed, and how to concealthe pipes and reservoir. Designing and building a garden grotto meant



looking into existing grottoes for reference and hiring grotto constructorswho had experience with these sorts of complex constructions.

Maurits Post was familiar with grotto constructions, having beentrained by his father Peter Post, who was chief architect to the Princes ofOrange and Nassau until his death in 1669. Father and son Post workedclosely with the French fontainier-grottier Dinant-family.33 With this kind ofbackground, it made sense that Johan Maurits suggested the services ofthis young architect to Bentinck. After Post's demise, Bentinck could havehired a member of the Dinant dynasty, or possibly the fountain-maker/engineer Willem Meester, also in the service of the Stadholder. Meesterhad built a number of these types of waterworks for several of the Prince ofOrange's gardens. He had further gained insight into the workings ofFrench gardens, water systems and grottoes, since the Prince of Orangehad ordered him to go to France for 3 months in 1679.34 Meester viewedthe gardens and ornaments and brought his findings back to the LowCountries, and to Prince William. Meester's understanding of water worksand artificial grottoes became available to those who hired him and tothose who consulted the collection of books, prints and papers on fountainsand gardens that he acquired.

One such book was the widely spread publication Traite de Jardinage byJacques Boyceau. In 1638, he told his readers that garden grottoes:

. . . are made to represent the wild caverns which are cut from natural rocks orbuilt specially elsewhere, also these are usually kept dark and certainly notgloomy. They are ornate with rustic products and material objects that fitwith this style, such as porous and concave stones, pieces of rocks and curiouspebbles, conches and strange fossils, and other types of shells, which by theirwell ordered forms and colours are beautiful enhancements: the water pipesare clean and well fitted, rendering the things most natural.35

Prince Johan Maurits' grotto came close to Boyceau's description, as itresembled a miniature mountain adorned with boulders. This windowlessgrotto housed not only shells and conches, but also 39 looking-glasses and astove. The mirrors made this grotto lighter, and the stove made itagreeable on colder days.

Johan Maurits' problems with his garden grotto in The Hague shedsome light on the construction and the maintenance of these complexgarden objects. In this grotto, shells and conches regularly fell from thewalls because of a combination of heat and infirm cement.36 Post informedthe Prince by letter on this matter, but he did not specify whether theproblem of the cement had anything to do with the heat of the grotto's ironstove or was due to hot weather conditions.37 There is no record of this sortof problems regarding the Grotto of Ganymede; therefore, it cannot beascertained whether Bentinck suffered similar problems.38 Maybe theconstructors had overcome the problems with cement, or the answer was inthe structure of the Ganymede grotto.

Although the Grotto of Ganymede housed a large part of the contents ofJohan Maurits' grotto, it differed greatly in overall design. In style andconstruction, the forerunner of Bentinck's grotto was the Grotto of Thetis,


122 Into the Light

Het Iraye Grotyan Gariimetles *H?££ met zyn, jfojOLteyirwrerlcen van t> try-ten,cle ISTi^lsrr^D met die llapejicle Diana cjti'tgjroote Prieel vajn latvêrilST.''^/;-.

ftutr.T.Vamlcfi. jlvf/en.j-.'teJt.-Mi.fSJt/e.sr, /><v . 4-",tV,r/,v «r/y«.-w,; netTr^ffSt .

Figure 2 Jan van den Avelen, Grotto of Ganymede, exterior, printed in Amsterdam,circa 1690, Collection Haags Gemeentearchief, nr. kl. B 1513.

in the garden of Versailles.39 The Grotto of Ganymede had a symmetricalfacade that was divided into four sections by pilasters (Figure 2). In themiddle was an arched entrance with left and right arched windows; theflat roof had an octagonal windowed cupola in its centre. Inside, thepavilion functioned as a hall, with a tiled floor, stone benches along thewall and large looking-glasses hanging opposite the windows and theentrance. Opposite the door was a large niche furnished with water-works, mirrors, shells, rocks and other ornaments. An oval fountain keptthe visitor from entering the niche; nature's secrets could not be inspectedclosely (Figure 3).

Before the final completion of the Ganymede pavilion, as just described,the constructors had to build a structure with water conduits, a reservoirand a fountain that needed then to be adorned (the fountain) and hidden(the conduits and reservoir). The final stage thus entailed the beautifica-tion of the grotto. Probably in early 1680, Bentinck's constructors starteto hang Johan Maurits' expensive glass mirrors40 in a symmetrical fashionagainst the curved back wall of the niche to reflect light and water. Theyfilled the rest of the niche with the other objects from the Prince's oldgrotto.41 Now, all the constructors had only to wait for the Lingen crystalto arrive at The Hague.

Late in 1680, these stones finally arrived to complete the grotto's changefrom an engineering project into an artful imitation of nature, by covering



irlioone Gj~ot van Ganim eAAAAAAAAAAAAAdes I

Figure 3 Jan van den Avelen, GVoô of Ganymede, interior, printed in Amsterdam,circa 1690, Collection Haags Gemeentearchief, nr kl. B 1514.

the walls, faucets, gaps, water conduits and walls from top to bottom. First,the rock crystal needed to be sorted, cut into manageable sizes and cleanedbefore being cemented into place. Then, the constructors assembled therocks in the grotto and cemented them around the fountain, so that theyrested firmly in their manmade cave. Without any written source, itremains speculative how the constructors positioned the crystals andmirrors like pieces of a puzzle. However, their goal was to make eachelement reflect and refract light from one point to another in order for thisoptical spectacle to work. Thus adapted and exposed, the crystals showedoff their natural and orderly beauty, while playing tricks with light andsight. This was the last step in the transformation of the rocks from aninvisible element in the earth's bowels to an artfully enhanced object ofnature.

Carefully placed in the grotto, the crystals and corals symbolized theearth; the ceramic snakes and tortoise as well as shells, conches and coralssignified the fertile quality of water.42 Brought out in the open, light shoneon nature's otherwise hidden mystery: the origin of the crystals was nowexposed to the public. The common notion was, as the Huygens'correspondence informs us, that crystals grew in the darkness of a cave.But, here, daylight entered via the door, the windows and from the copulaabove to shed light on this event. Inside, rays of light reflected from themirrors and scattered throughout the grotto while being refracted by the


124 Into the Light

water drops and the shiny crystals. Light revealed nature's secrets, whilethe multiple reflections and refractions created an optical spectacle.

The geometrically hung mirrors played an important part in thiscunningly orchestrated optical trick. Set in a semicircle, these looking-glasses seemingly dissolved the wall, making it difficult for the visitor to seehow deep the niche really was. Furthermore, the mirrors reflected eachother, the interior, the visitors, the ornaments and parts of the worldoutside the niche and the grotto. This distorted the boundary betweenwhat was real and what was unreal for the observer.43 Did one see theactual object or daylight, its reflection or a reflection of a reflection? Thiscomplex manipulation set in play by the grotto's constructors, harnesseddaylight, reflection and refraction in order to trick the visitor.44 Visitors, inturn, could simply enjoy the grotto for its pleasing trick or examine thisoptical illusion and find out how nature symbolically 'worked', rangingfrom its life-giving qualities to its order and symmetry.

The crystal's even-sidedness, together with the symmetrically placedmirrors and windows, referred to nature's mathematical design. Placed inthis artificial surrounding, these objects of inquiry and delight symbolizedthe mathematical order of God's Creation. The reflected and refractedlight pointed to the motion of light. The constructors illustrated theirunderstanding of the mechanics - if not the mechanical laws - of light'smotion through the way they manipulated it. Rays of light came inthrough the windows and flooded the grotto; it was reflected by themirrors and refracted through the water drops and crystals. The passage oflight triggered this optical spectacle, thoughtfully engineered by the grottoconstructors.

Bentinck and his workforce built a representation of spectacular,orderly nature by combining and processing natural knowledge,engineering, nature and art. Seamlessly combined, the constructorstransformed the once hidden objects of nature into an entertaining andenlightening art object. This entailed transforming the Lingen crystalsfrom unseen objects to objects that embodied nature's working.Simultaneously, it required the combined manual and mental expertisein grotto construction to realize a building that was also representednature.

This grotto addressed nature's enhanced beauty and Bentinck's positionas courtier and diplomat. The crystals connected the county of Lingen toBentinck's office and the Dutch Republic. The gifts from the elderly PrinceJohan Maurits of Nassau acknowledged the young Bentinck as animportant servant to the Stadholder. Bentinck himself advertised this roleby naming his garden pavilion the Grotto of Ganymede, the cupbearer tothe gods, in this case, celebrating his position as servant to Prince Williamof Orange, Stadholder of the Republic and King of England.

The Grotto of Ganymede became a topic discussed amongst grottovisitors and constructors. The English gentleman-tourist Thomas Bowreydescribed the grotto in 1698 as 'Curiously [set] with Shells, Rock Coralland Lookinglasses, and in it a Fountain'.45 It contained various objects of



nature and artifice assembled together to evoke nature's orderly beautyand curious variety. In a sense, a grotto was a type of Wunderkammer, as ithoused a collection of objects that played with the subtle transitionbetween nature and artifice. And, like a Wunderkammer, it showcased acollection of playful naturalia, displaying nature as artist.46 The con-structors merged the artistic talents of humans and nature in order tomagnify nature's mechanisms, and to showcase the manifestations ofnature's bizarre beauty for their unique properties.47 Collecting, ordering,polishing and investigating the form and the refractive nature of crystalwas part of this activity.

Nobles, amateurs and savants met in curiosity cabinets to admire,discuss and investigate nature's objects. These actors collected andappreciated the sort of rock crystal that illuminated Bentinck's grotto forits regular hexagonal shape and the way it dispersed light. They amassedother types of crystal for their colour, their shape or for their unique andstrange refractive qualities, as happened with the Iceland crystal. KingFrederik of Denmark had this type of crystal on display in his curiositycabinet for interested visitors and savants to see and admire. BothFrederik's Wunder hammer and Bentinck's grotto were, though in differentways, connected to the inquiry into the nature of light. The mathematicianErasmus Bartholinus studied the Danish King's Iceland crystal, whereasGhristiaan Huygens studied the Lingen rock crystal, which he got thanksto Bentinck's grotto.48

Neither investigation into the operation of nature nor the transforma-tion of the Lingen crystals took place solely in the Grotto of Ganymede.This process occurred almost simultaneously in the chambers of ChristiaanHuygens as part of his quest to expose nature's order and beauty. It led toa reconstruction of nature on paper. With the help of Constantijn'sStadholderly connections, some of the Lingen crystals were transported toHuygens' quarters, where he could transform these rocks into objects ofinquiry into nature.

CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS: EXAMINER OF CRYSTALS

In Zorgvliet's garden grotto, the Lingen crystals showed how the gardenconstructors used art to enhance nature, thereby imposing their rules torestore God's orderly and beautiful design. While Bentinck's workforceimposed nature's order and beauty, almost at the same time in Paris,Christiaan Huygens inquired into the nature of crystals while consideringartifice as the creator of their natural beauty and order. Even though theseapproaches regarding art and nature differed, both artisan and savantwere entailed in producing material and knowledge while investigatingnature's divine design.

Christiaan, like the grotto constructors, collected and processed objects,books and information to help him reveal the crystal's hidden secrets. Hepolished, cut and carved crystals while rendering them in ink by drawing,schematizing and describing. Furthermore, Huygens read and wrote about


126 Into the Light

the various types of crystal and discussed their various aspects with hisbrother Constantijn and other members of his extensive network. Both thesavant and Bentincks's artisans tinkered with crystals but with differentoutcomes. The details of Huygens' process culminated in his Traite de laLumiere, published in 1690.

Christiaan became interested in crystals from the first time he viewedthe Iceland crystal in 1672 together with the Danish mathematicianErasmus Bartholinus' booklet on the Iceland crystal's strange refraction,Experiementa crystalli islandici disdiaclastici (published in 1669).49 The Icelandcrystal's strange refraction occurs when a ray of light falls at an angle onthe crystal's surface. This refraction differs from that of the rock crystal.The rock crystal's refractions are regular, whereas one of the tworefractions of the Iceland crystal is perpendicular and passes at a differentangle.50 Huygens' search for an explanation for the strange refraction andhis growing expertise in the field of lens-making were inextricably part ofhis larger inquiry into the nature of light. Nature, knowledge and artexperientially composed a seamless web in Huygens' work.

Huygens eagerly wanted to investigate both types of crystals for the waythey refracted light, but he struggled - both mentally and manually - withhis material. In 1677, he wrote to the French minister of state Colbert thatthis 'little wonder of nature' was most difficult to penetrate. But this onlystrengthened his resolve to pursue the truths and hidden beauties thatremained locked within this ill-proportioned object.51 This process ofrevealing its secrets entailed endless tinkering - both direct and throughrepresentational sketches - with the crystals.

Two years later, Christiaan wrote to his brother that he 'found a way tocut and polish this crystal, which I was increasingly determined to dobecause everyone believed it to be impossible'.52 In his treatise, Christiaaninformed his reader how he went about it, how he first tried the commonmethod of polishing, which he had to adapt.53 Not only was Huygens busywith polishing Iceland crystals. He simultaneously tried to find new waysto 'perfectly polish glass' to make optical lenses.54 Along with the secrets ofnature, Huygens was also determined to penetrate the secrets of grinding,which were being kept from him by 'our little widow Le Bas'.55 Huygens,thus, combined hands-on contemplation with mindful manipulation inorder to reach his goal.

Over the years, Huygens amassed different types of crystal for hisinquiry into nature. So, when he learned about the existence and shape ofLingen crystals, he wrote in reply to Constantijn's letter (see above) that'[sjince I am a great examiner of crystals and their refraction, I wouldeagerly wish to see several good transparent pieces of this. You can easilyhave them sent with Mons. Bentingh's shipment'.56 It is not certain whenChristiaan finally got the Lingen rock crystal, but it was not before 1683.

Constantijn, constantly looking out for his brother, happened to be inDieren in 1684, visiting one of the hunting castles of Prince William ofOrange. The garden of this country estate housed two grottoes, both ofwhich were adorned with various crystals, amongst other things.



Constantijn took small samples from two of the grottoes' large crystals andsent them to his brother. He explained that the white one was of the sortthat came from the Lingen region and in regular shapes 'like the real rockcrystal'. Furthermore, he wrote, these crystals could be cut and broken inparallel pieces, giving them a shiny surface.57

The other sample of the Dieren crystal was fairly heavy, and Christiaanwondered whether it contained any metal. In any case, he wrote toConstantijn, it was probably not from a rich mine, which would explainwhy it was used for adorning a grotto.58 So, for Christiaan's inquiry intonature, not only the crystals from the Grotto of Ganymede, but also thosefrom the grottoes of the Stadholder's hunting castle were of interest. Andyet, Christiaan seemed not to have thought highly of garden grottoes asproviding a nurturing home for crystals, claiming as he did that such asetting displayed them as nothing more than objects of admiration. Rockcrystal should serve a greater purpose, he argued, as objects of commerceor examination. The Huygens's considered artisans and miners as twogroups of people who worked with nothing more than their hands andtools, with little concern for the crystals' hidden knowledge. Crafted byartisans into mere ornaments, the miners had given these crystals away asgifts to adorn a garden grotto. How else might this be understood than ascorroborating evidence for the social and intellectual superiority of thegentleman-geometre and his examination of nature's laws?

An apprehension of Huygens and his work rests somewhere betweenthis socially embedded set of distinctions and his practical engagementwith various sites of production and display. Ironically, perhaps, it isprecisely because he was situated on a highly placed social rung that gavehim access to aristocratic and princely gardens that he also gained accessto the handiwork of those he socially denigrated. Had it not been for thegarden owners and their grottoes, decorated with the various representa-tions of nature, as well as Constantijn's inquisitive eye and grabbing handswhen admiring these extraordinary objects, Christiaan would not havehad all these different crystals at his disposal. The fashion to reveal nature'ssecrets in a garden grotto fuelled Huygens' revelation of nature's orderlybeauty. Without the miners' by-product having found their way into asocially exclusive setting, his collection of crystals and, thus, his inquiryinto nature could not have been so extensive.

As secretary to Prince William, Constantijn followed the Stadholder onhis travels. This enabled Constantijn not only to visit different sites, butalso to build an extensive network. One of his connections was theAmsterdam silk merchant Philips de Flines. This wealthy amateur andgarden enthusiast had mentioned to Constantijn that he could obtainIceland crystal for Christiaan from his mercantile contacts. Christiaanquickly invited De Flines to come to Paris in 1679, where he introducedhim to collectors of curiosity, artists and printers and took him tobookshops and gardens. The gardener merchant, in turn, also agreed tosend some of his flower seeds to the King's botanic garden. His promises,however, were easier made than kept.59 Christiaan had to ask his brother


128 Into the Light

on several occasions by letter to remind De Flines of his word.60 This madeit difficult for the brothers to ascertain the reliability of De Flines. Thecontact ended after 1681, without any indication that Huygens receivedthe Iceland crystals.

De Flines' promise brought him in close contact with this wellconnected and learned family that had strong ties with the Stadholderand the Academic Royale des Sciences. The merchant's collection ofnatural history and art became even more socially prestigious through hisrelation to Christiaan and Constantijn. For instance, De Flines obtainedvia Christiaan a microscope, with which he viewed plants and insectstaken from his garden. Huygens's civil conduct, on the other hand, wasinduced by the possible acquisition of the precious Iceland crystal.

This manner of social conduct ran more or less parallel to theacquisition of grotto information and objects by owners/constructors ofgrottoes, whereby courteous prestige motivated the act of giving andsharing. Constantijn's network, thus, enabled Christiaan to collect books,information and crystals, which he then could use for his inquiry intonature. By cutting, breaking, polishing, sketching and comparing thedifferent crystals and combining his findings with information receivedfrom Bartholinus, the Lingen miners, Constantijn and other geometres,Huygens constructed his understanding of nature.

Huygens manipulated all these different types of crystal manually, onpaper and mentally in order to apprehend the formation, the shape andthe refractive uniqueness of the crystal while trying to understand the lawsof light.61 The 'great examiner' cut and polished the crystal into differentshapes using various techniques, such as treating it with almond oil tosmooth the surface and make it transparent. He reworked the crystal intopyramidal, cubic, pentagonal and hexagonal shapes and compared theirsingle and double refractions.62 Like his counterparts building a grotto, heworked with nature, using mathematical tools, chisels, pen and paper, inorder to understand and display its workings. The garden constructors'goal was to represent physically an enhanced nature; Huygens'transformation of nature became a construction of words, diagrams anddrawings. This operation entailed manual and mental labour, using art toreveal nature's geometrical form, by way of cutting and chiselling thecrystal, by making schematic drawings of the crystal and by depicting lightin geometrical shapes.

Huygens appreciated the beautiful regularity of rock crystals, which heunderstood to be made from well ordered particles. In his Traite de laLumiere, he mentioned that he:

. . . had observed a certain phenomenon in the ordinary [Rock] Crystal, whichoccurs in hexagonal form, and which, because of this regularity, seems also tobe composed of particles, of definite figure, and ranged in order.63

This regularity contrasted with the Iceland crystal. He disliked itsirregular shape and found it difficult to understand the workings of thiswonder of nature, as he informed Colbert by letter in 1677.64 But he



persisted in his quest to understand this complex and ill-proportionedcrystal.

The crystals signified the uniqueness and variety of nature's elements, aswell as nature's geometrical regularity and order. Jointly, variety andorder formed the Janus-faced foundation of divinely created and humanlyrepresented nature. The uniqueness of the Iceland crystal and theregularity of the rock crystal were manipulated and contemplated in thestudy and grotto as examples of the wonders and workings of nature.Huygens strived to expose nature's order and regularity by using nature'sintriguing variety, whereas the grotto constructors used geometrical orderto accentuate nature's uniqueness and wonder.

In the grotto and in the treatise, variety and order entwined to form thefoundation of both divinely created and humanly represented nature.65

The Grotto of Ganymede emphasized the complex mixture of nature'swonder and irregularity; here, shells, conches and fossils representednature's strange but playful forms. Bentinck's constructors merged naturewith art to form a well organized and geometrical pavilion, where itscontent could be appreciated for its curious beauty and optical delight.

Huygens, on the other hand, emphasized nature's regularity and orderin his treatise. He needed the regularity of the rock crystal and theuniqueness of the Iceland crystal for his inquiry into light, and hetransformed both rocks into schematic depictions in his treatise. Huygensopted for the schematized drawing, since this underscored his argument ofhow light passed through this crystal. The rock crystal embodied nature'sgeometrical order, whereas the Iceland crystal showed nature's unique-ness. For Huygens, the curiosity of the Iceland crystal was its refractionand not its actual shape. Christiaan considered the crystal an ill-proportioned but interesting object, and not an example of nature'splayful artistry.66 As such, he chose not to include an actual drawing of thisstrange crystal in his book, since it would only distract the reader from histreatise on light.67

The irregular form of Huygens' Iceland crystal contrasted with theorderly shape of the rock crystal. In both of his pre-press manuscripts of1689, he described his piece of Iceland crystal. But the description nevermade it to the final publication of the Traite de la Lumiere. The unpublishedsection reads:

. . . the greatest piece I have seen of the latter is the length of a thumb, has theshape of a cylinder, but is overall imperfect, irregular and pocked with cavities. . . at two ends it has... obtuse angles, composed of three angles of 101 degreeseach.68

Accompanying this text on folio 216r, Huygens had made a drawing of hispiece of Iceland crystal (Figure 4), which he crossed out in the pre-pressmanuscripts of the Traite. The original illustration and description showeda crystal with angles of varying degrees and different axes. This stood inopposition to the geometrical depiction of the Iceland crystal, which wasfound on folio 215r in the manuscript (Figure 5). For the printed version,


130 Into the Light

Figure 4 Christiaan Huygens, Traite de la Lumiere manuscript, Special collections,University Library Leiden, HUG 31 fol. 216r.

Huygens opted to include only this schematized drawing of the Icelandcrystal, and against the realistic depiction and description of the Icelandcrystal. He discarded nature's 'flawed' form, which worked against hisemphasis on nature's beautiful order and regularity. He remained,nevertheless, intrigued by the formation of the hexagonal rock crystal.

In search of an answer, he wanted to know more about the crystal's



Figure 5 Christiaan Huygens, Traite de la Lumiere manuscript, Special collections,University Library Leiden, HUG 31 fol. 215r.

natural environment. Christiaan asked his brother about the location andtype of earth in which the Lingen crystal grew that might help account forits shape.69 Constantijn explained that the crystals grew (the Huygens'brothers used the word croitre in reference to the crystal's originalenvironment) in a cave deep in a mountain. It was here that the crystalsgained their form. Back in his chambers, Christiaan puzzled over the


132 Into the Light

formation of nature's geometry, which he believed to consist of orderlycomposed particles. How did the crystal get its shape? How did thishappen with the 'many bodies, vegetable, mineral, and congealed salts,which are formed with certain regular angles and figures'? He found that:

All these things deserve careful investigation to ascertain how and by whatartifice nature operates . . . . It seems that in general the regularity whichoccurs in these productions comes from the arrangement of the small invisibleequal particles of which they are composed.70

Huygens admired the beauty of nature's geometry and the regularity ofthe composition of the particles, but he was unable to explain nature's'beautiful order'. This continued to elude him, which made him wonder allthe more about the formation of crystals. While searching for an answer,he wrote that he didn't yet dare:

. . . to say anything about how such tiny, equal and similar corpuscles areproduced, whether they are formed first and then assembled, or whether theyarrange themselves in the process of being born and to the extent that they areproduced, which seems to me most likely. To develop truths so reconditerequires a knowledge of nature much greater than that which we now have.71

Even after lengthy investigation into the nature of the crystal, togetherwith new information on its original 'birthplace', Christiaan was still notable to reveal how the crystal got its form and by what artifice natureoperates. All he could do was to speculate on the mechanism of theirregular formation.

Huygens had much to say about the working of light in his treatise, butthe question regarding the formation of nature's geometry remainedunanswered. It might therefore be argued that it was thus not in Huygens'cabinet, but in a garden grotto that the representation of nature's beautifulgeometrical order and its curious marvels were most revealingly achieved.The constructors offered their version of the working of divine order bymentally and manually weaving together order and variety, art andnature. By merging the natural and the artificial, they recreated anenhanced 'belly of the earth'. The grotto constructors found a cunning wayto present their understanding of nature's beautiful truths and expose theformation of its geometry; they aesthetically 'succeeded' where Huygensfailed.

CONCLUSION

As quoted at the beginning of this paper, Penson and Huygens signaled alink between art and nature. In the garden of Zorgvliet, humans imposedthe orderly rules of art onto nature, whereas Huygens' starting point was abelief that artifice is the tool with which God ordered nature. Gardenconstructors imposed their views of nature's geometry to transform andembellish their landscapes. In his quarters, Huygens tried to explainnature's own design and to reveal its hidden geometrical truths.

The transformation of nature took another step in the grotto, where



light, mirrors and crystals were configured to form a cunning optical trickwhile manipulatively revealing nature's geometrical beauty and themotion of light. Bentinck and his constructors combined their skilled andintellectual labours regarding engineering and nature, geometry, tools,prints and books to project an optical illusion. They amassed natural andartificial curiosities from two main sources, the Lingen mine and JohanMaurits' grotto, and adapted them to this newly built environment. Theaccumulation of information and objects led to the design of the grottothat revealed both nature's playful artistry and its orderly workings.

Up to 1690, Christiaan Huygens examined crystals and their refractionby using various tools, such as geometry, chisels, metal plates, almond oil,pen and paper, to reveal the nature of light. Huygens represented hisgeometrical adaptation of nature in schematic depictions and writing,thereby deciding in the final stage to discard what seemed to be evidence ofnature's inexplicable irregularity. Tinkering with Iceland and rock crystal,Huygens uncovered the workings of the strange refraction and he revealedthe rules of refraction. While manipulating and contemplating differentcrystals, he tried to understand the crystal's formative secret, but wasfinally forced to give up his goal of finding the truth regarding nature'sorderly formation.

Searching for nature's truths enabled Bentinck's constructors andChristiaan to find a way to expose its hidden workings. This inquiry intothe nature of crystals was an activity whereby both Bentinck and Huygensrelied on the knowledge and knowhow of other people. A networkconsisting of Gonstantijn Huygens, Prince Johan Maurits, Philips deFlines, several grotto constructors and fountain-makers, Prince William ofOrange and the miners from the county of Lingen tied the Grotto ofGanymede to the Traite de la Lumiere. Each member of the networktransformed the crystal into an object that exposed its inner beauty andtruth. The miners revealed the crystal's protective quality, the grottoconstructors revealed nature's orderly beauty and the mathematicianrevealed the laws of refraction.

A collaboration of minds and hands, motivated by the crystal'sgeometrical shape and the way it reflected light, laboured to expose andunderstand the nature of these rocks. The revelatory goals of the grottoand the treatise differed, but their creators' practices and intentions wereakin. Bentinck's constructors, like Huygens, paired variety and wonder togeometry and order for their constructive understanding and depiction ofnature. Huygens emphasized order and geometry in his book. Though heused variety and wonder for his inquiry into nature's workings, he decidedto suppress this in the end, since it led attention away from nature'sregularity. Bentinck's workforce emphasized nature's wonder and imposedgeometry onto nature while using the arts to 'explain' nature. Theymerged variety and order so as to accentuate nature's wealth andsplendour.

The manipulation and contemplation of nature by the miners andgrotto constructors opened the way for Huygens to proceed with his


134 Mo the Light

inquiry into nature, connecting the grand examinateur and his crystals firmlyto the Grotto of Ganymede. The Huygens' brothers, however, claimedotherwise. Their high-ranked status strengthened their motivation to standabove the level of labourers and their artistically transformed products.The Huygens brothers regarded these labourers as incapable of being ableto value nature and understand its laws, since their handcraft wasmotivated by economics and materially directed towards adorning agarden grotto. Conversely, the Huygens's social standing enabled them togain access to noble garden grottoes filled with natural and artificialobjects that miners and artisans had 'merely' retrieved, constructed orembellished. But it was the mindful hands of these labourers that broughtthese nature's hidden treasures to light, allowing Christiaan Huygens toamass and examine the different types of crystal, and to write a treatise onlight. Due to their place in society and gentlemanly concerns, the brothersplaced themselves above the echelon of nameless labourers and their 'tacit'knowledge of nature. This seventeenth-century elitist distinction hassubsequently been prolonged by generations of historians.

Indeed, the attention of historians has rested for too long on the'internal' intellectual development of the Traite de la Lumiere. Huygens'wide-ranging correspondence and his treatises published in the OeuvresCompletes have supplied historians with plenty of material to examine andappreciate his relationship with other savants. But, by looking at otherletters and by including the two pre-press manuscripts of his treatise72 inour investigation, this essay draws another picture. Huygens depended onthe knowing and doing of a broad range of actors, including miners andartisans, while he harnessed both his own hands and mind to induce thecrystal to reveal its secrets. The network of these transformative practicesand the revelation of nature connected the Lingen mines, the Grotto ofGanymede and Huygens' cabinet, revealing a collaboration that entailedboth material and knowledge production. This intertwined connectionand transformation have remained long hidden from us, partially becausethe Grotto of Ganymede was demolished some time ago, leaving onlyHuygens' treatise and his culturally shaped sense of social interactions asour obvious guides to the related histories of material and knowledgeproduction. But, now that the productive capacities of mental and manuacollaboration are brought to light, the implications for revising ourapproach to natural inquiry and invention seem crystal clear.

Notes and References* A previous version of this paper was presented at SHOT in Washington, October

2007. I would like to thank participants for their comments, and I especially thank Dr LissaRoberts, my mentor and friend.

1. T. Penson, 'Harl', MS. 3516, f 14, quoted in R. C. Temple (ed.), The Papers ofThomas Bowrey 1669-1713 (London, 1927), 52.

2. C. Huygens, Traite de la Lumiere (Leiden, 1690), 91, Tl y a plusieurs corps vegetaux,mineraux, & sels congelez, qui se forment avec de certains angles & figures reguliers', and p.92, 'Toutes ces choses meritent d'estre recherchees soingeusement, pour reconnoitre comment& par quel artifice la nature y opere'.

3. C. Mukerji, 'Material Practices of Dominion: Christian Humanism, the Built



Environment and Techniques of Western Power', Theory and Society, 2002, 31: 1-34. Shediscusses how constructing a garden depended on natural knowledge and artistry.Engineering nature was a 'form of purification' of restoring nature to its once perfect'grand design' of Creation. God had hidden Nature's laws from men because of their sins;see pp. 7-8.

4. Art has two meanings: (1) the process of the transformation of nature and (2) theproducts of human endeavour to imitate nature. See, for further reference, J. van der Groen,Den Mederlandtsen hovenier (Amsterdam, 1670), ' . . . de Natuur, die zich veeltijts wanschickelijckvertoont, door de konst kan op-geschickt, op-gepronckt, in goede ordre, cierlijck envermakelijck gemaeckt worden'; E. de Jong, Natuur en Kunst, Nederlandse tuin- en land-schapsarchitectuur 1650-1740 (Hilversum, 1995), 35-8; P. Dear, 'Miracles, Experiments, and theOrdinary Course of Nature', his, 1990, 81: 663-83, notably p. 682.

5. See F. J. Dijksterhuis, 'Constructive Thinking: A Case for Dioptrics', in L. L.Roberts, S. Schaffer and P. Dear (eds), The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the LateRenaissance to Early Industrialisation (Amsterdam, 2007), 59-82. He argues the actors' difficultiesregarding making a distinction between the disinterested geometre and the professional/practical mathematician.

6. A. E. Shapiro, 'Huygens' "Traite de la Lumiere" and Newton's "Opticks": Pursuingand Eschewing Hypotheses', Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 1989, 43: 223-47; A.E. Shapiro, 'Huygens' Kinematic Theory of Light', in H. J. M. Bos, M. J. S. Rudwick, et al.(eds), Studies of Christiaan Huygens, Invited Papers from the Symposium on the Life and Work ofChnstiaan Huygens (Lisse, 1980), 200-20.

7. See, e.g. T. Comito, 'Renaissance Gardens and the Discovery of Paradise', Journal ofthe History of Ideas, 1971, 32: 483-506. This paper discusses the transformation of nature intogardens. P. Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museum, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early ModernItaly (Berkeley, 1994), 407, where she argues that 'Europe's leading intellectuals conductedtheir inquiry into nature in museums'. W. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books ofSecrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, 1994). Nature, Eamon argues, was to beunderstood through experiments; otherwise, its secrets remained hidden.

8. For more reference, see B. Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge MA/London, 1993), 79-90. B. Latour, 'Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World', in K.Knorr and M. Mulkay (eds), Science Observed: Perspective on the Social Study of Science (LosAngeles, 1983), 141-70; I. Rhys Morus, 'Seeing and Believing Science', Isis, 2006, 97: 101-10.

9. C. Huygens, Oeuvres Completes de Christiaan Huygens (Den Haag, 1888-1950) (referredto further as OC), Vol. 8, No. 2230 Constantijn to Christiaan, 3 October 1680, 'En passant aLingen pour aller a Cell on me fit voir des grosses pieces moitje terre et moitje pierre sur lesquels croissent certaines pointes comme celles du cristal de roche, et de figure hexagonecomme elles: ces pointes que je vis n'avoyent qu'environ un demy pouce de diametre, mais leRichter de Lingen me dit qu'il s'en trouvoit de plus grosses, et que de ce cristal 1'on pouvoitfaire tailler des cachets et toutes autres choses. Us 1'estiment si peu par la qu'il me dit qu'ilavoit envoye de fort grosses pieces de cette mine a Mr. Benting pur en orner les Fontaines qu'ilfait a Sorgvliet'.

10. P. H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan, Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution(Chicago, 2004). She discusses at length the role of artisans as active knowers of nature, whichI will not repeat here.

11. G. Schreiber, Der Bergbau in Geschichte, Ethos und Sakralkultur (Cologne, 1955). Oncrystals and their meaning, see pp. 202-6.

12. W. Cramer, Geschichte der Graffschaft Lingen im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Oldenburg,1940), 82-5.

13. On the Ibbenbiiren coalmine, see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergwerk_Ibbenbu-ren, 29 October 2008, 'Erste Zeichen fur den Steinkohlebergbau in Ibbenbiiren lassen sich bisauf das 15./16. Jahrhundert zuruckdatieren. Aufgrund des hugeligen Gelandes wurdenkleine Schachte und Stollen in die Erhebungen der Landschaft getrieben, um Kohle fiirbenachbarte Kalkbrennereien und Salinen zu gewinnen'. This mine is due to be closed in2009 or 2010. On rock crystal, see http://gea-drenthe.nl/nsaksen.html#ibbenburen, 29October 2008, 'Steenkoollaag uit het boven-Carboon. Naast fossielen zijn uit ertsgangen enspleten in de kolenkalk de volgende mineralen bekend: Bariet (4cm), Bergkristal (tot 10cm,ook Scepter-kwarts), Dolomiet (1,5 cm), kogelvormige Markasiet, Milleriet (2cm), Steenzout


http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergwerk_Ibbenburen

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergwerk_Ibbenburen

http://gea-drenthe.nl/nsaksen.html#ibbenburen

136 Into the Light

(3cm) em Whevelliet (3mm)'. For more information on Ibbenbiiren rock crystal, seewww.boerseos.de/ibbenb.php.

14. OC, op. at. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2369 Constantijn to Christiaan, 25 September 1684, andNo. 2368 Christiaan to Constantijn, 22 September 1684, ' . . . cristal de Lingen croit dans unegrotte qui est dedans d'une montagne et fort avant en terre a ce qu'ils disent'. In the letters of1679, Constantijn used the word 'mines' whereas, in the 1684 correspondence, he talkedabout 'grotto'.

15. In their letters, the Huygens brothers used the word 'croitre' (to grow) whendiscussing the crystal's natural environment.

16. S. Taylor-Leduc, 'A New Treatise in Seventeenth-Century Garden History: AndreFelibien's "Description de la Grotte a Versailles'", Studies in the History of Gardens & DesignedLandscapes, 1998, 18: 35-50, see p. 42.

17. N. Lefebvre, A Compendious Body of Chemistry: Teaching the Whole Practice Thereof by theMost Exact Preartion of Animals, Vegetables and Minerals, Preserving their Essential Virtues (London,1664), two volumes. He explains on p. 62 that 'Minerals do live, as long as they are joined totheir Matrix and Root'. Lefebvre expressed the notion that minerals live on as long as they arein their natural state in the earth.

18. M. Szafranska, 'The Philosophy of Nature and the Grotto in the RenaissanceGarden', Journal of Garden History, 1989, 9: 76-85. She argues that a garden grotto symbolizedlife-giving qualities of earth and water. Plant seeds, stones and crystals were 'born' in the bellyof the earth and metal got its shape there; see p. 79.

19. Schreiber, op. cit. (11). Working so closely, the mine workers were known as'brotherhood' or 'community', pp. 19-20.

20. G. Heilfurth, Der Bergbau und seine Kultur, Eine Welt zwischen Dunkel und Licht (Zurich,1981), 26-46; L. Suhling, Aufschlieflen, Gewinnen und Forderen: Geschichte des Bergbaus (Hamburg,1983), 158-62; C. E. Gregory, A Concise History of Mining (New York/Oxford, 1980).

21. Schreiber, op. cit. (11) , 206.22. G. J. ter Kuile, 'Het graafschap Lingen onder de Oranjes', Verslagen en Mededeelingen

van de Vereeniging tot Beoefening van Overijsselsch Regt en Geschiedenis (s. 1, 1953), 13-31.23. Latour, 'Give Me a Laboratory', op. cit. (8).24. Perhaps Christiaan Huygens got the crystals no sooner than his return to the Low

Countries, in 1683.25. Although he had presented his initial findings on the Iceland crystal's strange

refraction to the Academic Royales des Sciences in 1679, he published his book in 1690 withnew information.

26. Royal Archives, The Hague, letter from Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen toBentinck, 27 February 1679. He wrote: ' . . . sans doute Son Alt : aura la bonte de vous adviseren ordonnant la place pour la grotte car c'est le principal, de la bien placer ....'

27. V. Bezemer-Sellers, Courtly Gardens in Holland 1600-1650: The House of Orange and theHortus Batavus (Amsterdam, 2001), 352-8.

28. Since the prince could not financially maintain his grotto, he had it demolished.29. The Huygens family knew this garden very well, since their residence in The Hague

bordered that of Johan Maurits.30. Royal Archives, The Hague, letter from Johan Maurits to Bentinck, 28 February

1675, ' . . . je vours [sic] prie, de me faire 1'honeur, j'accepter le petit ornement pour vostregrotte, que vous avez dessein de faire pour avoir une belle vue, soit sur le gradin [sic], ou dansquelque autre endroit, dont la reflexion dans les miroirs sera une belle operation, a Sorgvlietou sans doute Son Alt: aura la bonte de vous adviser en ordonnant la place pour la grotte carc'est le principal, de la bien placer, je vourdroit que j'avis quelque chose de plus grandeimportance, qui vous pourroit estre agreable, il seroit a vostre serviAAAce

31. Maurits Post's father Peter Post was also architect to the Stadholder and his family.32. N. Japikse, Correspondence van Willem HI en van Hans Willem Bentinck, eersten graaf van

Portland, Serie 1, part 1 (The Hague, 1927), 175-9, letter 146 from William III to Bentinck, 14April 1693, 'J'ay este cett apresdine a Sorghvliet ou j'ay trouve tout en asses bon ordre, maiscela a renouvelle mon chagrin de ne vous avoir aupres de moy. II y aura par tout ce pais peude fruit cette annee, la derniere gelee et niege ayent gate les fleurs'.

33. Bezemer-Sellers, op. cit. (27). Joseph, his son Otto and, later, his grandson Frederiwere all fountain-makers, pp. 174-6.


www.boerseos.de/ibbenb.php

Alette Fleischer

34. D. J. Roorda, 'De loopbaan van Willem Meester', Spiegel Historiael, 1981, 16: 614-22;E. de Jong, 'For Profit and Ornament: The Function and Meaning of Dutch Garden Art inthe Period of William and Mary, 1650-1702', in J. D. Hunt (ed.), The Dutch Garden in theSeventeenth Century (Washington, 1990), 13-48: Meester went there together with Mr VanNassau-Odijk, the Stadholder's nephew. V. Bezemer-Sellers, 'The Bentinck Garden atSorgvliet', in J. D. Hunt, The Dutch Garden in the Seventeenth Century (Washington, 1990), 99-129. On p. 120, she writes that Prince William and Bentinck sent Meester to Paris.

35. J. Boyceau, Traite dujardinage, selon les raisons de la nature et de I'art (Nordlingen, 1997),80, 'Les Grotes sont faites pour representeer les Antres sauvages, soit qu'elles soient tailleesdans les rochers naturals, ou basties expressement autre part: aussi sont-elles ordinairementtenues sombres, & aucunement obscures. Elles sont ornees d'ouvrages rustiques, & d'estoffesconuenantes a cette maniere, comme pierres spongieuses, & concaves, especes de roches, &cailloux bigearres, congelation, & petrifications estranges, & de diverses sortes de coquillages,qui par leurs formes & couleurs bien ordonnees font de beaux enrichissemens: les goutieres &reiallissemens d'eau, y sont propres & bien seants, redant les choses plus naturelles'.

36. Royal Archives, The Hague, letter from Post to Johan Maurits, 7/17 May 1673, Tckben meede doende inde grodt al waer door de groote warmte veel schillkens als hoornee afvallen ende verschijde ons mankeeren, . . . ' .

37. Royal Archives, The Hague, letter from Johan Maurits to his accountant/agent JacobCohen, 22 February 1679; it mentions an iron stove.

38. As it turned out, the courtier did not have a heater put into his garden pavilion; thismay have safeguarded him from falling shells and conches.

39. Bezemer-Sellers, op. cit. (34), 113-14; Bentinck was considered an authority onmatters concerning waterworks. See also Japikse, op. cit. (32) and N. Japikse, Correspondencevan Willem III en van Hans Willem Bentinck, eersten graafvan Portland, Serie 1, part 2 (The Hague,1928). In the correspondence between Bentinck, William III, the French garden architectAndre Lenotre and others, there are many references to gardens, fountains, gardening andwater works.

40. G. A. C. Blok, 'De architect Maurits Pietersz Post en de tuin van het Mauritshuis',Jaarboek van Die Haghe (The Hague, 1940), 60-117, see p. 92. Purchased by the architectMaurits Post for the grotto of Johan Maurits, '39 spiegelglasen betaelt die bij monsr alhiergehaelt en ten dienste van zijn F.G. grotte in den Hage verbruijckt zijn f. 170:3:-'.

41. Blok, ibid., 92, ' . . . voor partij zeehorens en schulpen daervan een gedeelte aen zijnF.G. vereerdt en andere door mijn gecocht zijn . . . f. 40:8:- '.

42. On grottoes, see N. Miller, Heavenly Caves, Reflections on the Garden Grotto (New York,1982); Szafranska, op. cit. (18); Taylor-Leduc, op. cit. (16).

43. B. M. Stafford and F. Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on aScreen (Los Angeles, 2001), see p. 25 on mirrors as instruments for science and for divination.

44. P. Findlen, 'Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of ScientificDiscourse in Early Modern Europe', Renaissance Quarterly, 1990, 43: 292-331; E. Gombrich,'Review Lecture Mirror and Map: Theories of Pictorial Representation', PhilosophicalTransactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences, 1975, 270: 11-149, notably120-7.

45. Temple, op. cit. (1), 50.46. L. Daston and K. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (New York, 1998),

notably 224-7; Findlen, op. cit. (44).47. On the inquiry and collecting of shells and curiosity cabinets, see E. C. Spary,

'Scientific Symmetries', History of Science: An Annual Review of Literature, Research and Teaching,2004, 42: 1-46; B. Dietz, 'Mobile Objects: The Space of Shells in Eighteenth-Century France',British Journal of the History of Science, 2006, 39: 363-82.

48. F. J. Dijksterhuis, Lenses and Waves, Christiaan Huygens and the Mathematical Science ofOptics in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht, 2004), notably 111 and 142-3.

49. F. J. Dijksterhuis, 'Christiaan Huygens en de mechanica van het licht', in M. Keestraand A. Lohnberg (eds), Doorbraken in de natuurkunde (Amsterdam, 2001), 57-80, see p. 64.

50. For more on Huygens and the strange refraction, see Dijksterhuis, ibid., andDijksterhuis, op. cit. (48).

51. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2105 Christiaan to Colbert, 14 October 1677, 'CristaldTslande qui n'est pas une petite merveille de la nature, ni aisee a profondir. Je me plains bien


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Into the Light

souvent de ma destinee d'estre d'une complexion si peu proportionnee a 1'inclination que j'ayde travailler a ces belles connoissance'.

52. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2201 Christiaan to Constantijn, 3 November 1679, 'J'aytrouve moyen de tailler et de polir ce cristal ce qu'on croioit impossible, et cela me sert fort ace que j'en ay a faire'.

53. Huygens, op. cit. (2), 88-9.54. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2201 Christiaan to Constantijn, 3 November 1679, ' . . . je

suis aussie apres a faire quelque nouvelle tentative pour le parfait poli du verre55. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2201 Christiaan to Constantijn, 3 November 1679,

poli du verre que nostre petite vefve le Bas dent fort secrete'. She was the widow of glassgrinder Le Bas, and keeping Le Bas' way of grinding a secret meant a safeguarding of herlivelihood.

56. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2235 Christiaan to Constantijn, 20 December 1680,'Comme je suis grand examinateur de cristaux et de leur refractions, je souhaiterois fort devoir quelque morceau bien transparent de cettuicy, et vous en aurez aisement puis qu'onenvoie a Mons. Bentingh'.

57. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2367 Constantijn to Christiaan 18 September 1684, 'Cesdeux petits morceaux de pierre sont pris de deux grands qui son employes aux Grottes qu'onfait icy. Le blanc est une maniere de Cristal qui croit dans la Comte de Lingen. II croit en desfigures regulieres comme le veritable. Vous verrez qu'il se fend et se casse par des piecesparalleles a la superficie qui est luisante'.

58. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2368 Christiaan to Constantijn, 22 September 1684,'L'autre morceau semble contenir quelque metail, veu sa pesanteur, mais apparemment cen'est pas d'une mine bien riche puis que s'en sert a faire des grottes'.

59. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2201 Christiaan to his Constantijn, 3 November 1679,'J'avois prie bien fort le Sr. Defflines de me procurer quelque morceau de cristal ou talcd'Islande, par ce qu'il me dit qu'un de ses amis negotioit en cette isle de tout le souffre qui s'yreceuilloit'.

60. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2231 Christiaan to Constantijn, 24 October 1680, 'Le bonSeigneur de Flines m'avoit promis de m'en procurer de celuy d'Islande par le moyen d'un sienamy, qui negocioit en soulphre dans cette Isle, mais il semble 1'avoir oublie. Par occasion jevous prie de luy en parler, comme aussi touchant des fraines de fleur, qu'il avoit promisd'envoier a Mr. Marchand nostre Botanicus du Jardin Royal en eschange d'autres qu'iln'avoit pas. II s'adresse tousjours a moy pour en avoir des nouvelles parce que je luy ay faitconnoistre Mr. Desflinis'; OC, op. cit. (9), No. 2238, Constantijn to Christiaan 28 January1681, 'De Flinis m'a mande que dans peu de jours il croyoit de venir icy et alors je nemanqueray pas de la sommer pour le Cristal d'Islande ... '; No. 2239 Christiaan toConstantijn, 14 February 1681, ' . . . de Flinis avoit promis d'envoier de graines de fleurs anostre Botanicus Mr. Marchand ... '.

61. Huygens, op. cit. (2), 88, ' . . . je diray icy la maniere dont je me suis servi a la tailler, &a la polir. La taille est aisee par les roues tranchantes des lapidaires, ou de la maniere qu'on siele marbre ; mais le poli est tres difficile, & en employant les moyens ordinaires, on deplit bienplutost les surfaces qu'on ne les rend luisantes'.

62. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 12, 442.63. Huygens, op. cit. (2), 59, '... j'observay dans le cristal ordinaire que croit en forme

hexagone, & qui, a cause de cette regularite, semble aussi estre compose de particules decertaine figure & rangees avec ordre

64. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2105 Christiaan to Colbert, 14 October 1677, 'Cristald'Islande qui n'est pas une petite merveille de la nature, ni aisee a profondir. Je me plains biensouvent de ma destinee d'estre d'une complexion si peu proportionnee a 1'inclination que j'ayde travailler a ces belles connoissance'.

65. L. L. Roberts, 'A World of Wonders, A World of One', in P. Smith and P. Findlen(eds), Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York/London, 2002), 399-411.

66. Findlen, op. cit. (44).67. S. Dupre, De Optica van Galileo Galilei, Interactie tussen Kunst en Wetenschap (Brussels,

2001). He explains how representation is not the same as exact rendering by arguing howGalileo sacrificed accurateness for the sake of an argument.


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68. Christiaan Huygens, Hug 31 VII 253-312, Leiden University Library, Folio 215r, 'Leplus grand morceau que j'ay vu de ces derniers est de la longueur d'un poucer, de formecylindrique, mais imparfaite et inegale, tout au tour, et cayee des plusieurs cavitez . . . auxdeux bouts il y a . . . angles obtus, compris des 3 angles de 101 degrez chacun ... '. This was apart of point 5, to be found on p. 95 of the Traite de la Lumiere.

69. OC, op. cit. (9), Vol. 8, No. 2368 Christiaan to Constantijn, 22 September 1684, Tuisque le vostre vient de Lingen, on pourroit estre informe dans quels lieux et en quelle terre ilcroit ce qui merite d'estre sceu, sur tout pour moy qui ay escrit un traite de ce cristal'.

70. Huygens, op. cit. (2), 91, 'II y a plusieurs corps vegetaux, mineraux, & sels congelez,qui se forment avec de certains angles & figures reguliers. Ainsi parmy les fleurs il y en abeaucoup, qui ont leurs feuilles disposees en polygones ordonnez, au nombre de 3.4.5. ou 6costez, mais non pas d'avantage', and p. 92, 'Toutes ces choses meritent d'estre rechercheessoingeusement, pour reconnoitre comment & par quel artifice la nature y opere. Mais ce n'estpas maintenant mon dessein de traite entierement cette matiere. II semble qu'en general laregularite, qui se trouve dans ces productions, vient de 1'arrangemet des petites particulesinvisibles & egales dont elles sont composees'.

71. Huygens, op. cit. (2), 96, 'Je n'entreprendray pas de rien dire touchant la manieredon't s'engendrent tant de petits corpuscules, tous egaux & semblables, ni comment ils sontmis dans un si bel ordre. S'ils sont formez premierement, & puis assemblez, ou s'ils se rangentainsi en naissant, & a mesure qu'ils sont produits, ce qui me paroit plus vrai-semblable. IIfaudroit pour developper des veritez si cachees une connoissance de la nature bien plus grandeque celle que nous avons'.

72. Both pre-press manuscripts are not included in the Oeuvres Completes.


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The Mindful Hands ofPeasants: Construction of an

Eight-Lock Staircase atFonseranes, 1678-79

C H A N D R A M U K E R J I

THE PROBLEM

In the late 1670s, two illiterate brothers, Michel and Pierre Medailhes orMadalhi, were given the subcontract for a major piece of engineering. Itwas an eight-lock staircase for the Canal du Midi built at Fonseranes insouthwestern France. The set of locks had to descend a hillside that wasnot a perfect incline plane, which made it difficult to design. Each lock hadto hold the same volume of water, but could not have exactly the samedimensions because of the way it sat on the hill. Given the complexity ofthe problem and the difficulties subcontractors had had with smaller lockstaircases before, one would expect that the subcontract would have beengiven to the most sophisticated engineers available and a crew withexperience with similar structures on the canal. Instead, it went to twobrothers without formal education and a workforce of mainly peasantwomen laborers. This group with astoundingly little education and lowsocial rank was given responsibility for an important piece of infra-structural engineering for the French state. Why?

Those engaged in this work apparently embodied a form of expertisethat not only made the subcontractors seem credible for the job, but alsohelped the labourers execute the project well.

As a work of unlettered expertise, the Fonseranes locks were clearly aproduct of 'mindful hands', carrying an intelligence that might not havebeen formal but still was recognizably important to the engineering.

This paper is an effort to uncover this tacit knowledge that the peasantsubcontractors and labourers shared, and explain how their skills wereused to solve the problems of designing a long lock staircase. This case isunusual in revealing the 'mindful hands' of peasants - a group whoseintellectual sophistication is hard to study in a period when they weredisdained by elites1 and muted by their illiteracy. (The intellectual abilitiesof artisans were more recognized in the period and documented morefrequently in both artifacts and writings.) In the seventeenth century,


The Mindful Hands of Peasants

credibility and rank were deeply intertwined and peasants were, by periodstandards, not reliable, thinking beings. In archival documents, theircapacities were often masked by the pretensions, thoughts and abilities oftheir social betters who could write.2 But, at Fonseranes, the supervisorsthemselves were of peasant background, so what this labour forceaccomplished demonstrates what the 'mindful' hands of peasants coulddo. The question, then, is what peasant practices prepared them tosuccessfully engineer the lock staircase at Fonseranes and to solve problemsin hydraulics that had previously proved intractable with formal methods.

Because of their illiteracy, there are no personal documents of theMedailhes brothers or the women they hired to shed light on their lives orexpertise, but, given Jean-Baptiste Colbert's concern about the treasuryfunds being used for building the Canal du Midi, there are verifications ofthe work and evidence of the labour process in the account books that tellus who did the work and (to some extent) in what sequence of steps.Comparing this material to the finished artefact and other structures onthe Canal du Midi built by comparable (or perhaps even the same)women labourers, we can piece together the story of the mindful handsbehind the lock staircase at Fonseranes.

The Canal du Midi itself was built across the province of Languedoc insouthwestern France between 1666 and 1684 under contract to a local taxfarmer and entrepreneur, Pierre-Paul Riquet. He brought to the projectno formal training in engineering, but the canal was nonethelesssuccessfully etched across the province and heralded at its completion asa wonder of the world. Celebrated for joining the two seas, it began at theGaronne River (that flows into the Atlantic Ocean) and extended acrossFrance just north of the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean. The waterwaywas roughly 150 miles (240 km) long, and required 100 locks to managethe substantial shifts in elevation.3 Canals were a relatively new technologyand lock design was barely understood in the late seventeenth century.Canals were used mainly in the Netherlands or on the Lombardy plain inItaly, where they only had to accommodate subtle changes in elevationwith their locks.

The Canal du Midi was much longer than most, and had to carry boatsover much more substantial changes in elevation to raise the waterway to620 feet (189 metres) above sea level at the divide between the Atlanticand Mediterranean watersheds. Where the elevation changed rapidly, thecanal was outfitted with staircase locks, but, with few exceptions, theseconsisted only of two or three basins in succession. The eight-lock staircaseat Fonseranes was dramatically different in scale from all the others andwas built in 1678-79 - towards the end of the enterprise, when the mostdifficult problems were finally tackled. By this time, money was runninglow and Colbert was running out of patience, as cost overruns and delayswere plaguing the enterprise. In this delicate moment, the complex lockstaircase had to be constructed in a very visible location, descending a longhill across from the city of Beziers, the hometown of Pierre-Paul Riquet.4

This was no place or time for a large technical failure (Figure 1).


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Figure 1 The middle locks of the staircase at Fonseranes.

FORMAL KNOWLEDGE OF ENGINEERING IN LANGUEDOC

It would be easy to think that if illiterate entrepreneurs were chosen assubcontractors for the Fonseranes locks, it could only be because inseventeenth-century Languedoc, there were no skilled engineers availablefor the project. But that was not the case. There were many engineersalready working on the Canal du Midi in the 1670s who had more



credentials for the job, and there were obvious local sources of educatedsubcontractors for the enterprise.

In fact, there were two schools in Languedoc that taught engineering inthe seventeenth century: the Academic at Castres and a Jesuit school atBeziers. The Academie at Castres was a well known school with somenotable engineering professors. It had on its faculty, for example, PierreBorel, who eventually was admitted to the Academie des Sciences in Parisafter he was forced to leave Castres for being a Huguenot.5 The greatmathematician, Pierre de Fermat, also worked in the legal system inCastres.6 In this town in the mountains, then, mathematics andengineering were there to be learned, and Riquet knew it. Theentrepreneur had copied a canal plan by Borel for his original proposal,and he was also a client of the Bishop in Castres, d'Anglure de Bourlemont,who was well aware in the 1660s of the school and was probablyinstrumental in imposing its Catholic orthodoxy.7

At the other end of Languedoc, closer to the site of the Fonseranes locks,there was also a Jesuit college in Beziers. One of the professors from thatschool, Pere Mourgues, was already working on the account books andverifications for the Canal du Midi in the 1670s, when the Fonseranesstaircase started to be built.8 He was clearly in a position to find skilled andliterate subcontractors from his school to bid on the Fonseranes locks.Nonetheless, he did not prevent the Medailhes brothers from gaining thesubcontract for the lock staircase, even though he clearly knew that thebrothers could not even sign their names. Mourgues witnessed the 'signing'of their account books as the older Medhailes brother placed a large X onthe documents, while the younger brother marked his agreement with asmaller cross.

Because of their lack of education, Michel and Pierre Medailhes werequite unlike the other men awarded contracts for comparably difficultstructures on the Canal du Midi. For example, Immanuel d'Estan, theman who supervised construction of the first aqueduct bridge over the LeRepudre River, was described in documents alternately as a mason or anarchitect. He and his collaborator, Andre Boyer, had previously workedwith the military engineer, Chevalier de Clerville, on projects nearBordeaux before coming to the Canal du Midi. The partners arrived at thecanal as seasoned and literate structural and hydraulic engineers beforethey were given their subcontracts.9 Pascal de Nissan, a favourite ofRiquet, was another entrepreneur who was awarded a major project onthe Canal du Midi. He was given the job of tunnelling through a mountainat Malpas. He was described in documents as an engineer and architect,and was clearly both literate and well respected, becoming one of thecontroles generaux of the canal.10 These men and their counterparts couldfollow written specifications, and sign account books with a fluid hand,demonstrating a literacy that was quite the opposite to the brothers whowere awarded the subcontract for the staircase locks at Fonseranes.

Clearly, the Medailhes brothers were unusual as subcontractors of amajor piece of engineering. So, were the peasant women they hired


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unusual as workers on a set of locks? Even though women had been used inlarge numbers on the Canal du Midi since 1669, they were rarely, if ever,assigned to locks. They mainly did contour cutting and silt control, routingthe canal and its water supply through the mountains and building simpledrains and settling ponds to manage water quality and flows. If theyhelped build large structures, it did not show up in the account books.11

Clearly, this lock staircase was so large and complex that it seemed torequire some new approach to the engineering - apparently, some wealthof tacit knowledge that peasant men and women could bring. There was arich indigenous tradition of hydraulics in the Pyrenees. The question iswhether these hydraulic practices provided tacit knowledge relevant toengineering an eight-lock staircase.

THE LOCKS OF THE CANAL DU MIDI

On the Canal du Midi, using locks to take boats up and downhill was aheadache from the start and remained so to the end. The Fonseranesstaircase was one in a long line of technically challenging projects, and asurprisingly easy one to achieve. It was built in 2 years, while, in contrast,it had taken from 1663 to 1670 just to design the basins for single locks thatwould make them stable and reliable over time.12 The earliest locks on theCanal du Midi failed almost immediately. The specifications in theoriginal contract were faulty, so when the first locks were 'finished', thewalls almost immediately began bulging and tipping (Figure 2).

The specifications for these early locks were based on precedents thatproved inappropriate. Like the medieval builders described by DavidTurnbull,13 Pierre-Paul Riquet and the Chevalier de Clerville, commisairegeneral des fortifications under Colbert, used templates from previousstructures to design locks for the canal.14 Unfortunately, the length anddepth measures they chose were derived from different sources, so theconsequences of creating such a huge cavity were not clear.

On the one hand, the original locks were 16 feet long, like the shallowlocks used on local rivers to bypass rapids - a dimension important foraccommodating local boats. On the other hand, the depth of the locks wasbased on the doors of seawalls. Riquet assumed (mistakenly) that the doorswould be the most vulnerable part of the locks,15 so he based the depth ofthe locks on the height of the doors used in the Netherlands for seawalls: 14feet. To those who had no direct experience of building locks, the wallsseemed unproblematic; they would just form a large rectangular containerfor water. But such thinking did not take into consideration thefundamental physics of the forces on lock walls as they filled andemptied.16

When locks were full, the inward pressure from the earth on the basinswas countered by the outward pressure from the water. But when the lockswere empty, the forces were not in balance, and the walls were pressedinward by the soil. Adding to the problem, the walls were jiggled slightlyevery time they were filled and emptied, slowly working the walls loose like


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146 The Mindful Hands of Peasants

Figure 2 Top lock on the Fonseranes staircase.

a tooth. Their foundations were soon destabilized by this movement, andthe inward pressure on the lock walls began to distort them. The situationwas particularly dire near the Garonne, where Riquet tried to connect thecanal to the river. Like the sand around them, the lock walls started moving.

Hector de Boutheroue, the manager for the Canal de Briare who hadreviewed the project before it was built, had been concerned about the lockdesign.17 He advised replacing the long and deep single locks with doubleor triple lock staircases — an idea that was opposed by Riquet at the time.18

But this is precisely what Riquet tried when the walls started to fail,making the connection to the Garonne into a double lock staircase andsetting a precedent widely followed elsewhere on the Canal du Midi.19

Unfortunately, this wise design decision, in itself, did not solve the lock


Chandra Mukerji

problems in the 1660s. Materials were an issue, too. Following therecommendations by Vitruvius for building in wet areas, Clerville specifiedusing wooden palisades for the lock walls - except for the connection to theGaronne River. Wooden walls were so fragile that they would bend andbreak under pressure, turning bulges quickly into wall failures. Notsurprisingly, Colbert insisted that henceforth all locks for the Canal duMidi would be made with good, solid masonry.20

Still, the biggest problem of the lock walls was the design of the basinitself. They needed to be long enough to accommodate local boats, andthey had to be deep enough to allow the waterway to change elevationrapidly where the land rose quickly - particularly towards the continentaldivide. The problem of creating locks deep enough for the local landscapewas finally solved by curving the walls and giving the locks an ovalshape.21 The curved walls functioned like arches, posed against the inwardpressures of the earth. With the oval design, the doors were much narrowerthan the inner basin. They only allowed one boat to pass into the locks at atime, but the interiors themselves were quite spacious, permitting multipleboats to share passage up or down the waterway. Oval locks built in stonebecame standard along the Canal du Midi, and about half of the basinswere assembled in lock staircases.22

This left one major problem for constructing locks on the Canal duMidi: maintaining the volume of the basins where the locks were arrangedin staircases. Even small staircases were plagued with problems throughthe 1670s because the basins generally could not be made with the sameexact dimensions, since the hillsides they had to descend were not perfectincline planes. Where the land fell away faster, they had to be deeper andslightly less long. The problem of adjusting the dimensions became evenmore pronounced when the staircases were triple and the hillsides theydescended longer.23 Given the steep hill at Fonseranes, the eight-lockstaircase there promised to be the most difficult of all.

Elevation studies had been used at first to try to calculate the volumesfor the basins of lock staircases, but these measures had proven more of aproblem than aid. Poor instruments and imprecise techniques crippled theeffort. Repeatedly, the locks built this way had basins that weresignificantly uneven in volume, and the crews had to rework them tocompensate for the mistakes. They created special water intakes and sidedrains inside the walls (tambours] to fill and empty them more effectivelyand accommodate their differences. But rebuilding was costly andcumbersome, so, in 1672, the supervisors officially suspended the use ofelevation studies for building lock staircases.24

The staircase at Fonseranes, then, was an engineering project ofsignificant difficulty, and one that posed problems that had yet to besolved. Fixing a set of two or three locks in a staircase was one thing; tryingto fix a staircase of eight locks with side drains and intakes would beimpossible. Worse, at Fonseranes, the locks had to be cut out of a rock face,so mistakes would be particularly hard to fix. Leaving such difficult workto peasants was not an obvious thing to do.


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POLITICAL AND ECONOMIIC PRESSURES IN THE 1670S

Failures on the Canal du Midi were particularly dangerous to Riquet inthe 1670s - lock failures most of all. Colbert was threatening to make theentrepreneur absorb the costs of turning so many locks into staircases, andrebuilding the locks that had become unstable. In 1676, the intendant forLanguedoc, d'Aguesseau, argued that the entrepreneur should befinancially responsible for any changes in the engineering he made beyondthe original contract, including the new work on the locks. Riquetcontended that making staircase locks was not 'ordinary' work, but an'extraordinary' expense that should not be subsumed under the originalcontract. Colbert was inclined to agree with the intendant in part because hewas annoyed that so many locks had failed, slowing completion of thecanal, but had not yet acted on the impulse.25

Unfortunately for Riquet, other technical troubles were also impedingefforts to finish the canal in the late 1670s. The route along the Aude valleyto the mountains before Beziers had proved much more rocky than anyonehad anticipated.26 To keep the canal high enough above the valley floor toprotect it from flooding, it had to be routed along escarpments, andworkers had to blast some of the channel out of the cliffs with gunpowder.This created cost overruns of 82,566 livres, the bulk of the 104,027 livresthat made up Riquet's expenses beyond what was covered by thecontract.27 There were also recurrent problems constructing the port atSete to serve as a terminus for the canal, as storms damaged the seawalland sand filled the port.28

Riquet was also being slowed in finishing the canal by the Etats duLanguedoc, the local authority over taxes charged with providing landand treasury monies for the canal. The Etats were dominated by locallandholders who opposed funding the enterprise altogether and resistedmaking indemnified land available for the canal. Even as late as 17December 1674 and, again, in 1675, the Etats refused to make parcels forbuilding the Canal du Midi available to Riquet, claiming that the statehad not assessed the value of indemnified land properly. At the same time,they refused to release funds for work done so far on the waterway,claiming that that nothing on the canal was yet complete.29 Riquet wascaught in the middle - unable to get the land to make progress or makeenough progress to get funds from the Etats.

Given the delays and cost overruns, Colbert had also lost confidence inRiquet. The minister now doubted publicly that the entrepreneur had thetechnical capacity and the strength of character to deliver the canal he hadpromised. Worse, Colbert was convinced (inappropriately) that Riquetwas skimming money from the treasury for his family. Any extra expensewould come under careful scrutiny and could become a source for furtherdistrust.30 This was no time for another set of locks to go bad.

WOMEN LABOURERS ON THE CANAL DU MIDI

Riquet's trust in peasants like the Medailhes brothers and the women


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labourers they hired was daring, but not unprecedented. The entrepreneurhad turned to peasants for help from the beginning, planning the watersupply system for the canal with the aid of Pierre Campmas, a localfontainier.31 He had also hired increasing numbers of peasant women aslabourers since 1669,32 bringing a rich tradition of hydraulics from thePyrenees to the Canal du Midi.

Women labourers started joining the workforce for the Canal du Midiin numbers in 1669, after the war. There were 7,000 men and 1,000women employed on the canal in this period, mainly to help with thewater supply in the Montagne Noire.33 Riquet had been having trouble inparticular finding workers who would carry dirt uphill to fill the dam, sohe began to pay labourers by the basket. Women arrived in large numbers- probably because this kind of heavy lifting was normal work formountain women.34 They were apparently from the Pyrenees and alreadyaccustomed to doing seasonal labour in the valleys of Languedoc. Theywere assigned mainly to Jean Gasse, sieur de Contigny, who ended updirecteur general des travaux. He and another supervisor, Roux, came toappreciate the hydraulic abilities of peasant women as they finished thewater supply on the Montagne Noire. These supervisors continued to usewomen labourers on other sites along the canal where it threaded throughthe mountains.35

By the mid-1670s, over 3,000 women were counted as labourers indifferent sites along the canal. Some were probably the same women whomoved with supervisors like Contigny and Roux, but the absolute numbersincreased, too. Women were frequently the majority of workers in theareas they were employed. For example, on 14 May 1678, in the area of LeSomail, the books showed that Estiene Valletter supervised 185 workers,125 of them 'femalle'36 and Jean Sabarie had 400 'femelles' and 21'maneouvriers'.37 Women were located mainly in mountainous terrain wherecontour cutting was required, or were employed to design silt controlmeasures in areas where streams and rivers fed into the canal. By the mid-16708, the bulk of the women labourers were in the Somail and Beziersregions - where the Fonseranes locks needed to be built.38

The women labourers who worked on the Canal du Midi usedhydraulic techniques that were familiar in Pyrenean towns, supplyingwater for irrigation, town fountains, public laundries and domesticalimentation. According to the forestry official, Louis de Froidour, theypractised a tradition of hydraulics that surpassed anything he had seenbefore:

The greatest advantage that people of the country here derive from theserivers is that they divert them everywhere they want, and that since theirsources are at high elevations and come down steep inclines, they can divertthem into canals even in the highest mountains and on high precipices to makemeadows there. They also route them around towns to serve as fortifications,and they run them into the majority of private homes for the well-beings of theinhabitants; they also disperse water in all parts of the countryside to improveit and to water gardens, fields, meadows, pastures, and the turn millwheels to


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grind gain, to tan leather, to cut timber, to forge iron, and to work copper, tofull fabrics, make paper, and in a word, for all sorts of commodities, to such anextent that one could say that to see all the uses one could make of water, one should seewhat they do in the Bigorre valley. (Italics in the original)39

The inhabitants of Bigorre and other former Roman bath towns in themountains adapted Roman hydraulics to new purposes. They maintainedthese techniques as a form of living practice, not simply repairing oldstructures, but building new ones and putting old methods to newpurposes. Some towns still followed the Roman practice of tapping highmountain springs, setting up reservoirs near them. The shepherds of themountains then diverted this water to make meadows, and villagers tooksupplies into town in the summer dry periods. Like the Romans, they usedthe contours of the land to control inclines and take water throughmanaged streams and canals into the valleys. They also built settlingponds to reduce the silt content of water entering town supplies, and setout sluice gates to regulate the movement of water into fields and gardens -techniques that were all familiar in Roman times.40

Women became expert in these traditions because most of the work hadto be done in the summer when the men were away making cheese.Hydraulic engineering was not a priority for these villages, but it was agood way to put the abundant water of the mountains to good use. Andwomen used it in complex ways, both improving their lives and sustaininga range of classical methods of hydraulics.41

Where women labourers worked in large numbers on the Canal duMidi, the waterway was outfitted with features typical of Pyreneanhydraulic systems. They were employed strategically in complextopography, but not all hilly areas. There was one mountainous regionwhere women were not employed on the Canal du Midi: where the canalbed had to be blasted from solid rock. Between Trebes and the OrbielRiver, where the canal was cut from stone over the Aude valley, most ofthe workers were men - masons, stonecutters, blasting experts andsurveyors.42

In contrast, women were used in substantial numbers in the Somail andBeziers regions, where the canal turned out of the Aude Valley and intothe mountains. Here, the waterway had to follow the contours of thelandscape, but could be dug from the earth more than cut from stone. Thecanal in this area still required some blasting and stonecutting, but themain engineering problem was maintaining a slight incline in the channelto carry the canal through the hills without locks toward the sea.43

Between the Cesse and Orb Rivers, where many women laboured, thecanal became, in the words of L. T. C. Rolt, 'a classic example of contourcanal cutting'.44 The waterway maintained the incline with surprisingprecision, resembling canals in the Pyrenees that directed spring or riverwater into town water supplies.45


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HYDRAULICS AND TIMBERING

Women labourers were of unaccountable importance to the Canal duMidi, both in the Montagne Noire and the mountains towards Beziers,using indigenous hydraulics based on Roman methods, but this work, initself, did not prepare them for constructing the Fonseranes staircase. Thelock did not call on their ability to do contour cutting; rather thanavoiding a precipice by using topographic regularities, the lock wasdesigned to go down a steep hillside. The staircase also did not requiretheir knowledge of settling ponds, silting problem and soils; it requiredinstead excavating a staircase from stone, and this was not their metier.But, in the Pyrenees, there was another common form of hydraulicengineering - one not used on Roman water supplies - that helpedpeasants carry timbers down from the high mountains. This practiceprovided tacit knowledge relevant to the lock volume problem atFonseranes.

Peasants traditionally cut trees in November, when the sap was nolonger running, and the snows were not yet deep. The problem for loggingin this period was that the streams and rivers of the high forests were oftenlow after the long dry season of summer. With too little running water tocarry logs over the inevitable rocks, peasants in the mountains not onlycleared the streams of whatever rocks they could move, but also builttemporary dams down the waterways to keep the timber afloat. Behind thefirst dam, the top reservoir would fill with water until the logs would beginto rise off the floor of the stream; then, the dam was broken, sending thelogs along with the water down to another basin; this reservoir, in turn,would fill with water and be broken, and so on down the hillside. Thedams functioned like a staircase of locks, moving objects on a body ofcollected water as it moved progressively down the hillside.46

The basins could only float the timbers if each of them containedapproximately the same volume of water. If one reservoir was larger, thewater level in it would be low and the logs could get stuck on the floor ofthe stream. If the reservoir was too small, the dam could break before allthe logs from the previous one had arrived, and the outliers could getstranded on the rock bed. Peasants who had designed these systems manytimes over the years would have understood this, and would have beenmotivated to develop both an eye for estimating volume and ways ofcompensating for differences in the incline that would affect the volume ofthe basins. They also may have found ways to test the volume of thereservoirs with water before filling them with timber.

This logging practice was a community effort, involving large numbersof participants. It was part of a Pyrenean tradition of collective resourcemanagement. A combination of community-shared property and politicalalliances over vast areas helped to sustain collaborative water and forestmanagement systems. Alliances across valleys had helped Pyreneanpeasants to continue using Roman hydraulic methods that spanned largeareas, and elaborate the waterworks on which women peasants honedtheir skills. The same cooperative tradition of land control also led to


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advanced patterns of forest management, and the development ofcommunally improved rivers and streams used for transporting logs.47

Both women and men worked together on the 'flottage des hois', butwomen were the more likely architects of the basins. Waterworks wereculturally inflected as women's work, since the hydrology of the mountainswas attributed to fairies, and women did hydraulic engineering.48 But,perhaps more importantly in this case, cutting trees, preparing timber fortransport and getting logs to the local streams was men's work. Thegendered nature of the division of labour in the Pyrenees may account forthe fact that the Medailhes sought out women to work at Fonseranes,assuming they would be best equipped to carve a viable lock staircasedown a long hillside.

THE PROCESS OF CONSTRUCTING THE FONSERANES LOCKS

There are some hints in the archival records about how the workproceeded. A document from 1679 contained both Riquet's account of thestate of work on the Canal du Midi in August and the verifications of thatwork by the Chevalier de Clerville made between late September andearly October. It provides a glimpse into how the Fonseranes staircase wasdeveloping during that period. Riquet said in August that the locks were'batit ala basse', or finished at the bottom, not clarifying what that meant.He also said that there was a large amount of material on site to finish therest of the eight locks. When Clerville arrived a few months later, he saidthat a second lock had been finished since Riquet had come in August, andthat the 'places' or beds for the other basins were so far advanced that thewhole structure would be finished within the year.49

A report that was issued on locks and their construction in 1672describes how the lock staircase at Fonseranes was supposed to be built,and provides a point of comparison with the extant data on whathappened there. The purpose of the report was mainly to bring a halt tothe use of elevation measurements for designing lock staircases, and tooutline instead a series of practical steps to yield better results.50

The document started by explaining that locks were used to fit the canalto the landscape by compensating for changes in elevation. The purposewas to keep the canal level between locks so boats could climb and descendthe waterway with equal facility. (The canal in fact had to have a slightincline toward the sea, following the watershed, but perhaps only thelabourers knew this.) In the excavation of a staircase lock, the documentcontinued, it had been determined appropriate to 'justifier le niveau' orverify the level in each lock basin with water, the only sure test (1'expreuveseure). Filling the basins with water when the structures were not yet linedwith masonry would demonstrate any problems and allow one to fix thelocks in case of errors. It would also provide advantageous informationabout the quality and solidity of the terrain that would be helpful inchoosing construction materials and techniques. Formal measures were tobe replaced with practical tests.51


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If the eight basins for the lock at Fonseranes were excavated and testedwith water to verify the volumes before the bottom one was finished withmasonry, then the work was indeed following the 1672 prescriptions. Thereport by Riquet in the summer is ambiguous on this point, since, when hewrites about the bottom lock, he does not report on the state of theexcavation above it. In contrast, Clerville is clear that by the fall, the fullstaircase has been excavated and the second lock's masonry has beenfinished.52 But is there any evidence that the basins were tested with waterafter they were excavated and before their interiors were finished with cutstone? There is no direct physical evidence of this, since the basins werecovered with cut stone after the tests were done - assuming they weredone. But there is indirect evidence of how the procedures outlined in 1672could have been done at Fonseranes based on characteristics of other locksand structures on the Canal du Midi.

The easiest way to test the volume in a staircase lock would have been tofill the top basin, then open it to the second basin, and see if the water filledthe second basin. Then, the second basin would be opened and so on, all theway down the hill. If the reservoirs for the locks were built properly, the sameamount of water would fill all the basins to approximately the same level.

But how would the locks be closed when they were not finished and hadno doors? The locks could be closed with a temporary sluice gate made oflarge timbers stacked into a slot in the wall. Something like this wasalready being used for the water supply for the Canal du Midi in themountains, where women labourers had worked (Figure 3).

Figure 3 Insets by the weir for the prise d'Alzau.



The water supply in the mountains began high in the Montagne Noire,with the prise d'eau d'Alzau or capture of the Alzau River near its source.The capture was equipped with a system for increasing or decreasing theintake from the river, depending on what was needed for the canal. Theriver ran dramatically higher and lower in different seasons, and thedemands for the water for the canal varied considerably, depending onusage.

There was a basic weir across the Alzau to divert water towards a sluicegate and to enter the water system for the canal. Weirs were usually lowrock walls set at an angle across the river. The low height of the weirallowed most of the river water to pass over it, but the wall nonethelesscreated a quieter pool - particularly at the downstream end of the weir,where the river was connected to a diversionary channel. This tranquilarea functioned partly as a settling pond, allowing water to shed someprecipitated particles before it was diverted for other purposes.

The prise d'eau had a weir like this, but also a superstructure, allowingpeople to raise its level with a kind of temporary dam. There was a wallalong the shore of the river across from the diversionary channel, leadingto the Canal du Midi. Above and behind the weir, the masonry wasprovisioned with slots that could hold timbers in the river when water wasrunning high or was in greater demand, directing more water towards thecanal and its reservoir(s).

Placing timbers in slots to close off waterways was a routine practice inthe period - one used most often for closing off town moats or watersupplies when the rivers that fed them were running high. Large timbersused for such purposes often had a chain attached, and could be removedby a horse pulling on the chain to drag the heavy timber from thewaterway. Such temporary gates in waterworks were not unusual, butusing them to form a weir of variable height was a more sophisticatedapplication of the technique.

Many of the locks on the Canal du Midi, including one called Herminis,had slots built into the masonry for laying down timbers to close off thecanal. They were mainly placed upstream, where they could keep waterout of the lock when it needed repairs. But some locks, like one near theOgnon River, had downstream slots for timbers (Figure 4). These wouldbe used to hold water in the locks without doors. Such openings wereprobably used after 1672 for testing the volume of the basin while it wasstill under construction. This was the simplest way to do those kinds ofsimple measures prescribed for locks.

The Fonseranes lock was not outfitted with slots in the masonry on thedownstream side of its basins. By the 1672 procedure, the volume of thebasins was meant to be tested before the masonry was done, so the lack ofdownstream slots did not signal a lack of early testing. The only slots in themasonry were at the top of the Fonseranes lock and clearly meant forrepairing it (Figure 6). But there was a way to close the excavated basins.The lock doors for the Canal du Midi folded back into a recess tomaximize the door opening on oval locks; this recess would have been


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Chandra Mukerji

Figure 4 Slots at the bottom of the lock at Ognon.

excavated along with the basins. These indentations, although much widerthan the slots on the prise d'eau, would nonetheless have been able to holdtimbers to close the lock and test its volume with water.

There is also some evidence that the shape of the lock was indeedchanged to maintain the volume - this time, after the masonry wasfinished. There were striations along the floor of some lock basins thatwould be difficult to explain in other terms. They looked like places wherestone was shaved from the bottom, slightly increasing the lock's volume. Ifso, this evidence supports the conjecture that something like the 1672procedure was applied to the lock staircase at Fonseranes, using practicalrather than formal methods to maintain the volume in all the basins. Thatwould explain why the lock staircase worked reliably right away, and howa peasant method of building reservoirs on mountain streams could havebeen applied and made effective on the Canal du Midi (Figure 5).

CONCLUSIONS

The Canal du Midi was considered a wonder of the world on its completion.It was innovative in part because those who contributed to its structuralengineering and hydraulics were not just schooled gentlemen, but alsopeasants who knew hydraulic engineering techniques of classical provenanceas indigenous practices. They did not learn their engineering from Vitruviuslike the military engineers who worked on the Canal du Midi. They did notneed to. They lived among models of hydraulic practice that lay in theenvironment around them. Languedoc was their memory palace, and theyelaborated on ancient methods by working with the soils, seasons, weather,rock, trees, minerals and water of the province itself.


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156 The Mindful Hands of Peasants

Figure 5 Slots on the top of the Fonseranes staircase before the first lock.

The history of the Canal du Midi provides a rich opportunity to learnmore about the engineering knowledge of peasants because, at this site, itwas passed from peasants to learned gentlemen and found its way intobooks. The failures of formal knowledge on the Canal du Midi helped tobring indigenous practices to the fore, showing their value and allowingpeople like the Medailhes brothers and indigenous women engineers to actas and convey the intelligence of the French state.

The amount of direct evidence about the peasants, who they were,where they lived and how they worked, may be scant, but the physicalisomorphism between the engineering techniques celebrated on the Canaldu Midi and the folk traditions in the mountains provides evidence of whatthese low-status engineers could do. The peasants who came to the Canaldu Midi necessarily brought with them techniques of rural life that theyunderstood as common sense; they came with collective memories of howto cut timber and take it to town; and they came with knowledge of weirsand timber gates they could use to do their work.

If it is impossible to say positively and in detail how the lock staircase atFonseranes was physically constructed, it is not impossible to know howlocks were supposed to be built after 1672 or that the prescribed processseemed to have been roughly followed at Fonseranes. And while we cannotsay for sure that damming streams to float timbers provided a model ofconstruction for the Fonseranes staircase, it would explain why twoilliterate brothers would have been entrusted with the subcontract forthese locks. And, while we do not know for sure that peasant women built


Chandra Mukerji

dams for logging in the Pyrenees, it would explain why the Medailhesbrothers would have specifically recruited a crew of women with noobvious experience with lock construction or stone cutting. What we cansay for sure is that peasants, mainly women, built the lock staircase atFonseranes. And, although we may not be sure how, we know theproblems they solved to do the work. They maintained the volume of thebasins, taking boats up and down the steep hillside with silent efficacy -miraculously using falling water in lock basins to raise boats hundreds offeet above the valley floor.

Notes and References1. L. de Froidour, Les Pyrenees centrales au XVIIe siecle: lettrespar M. de Froidour ... a M. de

Hericourt ... et a M. de Medon ... publiees avec des notes par Paul de Casteran (Auch, 1899), 30-1.2. This is nowhere clearer than in the history of the Canal du Midi, where peasant

practices were routinely attributed both at the time and later to gentlemen who did not inventthem. See C. Mukerji, 'Cultural Genealogy', Cultural Sociology, 2007, 1: 49-71.

3. J.-D. Bergasse, (ed.), Le Canal du Midi, four volumes (Cessenon, 1982); T. L. C. Rolt,From Sea to Sea: The Canal du Midi (London, 1973); A. Maistre, Le Canal des deux mers(Toulouse, 1968); M. Adge, 'L'Art de 1'hydraulique', in Conseil d'Architecture, d'Urbanismeet de 1'Environment de la Haute-Garonne, Canal royal de Languedoc: le partage des eaux (Caue,1992), 202-3; Collection La Journee Vinicole, Le Transport du vin sur le Canal du Midi (Baumes-Ides-Dames, 1999), 21.

4. M. Cotte, Le Canal du Midi: Merveil de Europe (Paris, 1999); Bergasse, op. cit. (2);Maistre, op. cit. (2).

5. Rolt, op. cit. (3), 24-6. Pierre Borel was a respected thinker of his day. He entered theAcademic des Sciences as a chemist, and wrote on Cartesian science. See J. F. Scott, TheScientific Work of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) (Ann Arbor, 2006), 84.

6. See S. Singh, Fermat's Enigma (New York, 1997), 35-44. Fermat was not at theAcademic, but was a judge in Castres. Singh writes as though Mersenne was the onlymathematician of interest in the period, and attributes great importance to Fermat's meetingwith this man. But the Huguenot Academic at Castres was internationally recognized in theperiod. See, e.g. N. Malcolm (ed.), Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, Vol. II (Oxford, 1994),853.

7. Rolt, op. cit. (2), 24-6.8. T. Verdier, 'Matthieu de Mourgues, un pere jesuite au service de 1'architecture sous

Louis XIV, in D. Avon and M. Fourcade (eds), Mentalites et croyances contemporaines: Melangesofferts d Gerard Cholvy (Montpellier, 2004), 617-25.

9. Boyer and d'Estan's connection with Clerville and work at Rochefort are suggestedby some of Clerville's letters. See Archives du Canal du Midi (henceforth ACM) 31-39; ACM31-40; ACM 31-43.

10. Descendents de Pierre-Paul Riquet, Histoire du Canal de Languedoc (Paris, 1805), 141.11. Archives du Canal du Midi ACM 1072 and ACM 1073; C. Mukerji, 'Women

Engineers and the Culture of the Pyrenees', in P. Smith and B. Smith (eds), Knowledge and ItsMaking in Europe, 1500-1800 (Chicago, 2008), 19-44.

12. Cotte, op. cit. (4), 15-18.13. D. Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers (Amsterdam, 2000).14. H. Verin, La Gloire des Ingeneurs: L}intelligence techniques du XVle au XVHie siecle (Paris,

1993), 222-3, 227-8.15. Cotte, op. cit. (4), 57-8.16. For the use of prototypes and heuristics in engineering, see J. Heyman, The Stone

Skeleton: Structural Engineering of Masonry Architecture (Cambridge, 1995) and Verin, op. cit. (14),44-45, 152 as well as Turnbull, op. cit. (13). The design was even vetted by a Commission ofworthies and experts headed by Clerville before Riquet was given the contract for the project.They, too, did not take into consideration the soil pressures on the lock walls. See Rolt, op. cit.(2), 31; F. de Dainville, Cartes Anciennes du Languedoc XVIe-XVHIe S (Montpellier, 1961), 55,


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60-1; M. L. Malavialle, 'Une Excursion dans la Montagne Noire', Part I, SocieteLanguedocienne de Geographic Bulletin, Tome XV, IX: 184; Part III, Tome XV, 1892: 283-314. For Clerville's role in the development of French infrastructure in relation to Colbert, seeVerin, op. at. (14), 188.

17. Malavialle, ibid., Tome XV, IX: 146-9, 184-5; Rolt, op. cit. (2), 42-6. ACM 13-05,'Memoire de mes remarques du Canal M. de Seguelay', October 1670. For Riquet's criticsand Colbert, see I. Murat, 'Les Rapports de Colbert et de Riquet: Mefiance pour un hommeou pour un systeme?', in Bergasse, op. cit. (2), Vol. 3, 105-22.

18. Riquet was mostly enthusiastic about Boutheroue's suggestions, but not this one. SeeACM 29-6.

19. Registre contenant les ordres, instructions et lettres expediees par Monseigneur Colbert, touchantles fortifications des ponts et chausseees, canal de communication des mers et mines de Languedoc en I'annee1665, Ms Ecole des Ponts et Chausees. They also stabilized the walls with cofferdams. To buildcofferdams, they pounded long wooden stakes or pilings into the ground close to each otherbelow the waterline to form a barricade to keep out water. The interior space created by thepilings could first be pumped out, and then excavated below ground level down to rock or atleast deep heavy clay. After the excavation, the whole interior would be filled with stones andcement, creating a foundation in wet conditions that was both heavy and deep. Vitruviusdescribed how to do this in The Ten Books, M. H. Morgan, trans. (New York, 1960), chap. 12,162-3.

20. Registre contenant les ordres, instructions et lettres expediees par Monseigneur Colbert, touchantles fortifications des ponts et chausseees, canal de communication des mers et mines de Languedoc en I'annee1665, Ms Ecole des Ponts et Chausees. For Vitruvius on wood and its uses, see the Ten Books,ibid., 58-65, 162-4.

21. Even in 1669, they were still trying to repair some of the locks that had failed,showing that their stability depended on the final development in 1670 of oval locks. SeeACM 13-3.

22. Cotte, op. cit. (4), 57.23. See, e.g. Riquet on the failed locks at Castanet: Riquet a Colbert, 24 Decembre

1669, ACM 22-38.24. ACM 13-15, 'Memoire sur le Canal royal de la jonction des Mers de Languedoc, ler

Mars 1672', includes cautions against getting the elevation measures wrong, the problems itcould produce in locks and a description of the process of filling the cavities for locks withwater to test volume before doing the masonry for step locks. There was also discussion of theimportance of knowing the characteristics of the soil in which the locks were being built. Fordescriptions of the multiple locks that had problems, and had to be rebuilt in part or in whole,see TEstat auquel le Chevalier de Clerville a trouve les ouvrages du canal de la jonction desmers', n.d., ACM 13-12. This document lists all the locks for the second enterprise, includinga list of multiple locks in need of repair: St Roch, Gay, Le Vivier, Foucault, Villaudy andPuilaurier.

25. ACM 11-03.26. ACM 13-12.27. ACM 12-07.28. A. Degage, 'Le Port de Sete: Proue Mediterraneenne du Canal de Riquet', in

Bergasse, op. cit. (2), Vol. IV, 265-306, particularly pp. 270-4.29. See, e.g. a verification done by the sieur de Montbel in 1674 for payments to

property holders near the canal. See ACM 96-13.30. P. Clement, Lettres, Instructions et Memoires de Colbert (Nendeln. Liechtenstein, [1867]

1979), Vol. 4, Introduction, xcvii, 373-4, 386-8; Murat, op. cit. (17).31. C. Mukerji, 'Entrepreneurialism, Land Management and Cartography during the

Age of Louis XIV, in P. Findlen and P. Smith (eds), Merchants and Marvels (New York, 2002),248-76.

32. Mukerji, op. cit. (11) . See also ACM 22-27.33. ACM 13-3.34. ACM 13-3.35. See ACM 12-02 on Campmas and Roux and the alimenation system. For more

information on Contingny and his work on the Saint Ferreol dam, see H. de Cazals, 'Armorialdu Canal', in Bergasse, op. cit. (2), Vol. 3, 151-79, particularly p. 167. See also B. Gabolde,


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'Les Ouvriers du Chantier', in Bergasse, op. cit. (2), Vol. 3, 236. There is evidence that manyof the labourers for the project were recruited from the Pyrenees. On 20 October 1668, Riquetwrote to Colbert that he was staying on in Perpignan to recruit large numbers of workers forthe canal, ACM 21-18. Workers were also explicitly recruited from Bigorre in 1673, ACM 30-65. For the working patterns of Pyrenean women, see also I. Gratacos, Femmes pyreneennes, unstatut social exceptionnel en Europe (Toulouse, 2003), 105-15.

36. ACM 1072-18.37. ACM 1072-40.38. Mukerji, op. at. (11); ACM 1072-18; ACM 1072-40.39. L. de Froidour, Memoire du Pays et des Etats de Bigorre, intro and notes by J. Boudette

(Paris, 1892), 30-1.40. Mukerji, op. cit. (11) ; G. Giovannoni, 'Building and Engineering', in C. Bailey (ed.),

The Legacy of Rome (Oxford, 1940), 429-74. E. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (Glencoe, IL,1963), 429, n. 74.

41. Mukerji, op. cit. (11) .42. Ibid. See Lettre Riquet a Colbert, 4 juin 1669, ACM 22-19 for one of the requests for

powder.43. ACM 1072 and ACM 1073.44. Rolt, op. cit. (3), 89.45. ACM 1071 and ACM 1072 contain uncatalogued accounts for the Somail region.

See ACM 12-02 for the appointment of Campmas and Roux to the alimenation system. SeeCazals, op. cit. (35) for Contingny's work on the St Ferreol dam.

46. See P. Salies, 'De ITsthme Gaulois au Canal des Deux Mers: Histoire des canaux etvoies fluviales du Midi', in Bergasse, op. cit. (2), Vol. 4, 55-97, particularly p. 67.

47. Froidour, op. cit. (39), 20.48. See Gratacos, op. cit. (35), 131-83, particularly pp. 143-71 (which describe the fairies

of the mountains) and 177-80 (which describe how the traditional sighting of fairies of theregion was turned into apparitions of the Virgin); see also Mukerji, op. cit. (11) .

49. ACM 13-12.50. ACM 13-15.51. ACM 13-15.52. ACM 13-12.


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Enlightenment in RussianHands: The Inventions andIdentity of Ivan Petrovich

Kulibin in Eighteenth-Century St Petersburg

S I M O N W E R R E T T

INTRODUCTION

Numerous venues existed for the mechanical arts in the city of StPetersburg during the reign of Empress Catherine II (1762-96). OnVasilevskii Island, on the northwest shore of the river Neva, stood the StPetersburg Academy of Sciences, founded by Emperor Peter I in 1725, andcentred on the Kunstkamera, a great building housing collections ofartificialia and naturalia (Figure 1, point 1). Nearby, a little upriver, was theImperial Academy of Arts, open to a nascent Russian public every summer(Figure 1, point 2). Both academies housed workshops for instrument-makers, engravers and printers. Across the river, in Catherine's Hermitageand Winter Palace (Figure 1, point 3), clocks, automata, painting,sculpture and medals were exhibited to ticket-holding visitors and, onNevskii Prospekt (Figure 1, point 4), the city's main thoroughfare, therewere instrument-makers' shops and colourful displays by itinerantshowmen, who went about 'with their hurdy-gurdies, lanterns forshadow-shows, marmots, dancing dogs, monkeys, and so on'.1

Instrument-making and mechanical inventions, the themes of this essay,crossed the varied spaces of this cultural milieu, crossing also historicalboundaries that have placed the makers of instruments in restrictedlocations. As recent essays on 'mindful hands' in the eighteenth centuryremind us, today's historical divisions between arenas of science, industry,politics and art either did not exist in the eighteenth century or were ratherposited as strategies to secure social differentiation and hierarchy.2 Hencethe recurrent enlightened dream of separating people into labouring'hands' or bodies, equated with machines, and 'heads' - the rational mindsof managerial classes, whose task it should be to govern the unthinkingbodies that work.3


Figure 1 Map of St. Petersburg, showing (1) The Academy of Sciences and Kunstkamera (2) The Academy of Arts (3) Winter Palaceand Hermitage (4) Nevskii Prospekt (5) Volkov House, Kulibin's residence and academic workshops (6) Potemkin's Tauride Palace (ashort distance northwest of this point) (7) Millionaia Ulitsa (8) Tsaritsyn Field (9) Twelve Government Colleges (10) Free EconomicSociety. Source: M. 1. Makhaev, Plan stolichnago goroda Sanktpeterburga s izobraheniem znatnieishikh onagoprospektov (St. Petersburg, 1753-1761),Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Simon Werrett

In what follows, the singular career of an instrument-maker serves toreveal the diversity of venues an enlightened artisan might visit, and thecomplexities of the enlightened artisan's identity. Though he is largelyunknown in the West, Ivan Petrovich Kulibin (1735-1818) was celebratedby Soviet historians as a great 'self-taught' inventor, an obscure provincialwho went on to become a leading inventor in the Academy of Sciences,and so the exemplar of a patriotic, selfless and hard-working peasant of justthe kind the Soviets needed to maintain industrialization in the decadesafter the Second World War.4

Kulibin's activities offer a means to engage more closely with thegeography of instrument-making and the complexities of 'head' and'hand'. This essay follows Kulibin from his early days as a clock-maker inthe town of Nizhni Novgorod to his appointment as supervisor of theAcademy of Sciences' instrument-making workshops in St Petersburg, andconsiders the changing nature of representations of his craft skills that thischange of place entailed. Kulibin's identity in Petersburg was hybrid, partindependent and commercial inventor, part mechanical servant to theAcademy, and part courtly client, and, throughout his career, theseidentities were variously in harmony or conflict. The essay then considersthree aspects of Kulibin's work, in bridge design, the construction ofautomata and the production of optical instruments and illuminatinglamps, to reveal how these identities were managed, by both Kulibin andhis superiors, in efforts to bring the mechanical and intellectual dimensionsof work closer together or further apart. The argument will be that noessential definition of Kulibin as a 'head', 'hand' or even mixture of bothmay stand, since different configurations of these notions were invoked byKulibin and others to serve different circumstances. As such, thegeography of mind and hand mattered - where one was dictated how theengagement of body and intellect were to be represented — and, for thisreason, special attention is paid throughout to the locations through whichKulibin passed.5

FORMATION OF AN INVENTOR: KULIBIN IN NIZHNI NOVGOROD

Ivan Kulibin was one of a number of'self-taught inventors' or 'mechanics'who flourished in Russia during the reign of Empress Catherine II. Eagerto encourage Russian industry and determined to see Russia emulate theindustrial success of Britain, Catherine offered patronage to several skilledartisans and merchants, who went on to significant careers overseeing theproduction of steam engines, carriages, clocks and other inventions. EgorGrigorievich Kuznetsov, from a family of serf smiths in the Urals,developed rolling mills for the metal plants of Nizhnii Tagil. TerentiiIvanovich Voloskov devised astronomical clocks and telescopes, while theTver peasant mechanic, Lev Fedorovich Sabakin, went to England totrain in steam engineering before returning to Russia to overseemechanized manufactories in St Petersburg and Tver.6 Since all of thesefigures, including Kulibin, received no formal university education,


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contemporaries and historians marvelled that their abilities were 'natural'.'Where did the Rzhev merchant Terentii Voloskov acquire profoundknowledge in mechanics, chemistry, and religion - at what university? Atwhat trade school? Not in any. He began his studies not with paintedglobes and printed books, but with the huge book of Nature.'7 The samewould be said of Kulibin. However, neither contemporaries nor historiansagreed on what kinds of skills were supposed to be 'natural' in theseindividuals, the variety of whose careers encompassed diverse attributionsof either mental or physical abilities. Tracing Kulibin's trajectory fromprovincial merchant to academic employee reveals both the diverseidentities entailed in one mechanic's career and the different ways in whichidentity was managed in the representations of his contemporaries.

Ivan Kulibin was born on 10 April 1735 in Nizhni Novgorod, southeastof Moscow, the son of a flour merchant. He belonged to the sect of OldBelievers (Raskolniki), who had separated from the Russian OrthodoxChurch in protest against reforms undertaken by Patriarch Nikon in 1666-67. From the time of this 'schism' (Raskol], Old Believers maintainedliturgical rites abolished by the reforms, abstained from tobacco andalcohol, and lived and worked outside mainstream Russian society,persecuted and tolerated to different degrees in different reigns. By 1700,the Old Believers had established settlements outside traditional Russiancentres such as Moscow — on the Kuban river in the Caucasus, in Vetka,Poland, and in the Kerzhenets forest near Nizhni Novgorod, the latterprobably the community from whom Kulibin was descended.8

Throughout his life, Kulibin retained the long beard and traditionaldress that marked Old Believers (Figure 2) and his religion was no doubtimportant in his career, though this relationship warrants deeper study.Probably, Old Believers' promotion of commerce and self-sufficiencyshaped Kulibin's entry into the clock and instrument-making trade. Asoutcasts from Russian cities, Old Believers gravitated to mines andmanufactories dispersed across the empire and, by necessity, developedtrading and commercial skills to secure their independence. Self-sufficientcrafts were likewise prized among Old Believers, who were often skilled inwoodwork for producing tools, household implements and ornaments.

In this context, Kulibin developed his art first as a clock-maker andthen as an instrument-maker in Nizhni Novgorod. With an Old Believerclergyman, he learned to read and write using the Psalter and Book of Hours,and worked with his father to learn the flour trade at home. Visiting flourmills, Kulibin constructed models of machinery and water-wheels, beforebecoming fascinated with the tower clock of Nizhni Novgorod's Church ofthe Nativity and a wooden clock belonging to a neighbour, from which hemade an exact copy. Kulibin then travelled to Moscow, where he learntclock-making from a local master, Lobkov, and purchased lathes and toolsfor making wooden and, later, metal cuckoo clocks.9

Kulibin now established himself as a reputable, independent artisan,making, repairing and cleaning clocks embellished with automata andplanetary movements for nobles and merchants in Nizhni Novgorod. He


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Figure 2 Ivan Petrovich Kulibin, engraving after a portrait by P. P. Vedenetskiiof 1818, from Portretnaia galereia russkikh dieiatelei (St. Petersburg, 1865-69), Slavicand Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and TildenFoundations.

also learned new skills, based on intelligence from the capital and theimitation of newfangled instruments. Obtaining copies of the St. PetersburgNews and books published by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences,Kulibin was able to read accounts of mechanical devices ranging frommills to musical instruments and, when a merchant brought a Gregoriantelescope, a microscope and an electrical machine made in England fromMoscow to Nizhni, Kulibin built replicas.10

Kulibin's business flourished, but it was not to be an exclusivelycommercial enterprise. In 1764, Kulibin became aware of a planned visitto Nizhni Novgorod by the Empress Catherine II. Since the visit wasscheduled for Easter, Kulibin set about constructing a clock for theEmpress in the form of an egg, the symbolic token given as a gift tocelebrate Russian Easter. Kulibin could not carry out this endeavourwithout support, however, and he turned to the patronage of localmerchant, Mikhail N. Kostromin, who agreed to fund the work if the eggwas also presented in his name. Kulibin's status thus shifted from that of anindependent commercial craftsman to that of an inventor of ingenious


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mechanisms for patrons - a transition reflected in a change of location.Moving to Kostromin's estate of Pozdeevo near Nizhni, and furnished withmaterials and the assistance of fellow Nizhni clock-maker, AlekseiPiaterikov, Kulibin spent some three years, between 1764 and 1767,working on the egg-clock. The finished product was intended to displayKulibin's ingenuity. Housed in an elaborately ornamented gold and silvercase, the egg combined Kulibin's skills with a suitable religious theme,depicting the resurrection in tiny automaton figures set to music,composed by Kulibin himself. It displayed, as a later observer noted:

. . . the tomb of our Saviour, with the stone at the entrance, and the centinalsupon duty; suddenly the stone is removed, the centinals fall down, the angelsappear, the women enter the sepulchre, and the chant performed on Easter-eve is heard.11

Catherine eventually visited in May 1767, but the clock was not complete.Nevertheless, Kulibin presented it to an audience including the Empressand the president of the Academy of Sciences, Count VladimirGrigorevich Orlov. Kulibin also demonstrated his microscope, Gregoriantelescope and electrical machine. Catherine was impressed, and arrangedan invitation to Kulibin through Orlov to come to the capital when theegg-clock was finished. Kulibin and Kostromin agreed and, two yearslater, in February 1769, they arrived in St Petersburg with Kulibin's egg.In April, Kulibin and Kostromin were rewarded by Catherine at theWinter Palace. Kulibin received 1,000 rubles and an appointment asmechanic to the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Kulibin now moved fromcommercial maker and courtly client to become a salaried employee of astate institution.12 Kulibin helped to establish a path that later Russianmechanics followed. Sabakin began his career as a clerk in the Tver court,but, like Kulibin, transformed himself into a courtly client through the giftof a wall-suspended astronomical clock presented to Catherine II in 1784,for which he was sent to England to study machinery.13

Kulibin's novel position offered benefits and restrictions, apparent inthe contract he negotiated in 1769-70. Writing to the Academy with a listof responsibilities that he agreed to undertake, Kulibin signed himself as a'merchant' from Nizhni, and stressed his independence from an exclusivelyservile role. Kulibin agreed that as 'mechanic', he should carry outacademicians' commissions for instruments and apparatus, repair andmaintain existing instruments, and oversee the Academy's variouswoodworking, turning and instrument-making workshops. But he alsorequested that from midday until evening, he should be free to pursue his'own needs'.14 Kulibin thus sought a compromise between the demands ofthe Academy on its mechanic and the independent status he had enjoyedin Nizhni Novgorod.

The Academy agreed to this arrangement. After all, the status anddemands of the position to which Kulibin was now appointed had variedsignificantly during previous decades. The Saxon Johann Leutmann hadbeen appointed as the Academy's first professor of mechanics in the 1720s,


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while his successor, Andrei Konstantinovich Nartov, had no formalposition. For the lack of recognition, Nartov had usurped power in theAcademy briefly in the 1740s, before being demoted to his earlier status.Other artisans in the Academy carried status not only as members of theinstitution, but as members of family dynasties of artisans or as masters andapprentices. In short, there was nothing fixed about the hierarchy of'heads' and 'hands' in the Academy, and Kulibin's hybrid contractreflected this.15

Nevertheless, the Academy's professors certainly liked to representthemselves as superior minds above merely mechanical hands. Thisbecomes apparent in the case of Kulibin's first labours at the Academy,and in his designs for a single-span bridge across the river Neva.

BUILDING BRIDGES: KULIBIN AND THE ACADEMY

Kulibin's early work in the Academy saw him serve a variety of clientsdispersed not only across the city of St Petersburg, but also across theRussian empire. The Academy's workshops were located in the formerhouse of General Volkov (Volkovyi dvor] (Figure 1, point 5), where Kulibinwas given an apartment in which to live and work. From here,mathematical instruments, air-pumps, thermometers, barometers, elec-trical machines and wooden table presses were dispatched to StPetersburg's Post Office and Commerce College, to Moscow University,and as far away as Pskov, Mogilev and Poland. Kulibin servedacademicians, private clients, courtiers and public officials, who employedhis instruments for the sake of amusement, prestige and various practicalmatters. Local nobles bought curious electrical machines, while professorspurchased apparatus for expeditions to the frozen wastes of Siberia.16 Inthe afternoons, we may assume, Kulibin withdrew from this work andbusied himself with inventing.

Kulibin is best known for one invention made at this time - the designof a single-span bridge across the river Neva. As instrument-makingconnected Kulibin with the city, so it also led to collaborations withacademicians and, in his designs for a bridge, Kulibin worked closely withLeonhard Euler and his associates in the Academy. This project has been afocus for deliberating the different methods of artisans and professors in theAcademy, and also offers a useful place to consider differing assessments ofthe mindfulness of hands in enlightened Russia.

At Catherine's invitation, Euler had returned to Russia from the BerlinAcademy of Sciences in 1766, and now stood as the Academy's mostcelebrated figure. Euler encountered Kulibin in 1771, when the latterpresented his solution to a perennial problem in St Petersburg - how toconstruct a permanent bridge over the river Neva. Stone bridges weresusceptible to damage from great quantities of ice flowing into the cityfrom Lake Ladoga in winter. In the 1760s, pontoon bridges were erected inspring and summer, while most crossings were made in ferries and boats.In 1771, Kulibin proposed a huge single-span wooden bridge of his own


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design to the Academy, of some 1,000 feet in length. The Academyarranged a commission to consider a 1:40 scale model of the bridge thatKulibin had prepared. While the model withstood tests, professors doubtedKulibin for lacking the means to infer the load-bearing capacity of thebridge from the model. But, by late 1772, Kulibin later recalled, he haddetermined these means, writing, in words that recall his religiousconvictions, 'with the help of the almighty Creator I have through certainexperiments found that by means of a small model one can realize theweight of the real bridge'.17

Euler, together with the astronomer-mathematicians Wolfgang LudwigKrafft, Nicolaus Fuss and Anders Lexell, inspected subsequent models,which they approved, while Euler independently derived mathematicalmeans for inferring the load-bearing capacity of a bridge from a scalemodel. Despite its technical feasibility, the bridge was not constructed forfinancial and practical reasons. Nevertheless, the episode promptedcooperation between Kulibin and the academicians, and led to the firstnotices of Kulibin's skills in local and foreign correspondence andpublications.

The interaction of Kulibin and Euler has been the subject of a debate asto whether or not the two men's solutions to the problem of inferring load-bearing capacities signalled a contrast between 'high' and 'low' technicalknowledge in enlightened Russia. Michael Gordin contrasted Euler's'high' a priori mathematical calculations with the more empirical 'low'solution of Kulibin, while Igor Dmitriev has suggested that a trendtowards mathematization of engineering was evident in both 'high' and'low' traditions, as represented by Euler and Kulibin, respectively, in thesebridge projects.18

Dmitriev's critique hinged on the fact that it was possible to make arational reconstruction in mathematical terms of Kulibin's method, asindeed another commentator, lakubovskii, had done in 1936, using amemorandum on the problem written by Kulibin in 1772.19 Deriving aformula, Kulibin's method was then comparable with Euler's, which Eulerdescribed in a paper in the Academy's Latin journal of 1775.20 However, itis surely critical to this debate that Kulibin did not proceed usingmathematical language to arrive at his conclusion, supporting the divisionof labour proposed by Gordin. Reading formulae into Kulibin's work alsocarries the assumption that empirical work was inferior to 'higher'mathematics, so that to make Kulibin more of a mathematician is to securehis reputation.

Alternatively, it is possible to consider contemporaries' views on thesemethods and to note that Kulibin's empiricism could itself be presented asmindful, warranting credit regardless of mathematical content. Whileacademicians and artisans may well have operated within differenttraditions, allocating these to intellectual or bodily labours was notobvious. As we have already seen, different parties represented their ownand others' skills in a variety of ways during this period, so there was neverany definitive identity corresponding to 'head' or 'hand' to be recovered.


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Rather, such identities were deployed as strategies, doing work to makeindividuals appear more or less mechanical (or mathematical) in theinterests of hierarchy and social differentiation. When the Russianambassador to England, S. R. Vorontsov, sought to obtain patronagefrom the empress for the mechanic, Lev Sabakin, in the 1780s, he praisedSabakin for 'the excellent sharpness of his mind and his aptitude formechanics'.21 In contrast, while Kulibin rejected a role equivalent to anacademic mechanic by maintaining free time for inventing in his contract,academicians identified Kulibin and other practically skilled figures in StPetersburg as exclusively practical. For example, academicians praisedKulibin for the ingenuity of his mechanical work, suggesting anappreciation of his talents. Euler's secretary, Nicolaus Fuss, wrote toDaniel Bernoulli on 5 January 1777:

. . . the academic technician Kulibin merits your knowing of him by theastonishing fact that from a simple peasant he has developed into a genuinelyremarkable person through a happy predisposition for the art of mechanicsbestowed on him by nature, so that without any outside help he has alreadycreated masterpieces and caused the public to be delighted with him and his[bridge] model, on which he works incessantly.22

Fuss was undoubtedly impressed with Kulibin's work here, but he did notpresent Kulibin as intellectually skilled, but rather as a 'technician'(mekhanik) having a 'happy predisposition for ... art'. Fuss also associatedKulibin with the peasantry and nature, making him a form of 'noblesavage' among craftsmen, whose talents were not of his own making but'bestowed on him by nature'. Elsewhere, Fuss claimed that Kulibin was'indebted [for] his higher knowledge only to some kind of instinct'.23 Theacademician Johann Georgi likewise described Kulibin in this manner, as'a man with an exceptional gift for mechanics'.24 Kulibin was singled outfor exceptional practical skill. In contrast, an article appearing about thebridge models in the St. Petersburg Times in February 1777 retained thenotion of an instinctive gift, but now emphasized Kulibin's intellectualtalents, and was perhaps written by Kulibin himself:

This excellent artist, whom nature endowed with a powerful imaginationunited with fairness of mind and an extremely logical reasoning ability, wasboth the inventor and executor of the model of a wooden bridge spanning 140fathoms, i.e. the width of the Neva.25

Here, Kulibin had 'imagination' and was 'extremely logical', and wasidentified as both an 'inventor' and an 'executor', suggesting acombination of mental and practical talent. The article also proposed thatKulibin's methods for estimating load-bearing capacity were comparablewith Euler's, even if their language was dissimilar. Kulibin's 'rules turnedout to be similar to those that were derived later on mechanical grounds bythe great Mr. Euler'.26 Identifications of Kulibin as 'head' or 'hand' thusdepended on who was asked, and where - in the Academy, Kulibin was agifted technician and, in the press, he appeared as a talented intellect.

Kulibin was praised not only for his skill, but also as an exceptional and


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unusual individual, an 'astonishing' figure worthy of notice. This interestin Kulibin as a wonder should not be underestimated. The cultivation ofexotic persons had a long tradition in the Academy, feeding bothphilosophical and courtly curiosity. Until the 1740s, the Academy keptliving monsters - giants, dwarves and hermaphroditic twins from Siberia -quartered in its premises, for display as wonders of nature.27 Kulibin waslikewise a wonder, a view confirmed in representations of his skill in thetravel journals of tourists seeking out the sights of St Petersburg duringCatherine's reign. English traveller William Coxe, whose Travels intoPoland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark was published in 1784, thus recordedmeeting Kulibin, who showed him the egg-clock and model bridge. Coxethought the egg gave 'trifling, though curious performances', while thebridge model was 'sublime'. Kulibin himself was described as 'a Russianpeasant' whose model reflected 'high honour on the inventive faculties ofuntutored genius'.28 Kulibin was, like his machines, a unique production,'of mechanics we shall only notice Kulibin, the Russian, the greatest geniusin this particular [mechanical arts] that the nation has ever produced'.29

Just as assessments of Kulibin identified him variously as a courtlywonder or an ingenious engineer, so his bridge project was equallyimagined in broader registers than the merely practical. Fuss identified itas a spectacle: 'The design of the model is ... so pleasing to the eye, thatfrom a distance one might mistake it for the arch of a stone bridge.'30 Thespectacle had an air of illusion and imitation, recalling an importantprinciple in Kulibin's practice of learning art through the imitation ofexisting mechanisms. Prince Grigorii Potemkin, the Empress Catherine'sfavourite in 1774-75, also saw the bridge model as a spectacle. Potemkinhad a passion for exotic and useful machines, and patronized many foreignand Russian mechanics and engineers, who constructed mills, factories andmodel machinery on Potemkin's various estates.31 In 1774, Potemkinprovided patronage for Kulibin's third bridge model in the form of 3,000rubles towards a total cost of 3,500 rubles. The 1:10 scale wooden model,some 100 feet in length, was built in the courtyard of the Volkov house,where it remained until May 1793, when it was moved to span a canal inthe gardens of Potemkin's Tauride Palace in St Petersburg (Figure 1, point6). Kulibin resisted the move, no doubt because he took every opportunityto display the model himself for visitors to his workshops.32

Kulibin's hands were thus those of a performer as well as a maker - afact that testifies to the fluid boundaries between showmanship andinvention, and courtly, academic and scientific projects at this time.Similar intersections are evident in the case of further inventions byKulibin, which mixed spectacle and science, and provided further siteswhere the identity of mind and hand could be deliberated.

AUTOMATA: KULIBIN'S SELF-MOVING MACHINES

The boundary between man and machine was another subject of specialinterest to Kulibin, as indeed it was for many of his contemporaries.


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Automata, meaning 'self-moving machines', imitated human and animallife and regularly served as sites for debating the border between mind andbody, 'head' and 'hand' in the Enlightenment.

'Automaton' might be interpreted in a number of ways in Russia. Toacademicians and proponents of enlightened management, workers mightbe identified with labouring bodies, mindless machines in need oforchestration; but automation could also signify independent motion,self-moving and relying on no external power source. Visitors to StPetersburg meeting Kulibin identified self-sufficiency in his skills: a 'boorby birth . . . without direction, without scientific attainments, he unfoldedhis talents of himself .33 After making the egg-clock, constructing automataremained one of Kulibin's principal occupations, serving both as a displayof mechanical ingenuity and as a means to cultivate independent action.

Kulibin's egg was only one of a host of automata on show in enlightenedSt Petersburg. In the 1750s, at the luxurious mansion of Count Petr BorisSheremetev on Millionaia Ulitsa (Figure 1, point 7), Lyons-born gantier-perfumeur Pierre Dumoulin showed:

. . . from 2-9 after midday a very well executed model of the Cathedral of St.Peter, Rome, and amongst other tableaux anime's, a little Hollandaise whoweaves 18 pouces of ribon a minute; equally a canary in a cage which singsmany airs as if it were alive, and many different very curious tricks of optics,dioptics and catoptics. Persons of quality pay to see these what they judge fit;for others, it will cost 50 kopeks and for a group of eight persons, 2 rubles.34

Like Kulibin, Dumoulin's exhibitions established his career. Moving on toMoscow, further displays of automata earned him the position of mechanicto the Machines and Instruments Cabinet of the Physics section of theUniversity of Moscow, though he was fired in 1767 for incompetence.Nevertheless, Dumoulin remained in Russia until his death in the early1780s.

Dumoulin's automata also adorned the imperial palaces. A duck anddrummer imitating those of Jacques Vaucanson (which Dumoulin hadpurchased in 1742) were on display in the imperial palace of Tsarskoe Selooutside St Petersburg in 1764.35 Courtiers enjoyed automata as items ofconspicuous consumption and as 'small-scale models of power'.36

Mechanical microcosms displayed cosmic and social order. The mechanicSabakin conferred with Kulibin to build a grand astronomical clockdepicting the motion of the sun and moon, exhibited in Catherine II'sHermitage.37 Tsarskoe Selo contained an automaton of well disciplinedsoldiers on manoeuvre, while the first manual of etiquette in Russia, theHonorable Mirror of Youth, urged that Russians should be 'bold, industriousand steadfast like a pendulum clock'.38

For Kulibin, self-moving machines offered the artisan a chance forindependent action. Kulibin's egg had helped to secure his position in StPetersburg, and automata remained a critical link between Kulibin andcourtly patrons throughout Catherine's reign. Potemkin patronizedautomata as well as bridges. After learning of the ingenious machines ofEnglish goldsmith and clock-maker James Cox, well known for supplying


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marvellous automata to Eastern clients, Potemkin ordered from Cox agrand clock supporting a moving musical peacock and birds. When thepeacock, which cost 11,000 rubles (£1,800) arrived in parts in StPetersburg in 1781, Kulibin was requested to assemble it, and Kulibinrestored and repaired the clock for the Prince for many years thereafter.39

Kulibin also constructed his own automaton for Potemkin, making theatreout of the kinds of machinery favoured in Potemkin's projects toindustrialize Russia, depicting:

. . . a mountain with waterfalls of crystal spirals made in fifteen places, actingentirely like natural waterfalls or cascades. At the foot of the mountain wasbuilt and worked a water mill. In the surroundings of this mountain canalsand rivers were made, with natural water, in which geese and ducks made ofwhite glass played, and between the canals was a field . . . it was valued byforeigners at 6000 rubles.40

Kulibin's intellect was dismissed in some reports of his skill, but Kulibinhimself could follow the same strategy. Another activity of Kulibin'spatronized by Potemkin concerned experiments to make 'mechanicalvessels' (mashinnie suda) or boats capable of running against the current ofthe Volga river, the main line of transport for merchandise entering Russiafrom the south. The problem was normally solved by teams of 'barge-haulers' (burlaki) who pulled laden barges upstream in teams, theirlaborious journeys later captured in a famous painting by the artist IliaRepin (Figure 3). In his experimental vessels, Kulibin mechanized thislabour, using the force of the current to turn a wheel or drum on the vesselthat wound in a line anchored upriver, thus pulling the vessel forwardsagainst the current.41

While he defended himself against identification as a mere hand in theAcademy, Kulibin had no hesitation in representing the barge-haulers asmerely hands in his own work, since he reduced the burlaki to the level of

Figure 3 The Boatmen on the Volga, 1870-73 (Burlaki na Volge) (oil on canvas)by Ilya Efimovich Repin (1844-1930) © State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg,Russia/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.


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machines to make their labours comparable. Based on his experiments, avessel laden with 8,500 puds might travel from 13 to 20 versts a dayupriver, which, according to a report on Kulibin's experiments, 'byreducing the number of laboring men by more than a third would not bewithout use for the navigation of the river'.42 Kulibin not only madehaulers equivalent to mechanical labour, but proposed such tools needed athinking man to oversee them, since 'the direction and repair' of Kulibin'svessels on the river demanded 'people knowledgeable in mechanics andcarpentry' without whom pilots and labourers could not function.43

Kulibin's readiness to mechanize labour was not lost on his contempor-aries. Later, when Kulibin experimented with these ships in NizhniNovgorod, the townspeople were so fearful of the effect on labour thatKulibin was forced to move away from his hometown.44

Mechanization of the body was a common element in other theatricaland practical schemes of Kulibin. Consecutive with his work on automatedbarges, in 1791, Kulibin designed prosthetic 'mechanical legs' withmoveable knee and ankle joints to replace the legs of an injured artillerist,and devised various improvements for mechanical limbs.45 Kulibin alsodesigned novel transport mechanisms, powered by mechanical sources.46

In the 1780s, he proposed a series of three and four-wheeled carriagescarrying one or two passengers and one pedalling driver, who commu-nicated motion to the back wheel via a flywheel and gears, while steeringwith the front wheel. Kulibin recognized that for long distances, a humandriver would tire, and so considered replacing him with a perpetualmotion machine, though many years seeking this motion were in vain.47

While Kulibin was ready to control the movements of other people, heused his inventions to gain independence for himself. Kulibin occupied ahybrid role, part independent inventor and commercial maker, partacademic mechanic, and part courtly client. These roles were not necessarilyin tension, but, by the early 1780s, Kulibin felt that they were. Thinkinghimself treated with contempt in the Academy, in 1786, Kulibin petitionedPotemkin to grant him an official rank in the Academy, giving him equalstatus to other academicians. Kulibin identified himself as an 'inventor' whohad carried out 'every responsibility which is demanded of the academicmechanic in the regulation'.48 When an answer failed to materialize,Kulibin sought to leave the Academy in order to secure his independence.He now wrote 'after agreeing to spend my time supervising the workshops. . . I was in such a situation that there was never time to show my successesin inventions to the Academy and society'.49 In 1786, Catherine agreed toprovide an annual sum to Kulibin, which would free him to develop hisinventions and display his intellect.50 Kulibin was released from his rolesupervising the workshops of the Academy of Sciences by the president,Ekaterina Dashkova, though he was allowed to keep his apartments on halfsalary, on condition that he continued to act as a consultant.51 Kulibin nowdevoted more time to his river vessels, and to the production of another set ofnew inventions - optical instruments and fireworks - which offered furthermeans to display ingenuity and achieve independence.


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INVENTING AUTONOMY: KULIBIN'S OPTICS AND FIREWORKS

Displays of'artificial fireworks' (or poteshnye ogni (pleasure fires) in Russian)enjoyed widespread popularity in the eighteenth century, shown togetherwith allegorical scenery celebrating the sovereign in courtly spectacles, oras diversions for paying audiences in pleasure gardens and theatres.Fireworks often blended with 'automata' as mechanical spectacles foreighteenth-century audiences, who delighted in creating exotic motions ofspinning wheels, rotating stars and moving human and animal figures withthe explosive action of rockets, bombs and crackers.52 Besides thesetraditional fireworks, enlightened pyrotechnics also included novel effectsdrawn from fashionable natural philosophy. 'Electrical', 'optical' and'aerial' fireworks mimicked gunpowder displays in miniature, domesticat-ing them as polite spectacles free of soot and smoke and consumable in thehome.53

In Russia, the Academy of Sciences oversaw the design of courtfireworks for much of the eighteenth century. In Catherine's reign,professor of rhetoric Jacob von Stahlin designed many displays, whichwere staged over the Neva, in the Tsaritsyn (today Mars) Field (Figure 1,point 8), and at Tsarskoe Selo outside the city. Stahlin prided himself onthe ingenuity that fireworks designs could display, filling his proposals with'figures moving in fire by means of mechanical action, like the scenery inoperas'.54

Kulibin also offered novel pyrotechnics to Russians in the 1770s, whoseinvention led the instrument-maker to traverse further spaces of the city.He collaborated in his designs with the rector of the Academy of Arts anddirector of the St Petersburg Tapestry Factory, G.I. Kozlov, and theKapellmeister of the Winter Palace, Giuseppe Sarti.55 The principle locationfor his pyrotechnics, however, was the optical instrument-making work-shop at the Academy of Sciences.

From the time of his arrival in St Petersburg, Kulibin busied himselfmaking optical instruments - producing moulds for grinding and polishingmetal and glass lenses and making telescopes and microscopes foracademicians. In the same year that Kulibin constructed his first bridgemodel, he also began work on the construction of an achromaticmicroscope for Euler. Achromatic lenses for telescopes had existed sincethe 1750s, after John Dolland's realization that lenses using flint and crownglass could eliminate the chromatic aberration troubling refractingtelescopes. A dispute with Euler helped to prompt Dolland's investigations,and Euler continued to develop mathematical means to improveachromatic lenses in subsequent years. In his Dioptrica of 1771, Euler alsoproposed an achromatic microscope, until then considered technicallyimpossible due to its lenses being much smaller than those of a telescope.Consecutive with his theoretical studies of this problem, Euler ordered theconstruction of such an instrument under Kulibin's guidance and, byMarch 1775, the instrument, constructed for the most part by Kulibin'sapprentice I. G. Shersnevskii, was completed, though its form ofconstruction and performance is regrettably unrecorded.56


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As in the case of Kulibin's bridges, this optical work promptedacademicians to urge divisions of head and hand. In 1774, Fuss publisheda short treatise intended, according to its title, as a 'Detailed instruction forcarrying lenses of different kinds to a greater degree of perfection with adescription of a microscope . . . taken from the dioptric theory of LeonardEuler'.57 Fuss claimed to translate the theoretical results of Euler'smathematical treatment of lenses into practical dimensions and combina-tions of lenses for the construction of different achromatic telescopes andmicroscopes. Implied here was a tacit division of labour between 'heads'and 'hands', between mathematics and practical instrument-making, inthe Academy, since Fuss claimed his work would make higher mathe-matics 'comprehensible to workmen'. Kulibin, however, pursued his ownstrategies to claim that he was more than just a hand making otherpeople's inventions, and used optical and pyrotechnic skills to do this.

Kulibin's first forays into pyrotechnics came soon after the work onachromatic microscopes in October 1777, when he designed 'pictureilluminations' and a triumphal arch to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary ofthe Academy of Sciences. The display beside the 12 Government Colleges(Figure 1, point 9) included a 'mechanical sun' and an image of Apolloshedding light on the world, achieved 'by the action of fire through a glasswith a moving figure'.58 Kulibin soon developed this optical effect into anew invention. In February 1779, he demonstrated to the Academy a new'lamp with mirrors' (fonar* s zerkalami), which followed directly fromKulibin's experimental instrument-making and pyrotechnics, consisting ofa compound concave mirror constructed of numerous smaller mirrors,arranged to reflect the light of a candle placed at the focus in a tin orcopper fitting. The whole was mounted on a wooden frame with screwsallowing vertical rotation, and served, like the microscope, the purpose ofmagnification. The following day, Kulibin publicized this lamp inextended advertisements in the city's newspaper, the Sankpeterburgskievedemosti.59 Kulibin here claimed that the mirror could magnify the light ofa candle up to 500 times.

Kulibin's advertisements displayed the inventor's talents and empha-sized the many ways in which his lamps could be used, to illuminate greathalls, artisanal workshops, mills, manufactories and light-houses; to serveas burning lenses in chemical experiments; or, in a smaller version, toilluminate the way for carriages and pedestrians. Kulibin paid particularattention to the use of lamps in imitating festive fireworks, by projectinglight through coloured screens from which decorative shapes were cut.60

Kulibin's lamps thus stood at the intersection of festive, courtly,commercial and scientific contexts, and served the inventor as a meansto gain both financial and courtly credit. Financial rewards would alsoaccrue from the sale of lamps to the public, as Kulibin explained: 'Thosewishing to order such mirrors made, personally or by letter, with half theprice paid in a deposit' should apply to Kulibin's workshop in the Volkovhouse.61 Prices ranged from 150 rubles for the largest mirror of 20 vershoks(35 inches) in diameter, which could illuminate up to a distance of 300


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sazhens (c. 2,094 feet), to 30 rubles for a 'tabletop' (stolovoe) version, of 4vershoks (7 inches) in diameter.

It is not known how many mirrors Kulibin actually sold, but at leastsome were constructed for private clients and others used to cultivatepatrons. To increase the availability of glass for his mirrors, Kulibinmechanized aspects of hand-production at the Imperial Glass Factory inSt Petersburg. His mirrors were used to light a cloth manufactory.62

According to Kulibin's first biographer, P. Svin'in, the Russian merchantGrigorii Shelekhov, director of the Northeastern Company (later theRussian-American Company) took a Kulibin lamp on a voyage to KodiakIsland, where he founded Russia's first colony in Alaska. Shelekhov usedKulibin's lamp to display the superiority of Russians over 'savage' Kodiakislanders:

Knowing that the savages worship the sun, he told them once at night toassemble on the shore (having arranged earlier at what time to light the lampon the mast of the ship) and he would call upon the sun to appear. Within afew minutes the lamp was lit, and the savages with a cry and strangelyagitated fell to the ground and began to pray to him.63

Kulibin also used his lamps to display his ingenuity at court and tocultivate courtly patronage. This became critical in the years followingKulibin's partial separation from the Academy. Catherine had promisedfunds to Kulibin in 1786 to make his experiments and, against thispromise, Kulibin borrowed money. Catherine's gift failed to materialize,however, leaving Kulibin with growing debts, some 7,000 rubles by1790.64 Kulibin thus used novel pyrotechnics to secure support, as he haddone with the egg-clock in the 1760s. In April 1791, Kulibin arrangeddecorations for a grand fete in the Tauride Palace of Prince Potemkin,recently returned to St Petersburg from campaigns against the Turks. Thefete, which was remembered as one of the grandest in eighteenth-centuryRussia, included displays of automata by Kulibin and thousands ofilluminations.65 Outside in the palace's Winter Garden, Kulibin also set upa mirror lamp, whose beam was directed at many smaller mirrors, blueand white glass globes, and pyramids located around the expansivegrounds. Spectators marvelled at the results, a 'magic spectacle' where 'thewhole palace seemed on fire' with 'mirrors innumerable'.66

Two months later, Kulibin's inventions gave him access to the imperialfamily, for whom he was requested to show displays of 'optical andmechanical fireworks' using his mirror lamps and other devices at thepalace of Tsarskoe Selo.67 Kulibin represented the display as both anintellectual and a mechanical achievement - as an 'idea and experiment'.The performance included a monogram 'in fire of a violet color in laurelsand palm fronds of green, [which] suddenly emits streaming golden rays. . . then transform into rays in continuous fiery brilliance and motions'.68

Spiralling cones, pyramids, fountains, wheels and star-figures thenappeared, all brightly coloured in blue, green, yellow and violet.

These spectacles led directly to more freedom for Kulibin to pursue hisinventions, and movement, as Kulibin was allowed to traverse the empire


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in order to test his ideas. In the summer of 1791, Catherine awarded 2,000rubles to Kulibin to continue his experiments. Potemkin then requestedKulibin to travel to his court in lasi, Moldavia, to make furtherexperiments on river vessels, potentially useful in the war against theTurks. Kulibin went, but when Potemkin died soon after, he returned tothe capital. Petitions for more support to Catherine followed and, in early1792, the Empress agreed to pay Kulibin an annual sum of 900 rubles tosupport his work. 'Optical fireworks' thus helped to secure Kulibin'sindependence and to demonstrate his intellect.69 Kulibin's status as both amechanical and an intellectual talent was marked in the same year, whenhe was elected to St Petersburg's Free Economic Society (Figure 1, point10), a prestigious institution of nobles and academics examining reforms inRussian agriculture and industry.70

CONCLUSION

Throughout his career, Kulibin was fascinated by autonomy, both in hisefforts to create a space for independent activity and in the mechanicalinventions that he created. Automata - figures in clockwork, self-movingboats, carriages, fireworks and perpetual motions — provided not onlymechanical means for independent action, but also Kulibin's means togain autonomy. Sold to the public or presented as gifts to the Empress andnobles such as Potemkin, Kulibin's machines brought him the financialand courtly credit necessary to work outside the Academy of Sciences andfulfil his role as an inventor. Kulibin was not alone in this venture. TheUrals artisan Kuznetsov won his serf family's freedom by building amusical carriage or droshky for the wife of Emperor Paul I in 1800.71

Kulibin's successes were more short-lived. As he depended on courtlypatronage for support, so courtiers could also restrict his activities.Kulibin's last petition to the Empress was made through the intercession ofcourt poet and imperial secretary Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin, who,unfortunately for Kulibin, found an enemy in the Academy of Sciences'president, Elizaveta Dashkova. In November 1793, Kulibin was ejectedfrom his premises in the Volkov house, and his bridge model removed tothe Tauride Palace. Kulibin remained in St Petersburg until 1801, beforeleaving for Nizhni Novgorod, where he stayed until his death in 1818.These were productive years, however, during which Kulibin worked onhis mechanical vessels for the Volga and many other inventions, includinga mechanical lift, an optical telegraph and machinery for Russianmanufactories.

In her critique of Joel Mokyr's account of 'Industrial Enlightenment',Liliane Hilaire-Perez has stressed the hybridity of artisans' careers ineighteenth-century France. Far from being a homogeneous group resistantto industrialization, artisanal culture was a hybrid of commercial, courtly,individual and institutional activities, entailing diverse practical andintellectual skills.72 The career of Ivan Kulibin, representative of a numberof 'self-taught inventors' in Catherinian Russia, supports Hilaire-Perez's


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conclusion. During his time in St Petersburg, Kulibin had worked hard tomanage a career that mixed courtly patronage, commercial instrument-making and service to a state institution. That Kulibin's activitiesintersected all these arenas emphasizes the hybrid nature of a 'scientific'career in this period, a mixture also manifested in the diverse courtly,artisanal, industrial and philosophical spaces through which Kulibinpassed in the city as he went about the business of instrument-making andinventing. Location was equally critical in the different ways in which suchactions were represented. In the Academy, professors such as Fuss workedto distinguish mechanical and intellectual work, identifying Kulibin as atalented 'hand', whereas Kulibin himself claimed to unite both practicaland mindful skills, manifested in a variety of ingenious inventions.Elsewhere, though, Kulibin's own work divided head and hand,comparing Volga barge-haulers with machines and urging their manage-ment by ingenious minds. The identity of the mechanic in eighteenth-century Russia was thus never fixed or static, and could shift betweendifferent definitions, depending on local conditions and circumstances.

Notes and References1. .1. G. Georgi, Opisanie rossiisko-imperatorskogo stolichnogo goroda Sankt-Peterburga i

dostopamiatnostei v okrestnostiakh onogo, splanom (St Petersburg, 1996, reprint), 476.2. L. Roberts, S. SchafFer and P. Dear (eds), The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from

the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (Amsterdam, 2007).3. S. Schaffer, 'Enlightened Automata', in W. Clark, J. Golinski and S. SchafFer (eds),

The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago, 1999), 126-65; H. Otto Sibum, 'Experimentalists inthe Republic of Letters', in L. Daston and H. Otto Sibum (eds), Scientific Personae, special issueof Science in Context, 2003, 16: 89-120.

4. N. M. Raskin, Ivan Petrovich Kulibin, 1735-1818 (Leningrad, 1962); V. N. Pipunyrovand N. M. Raskin, Ivan Petrovich Kulibin, 1735-1818 (Leningrad, 1986).

5. For geographically sensitive approaches to instrument-making, see J. Bennett,'Wind-Gun, Air-Gun or Pop-Gun: The Fortunes of a Philosophical Instrument', in Roberts etaL, op. cit. (2), 221-45; D. E. Harkness, '"Strange" Ideas and "English" Knowledge: NaturalScience Exchange in Elizabethan London', in P. H. Smith and P. Findlen (eds), Merchants andMarvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (London, New York, 2002), 137-60.

6. N. A. Mezinin, 'An Outstanding Russian Mechanical Engineer: The 250thAnniversary of the Birth of E. G. Kuznetsov', Metallurgist, 1976, 20: 67-9; F. N. Zagorskii,L. F. Sabakin: A Russian Mechanic of the 18th Century: His Life and Work (Jerusalem, 1966).

7. F. N. Glinka, writing in 1808, quoted in S. Dickinson, Breaking Ground: Travel andNational Culture in Russia from Peter I to the Era of Pushkin (Amsterdam and New York, 2006),202.

8. R. O. Crummey, The Old Believers & the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community & theRussian State, 1694-1855 (Madison, 1970); I. Paert, Old Believers, Religious Dissent, and Gender inRussia, 1760-1850 (Manchester, 2003).

9. Pipunyrov and Raskin, op. cit. (4), 24-33.10. Raskin, op. cit. (4), 37-9, 46.11. W. Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark, 5th edn, five volumes

(London, 1802), Vol. 2, 111-12; see also N. M. Raskin and B. A. Mal'kevich (eds), Rukopisnyematerialy L P. Kulibina v Arkhive Akademii nauk SSSR (Moscow-Leningrad, 1953), 331-4, 373-6.

12. Raskin, op. cit. (4), 61-9; Pipunyrov and Raskin, op. cit. (4), 42-5.13. Zagorskii, op. cit. (6), 7.14. Kulibin's petition to the Academy, November 1769, in Raskin and Mal'kevich, op.

cit. (11), 479-80, on p. 479; for his contract, ibid., 480-1.15. V. L. Chenekal, Russkie priborostroiteli pervoi poloviny XVIII veka (Leningrad, 1953); S.


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Werrett, 'An Odd Sort of Exhibition: The St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in EnlightenedRussia', Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 2000, chap. 9.

16. Raskin and Mal'kevich, op. at. (11), 481-92.17. Quoted in N. M. Raskin, 'Euler and I. P. Kulibin', in N. N. Bogolyubov, G. K.

Mikhailov and A. P. Yushkevich, trans. R. Burns (eds), Euler and Modem Science (Washington,DC, 2007), 317-34, on p. 318; Kulibin's solution is given in Raskin and Mal'kevich, op. at.(11) , 151-60.

18. M. Gordin, 'Navodia mosty: Eiler, Kulibin i tekhnicheskoe znanie', trans. E.Kanishcheva, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2004, 66: 180-97; I. Dmitriev, 'O mostiakh ifonariakh', Novoe Literaturnoe Obozreme, 2004, 66: 198-200.

19. B. V. lakubovskii, 'Proekty mostov I. P. Kulibina. 1. Dereviannyi arochnyi mostcherez r. Nevu', Arkhiv istoni nauki i tekhmki, 1936, 8: 191-252, esp. 199-200.

20. L. Euler, 'Regula facilis pro dijudicanda firmitate pontis aliusve corporis similis excognita firmitate moduli', Novi Commentarii Academiae scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae, 1775,20: 271-83.

21. Vorontsov, quoted in Zagorskii, op. at. (6), 7.22. Quoted in Raskin, op. at. (17) , 323.23. Quoted in A. Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture: A History to 1860 (Stanford, CA,

1963), 173; T. Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001).24. Georgi, opât. ( 1 ) , 420.25. Quoted in Raskin, op. at. (17) , 322.26. Quoted in Raskin, op. at. (17) , 322.27. M. Hagner, 'Enlightened Monsters', in Clark etal, op. cit. (3), 175-217, on pp. 184-6.28. Coxe, op. at. (11) , Vol. 2, 109-11.29. J. H. Castera, The Life of Catherine II, Empress of Russia, trans. Rev. W. Tooke, 3rd

edn, three volumes (London, 1799), Vol. 3, 437-8.30. Quoted in Raskin, op. cit. (17), 323.31. S. Werrett, 'The Panopticon in the Garden: Samuel Bentham's Inspection House

and Noble Theatricality in Eighteenth-Century Russia', Ab Imperio, 2008, 3: 47-70.32. Raskin and Mal'kevich, op. cit. ( 1 1 ) , 223-4; Georgi, op. cit. (1 ) , 64.33. Castera, op. cit. (29), Vol. 3, 438.34. Sanktpeterburgskie vedemosti, 19 December 1755, quoted in A. Doyon and L. Liaigre,

Jacques Vaucanson, Mecanicien de Genie (Paris, 1966), 92-3; on Dumoulin's career, see ibid., 92-8.35. J. Beckmann, A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins, trans. W. Johnston, two

volumes (London, 1846), Vol. 2, 136-7.36. M. Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1995), 128.37. Zagorskii, op. cit. (6), 19.38. Quoted in E. V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great, Progress through Coercion in

Russia (London, 1993), 220.39. On the peacock clock, see Raskin, op. cit. (4), 54-60; Pipunirov and Raskin, op. cit.

(4), 126-9; C. M. Pagani, 'The Clocks of James Cox: Chinoiserie and the Clock Trade withChina in the Late Eighteenth Century', Apollo, 1995, 141: 15-22.

40. Pipunyrov and Raskin, op. cit. (4), 129.41. D. Gouzevitch and I. Gouzevitch, 'The History of the First Patents for Steam Vessels

in Russia', History of Technology, 2002, 24: 81-94, on pp. 81-2.42. Governor A. M. Runovskii to Count P. A. Stroganov, 9 November 1804, quoted in

Pipunyrov and Raskin, op. cit. (4), 153-4.43. Governor A. M. Runovskii to Count P. A. Stroganov, 9 November 1804, quoted in

Pipunyrov and Raskin, op. cit. (4), 154.44. Raskin, op. cit. (4), 200.45. Raskin, op. cit. (4), 156-8; D. I. Kargin, 'Mechanicheskie nogi Kulibina', Nauchnoe

nasledstvo, 1948, 1: 63-70.46. Raskin, op. cit. (4), 168-71; D. I. Kargin, 'Perpetuum mobile I. P. Kulibina', Arkhiv

istorii nauki i tekhmki, 1935, 6: 187-209.47. On the carriages, see Raskin, op. cit. (4), 150-3; Pipunyrov and Raskin, op. cit. (4),

125-6.48. Kulibin to G. A. Potemkin, c. 1786, quoted in A. M. Kachanov, 'Novye svedeniia ob

I. P. Kulibine', Sovetskie Arkhivy, 1989, 2: 82-5, on p. 85.


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49. Kulibin, quoted in Pipunyrov and Raskin, op. cit. (4), 87.50. Raskin, op. cit. (4), 143.51. Raskin, op. cit. (4), 143-4; Pipunyrov and Raskin, op. cit. (4), 87.52. See, e.g. the Russian pyrotechnic manual, M. V. Danilov, Dovol'noe i iasnoe pokazanie

po kotoromu Vsiakoi sam} soboiu liuzhet' prigotovliat' i delaf vsiakie feierverki i raznyia illuminatsii, 3rdedn (Moscow, 1785).

53. S. Werrett, 'From the Grand Whim to the Gasworks: Philosophical Fireworks inGeorgian England', Roberts et al., op. cit. (2), 324-47.

54. J. Stahlin, 'Kratkaia istoriia iskusstva feierverkov v Rossii', in âpiski lakoba Shtelinaob iziashchnykh iskusstvakh v Rossii, two volumes (Moscow, 1990), Vol. 1, 238-66, on p. 255.

55. Raskin and Mal'kevich, op. cit. (11), 28.56. Raskin, op. cit. (17) , 327-9; S.L. Sobol', Istoriia mikroskopa i mikroskopicheskikh

issledovanii v Rossii v XVIII veke (Moscow-Leningrad, 1949), 320-30; Raskin, op. cit. (4), 91-7.57. N. Fuss, Instruction detaillee pour porter les lunettes de toutes les differentes especes au plus haul

degre de perfection dont elles sont susceptibles, tiree de la theorie dioptrique de Mr. Euler le pere et mise a laportee de tous les ouvriers en ce genre par Mr. Nicolas Fuss. Avec description d'un microscope, qui pentpasser le plus parfait dans son espece et qui est propre a produire tous les grossissemens qu'on voudra (StPetersburg, 1774).

58. Raskin and Mal'kevich, op. cit. (11) , 494; Raskin, op. cit. (4), 137-8.59. The advertisements are reproduced in Raskin and Mal'kevich, op. cit. (11) , 418-24.60. Raskin and Mal'kevich, op. cit. (11), 420.61. Raskin and Mal'kevich, op. cit. (11), 421.62. Raskin, op. cit. (4), 158-9, 163.63. P. P. Svin'in, £hizn} russkogo mekhanika Kulibina i ego izobreteniia (St Petersburg, 1819),

10.64. Pipunyrov and Raskin, op. cit. (4), 131.65. L. I. D'iachenko, Tavncheskii dvorets (St Petersburg, 1997), 41-9; S. Sebag-

Montefiore, The Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (New York, 2000), 467-71; Pipunyrovand Raskin, op. cit. (4), 112.

66. C. F. P. Masson, Secret Memoirs of the Court of Petersburg: Particularly Towards the End ofthe Reign of Catherine II (Philadelphia, 1802), 318-21; see also V. N. G. Golovina, Memoirs ofCountess Golovina, a Lady at the Court of Catherine II, trans. G. M. Fox-Davies and D. Nutt(London, 1910), 28.

67. Raskin and Mal'kevich, op. cit. (11), 451-2.68. Raskin and Mal'kevich, op. cit. (11) , 451.69. Raskin, op. cit. (4), 146-8; Pipunyrov and Raskin, op. cit. (4), 111-12, 131-2.70. Pipunyrov and Raskin, op. cit. (4), 132-3.71. Mezinin, op. cit. (6), 69.72. L. Hilaire-Perez, 'Technology as Public Culture in the Eighteenth Century: The

Artisans' Legacy', History of Science, 2007, 45: 135-53; see also I. Gouzevitch and I. Inkster,'Identifying Engineers in History', History of Technology, 2006, 27: 101-7.


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The Mindful Hand Goes toJapan: Dutch-Japanese Trade

in the Second Half of theEighteenth Century

L I S S A R O B E R T S

The Mindful Hand sets out to show that both natural inquiry and inventionbetween the so-called Scientific and Industrial Revolutions involved anintimate and active collaboration between mental and manual labour.1

Neither material production nor the production of knowledge, therefore,can be understood during this period within a taxonomy that alignsartisans, on one hand, with physical manipulation and natural philoso-phers, on the other, with contemplation. But the book is also interested totrace how reason and manual labour came to be accepted during thishistorical period as governed by separate, hierarchically orderedcategories, and how European elites used such claims of hierarchicalseparation to strengthen their authority over the processes and results ofmaterial and knowledge production. It spells out at least threecomplementary ways in which they did so: (1) by co-opting the rhetoricof reason and science to bolster claims of authority; (2) by endeavouring toreorganize sites and networks of production in accord with what theyclaimed were the principles of rational management and (3) byappropriating people, goods and ideas from elsewhere through a multi-faceted process of domestication. Hence, it presents, for example, scientificacademies and aristocratic circles publicly distancing their members fromboth their own dexterous skills and from artisanal collaborators withwhom they mundanely worked; skilled workers being disciplined byregimes of standardized modelling, construction and compensation; andthe work of inventors reconstituted upon its exportation to foreign shores,sundered into attributions of exotic showmanship versus trustworthydomestic reason, industry and innovation.

The last of these processes is especially interesting because itsrecognition leads to a double mapping in which we can account for thepart played by travelling resources and skills in the history of material andknowledge production and simultaneously bear witness to the ways inwhich the necessary ingredient of travel was often submerged or


The Mindful Hand Goes to Japan

reconstituted by domesticating processes of local (re-) production andcontrol. Historiographically, this resonates with current debates betweenhistorians such as Liliane Perez, who focus on the crucially importantmobility of what we might label 'mindful hand workers' - artisans,engineers, entrepreneurs, etc. - during the period covered by our book,and historians such as Joel Mokyr and Margaret Jacob, who argue insteadfor the decisive role of ('useful') knowledge during the so-called industrialenlightenment.2 Historically, we see it in countless examples of travellingskills and global trade providing means and materials for the production of'European' - or more restrictively, nationally labelled - goods and ideas.Consider the static electric generator, for example - one of the EuropeanEnlightenment's most emblematic machines. While Joseph Priestley andcountless since have referred to it as a 'philosophical instrument', capableof providing insight into nature, few have paused to consider theprovenance of its components: its design trajectory rooted in theinternational travel of 'electricians' and instrument makers, the Africanorigins of its ivory handles, its silk threads and cotton pads from Asia andAmerica, its stand made perhaps of new world or Swedish mahogany.3

If the sinews of the mindful hand were thus firmly enmeshed in globalnetworks of travel and exchange, a point not sufficiently stressed in the book,it is equally true that these networks were themselves practically constructedand maintained by that same hybrid entity. As a way to appreciate this, wecan revisit Edwin Hutchins' famous book Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge,MA, 1995) in which he coined the term 'distributed cognition' to explainthe collaborative nature of navigation. Kapil Raj and others have shownthat, in fact, the voyages of exploration and trading expeditions that tookEuropeans around the globe during the early modern period involved farmore than cognitive coordination. Both onboard ship and across the boardmore generally, they required the inextricable collaboration of mental andmanual labour within and among individuals — tempered by the constantassertion of hierarchical management and control. Mapping the globe,collecting and categorizing its natural constituents as well as the exchange ofcommodities and customs relied on the coordinated support of scientificsocieties, trading companies and governments — European institutions mostresponsible for managing the production of knowledge, material goods,wealth and the socio-political order.4

It would seem that both the mindful hand and the sources of its managederasure were ubiquitous. But, before such a bold and global claim can bejustified, we need to examine what happened when material goods andembodied knowledge that bore a stamp of European provenance madetheir way through foreign ports and got taken up by local goals andcircumstances. What became of these products' identities and the identityof the European culture they were often taken to represent? Did thehistorical tension between the mind and hand's practical collaborationand assertively official claims of their hierarchical separation give way toother visions as expanding networks of exploration and commerce spreadWestern captains, commodities and concepts around the globe?5


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To begin addressing these questions, this essay looks at the case ofDutch-Japanese trade during the second half of the long eighteenthcentury. A number of things make this case an especially intriguing andfruitful historical laboratory. First, and most well known, is the fact thatthe Netherlands was the only 'Western' nation allowed to trade directlywith Japan between the years 1641 and 1853 (when Perry made his(in) famous entry). At a time when Japan almost totally curtailed relationswith other European countries, much of what the Japanese came to viewas European during this period was related somehow to their contact withVOC personnel and the products they imported. But, a number of otherfacts need also to be considered.

First, not all employees of the trading company through which theDutch were represented in Japan - the VOG - were Dutch. Japaneseimages from the period tend to distinguish only between 'Red Hairs' (komo) as they referred to the Dutch and their 'dark' servants. More than halfthe sailors and soldiers in the VOG's employ, however, came from otherEuropean lands. And, among its officials who had the most significantcontact with Japanese in terms of exchanging knowledge were foreigners aswell.

Further, the Shogun's court in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) and Japan'selite recognized that Europe was not a politically or culturallyhomogenous land mass, as reflected in a number of writings on thesubject, the conflicts and differences they had witnessed between the Dutchand Portuguese and the fact that both the Russians and British continuedtheir efforts throughout the late eighteenth century to establish traderelations with Japan; official negotiations and other forms of contact withRussians led especially to concerns about foreign invasion and reflectionson Western modes of government by the end of the eighteenth century.6

We therefore want to be careful about how we read the popular tendencyto conflate Japanese knowledge of, experience with and prejudice aboutthe Dutch with ideas about Europe more generally. Rather than sayingthat the Japanese used their experiences with the Dutch to drawconclusions about Europe, its culture(s) and the goods and ideas itsrepresentatives peddled, it is perhaps more accurate to remark that theJapanese based their visions of 'the West' on their experiences with thesorts of individuals and products who/that - for reasons related to bothsides of the exchange - were drawn into expeditionary and commercialactivities, often (but not exclusively) under the auspices of the VOC. Thisgoes as well, then, for how we understand the fact that the word coined byJapanese for the study of 'Western' knowledge during this period wasRangaku - Dutch Studies.

It is also the case that the Dutch were not Japan's only trading partners.The earlier presence of Portuguese traders and missionaries (who wereforced to leave in 1639) left a trace, whose long-term impact has yet to befully appreciated, I believe, particularly in relation to their introduction of'Western' medicine and hospital care. This isn't only a question ofexamining the medical knowledge and procedures they and their books


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might have introduced. Understanding the Portuguese legacy in this areawould require us also to take into account things such as the socio-politicalimpact of Franciscan missionaries who administered hospitals that refusedto distinguish between rich and poor in the care they gave - therebycoupling a particular stream of Catholicism (and perhaps more generalideas about Christianity in Japan) with knowledge and care of the body onone hand and a potentially subversive vision of the body politic on theother.

Once the Portuguese and all others whose presence retained theperceived threat of Christian invasion were banned, the Dutch still had tocontend with competition from Chinese and Korean traders.7 The Chinesewere especially well represented in Japan, with a far larger contingent ofpeople engaged in trade than the Dutch and a history that tied Japaneselanguage and culture to them in a number of important ways.8 This,however, did not exempt the Chinese from being subjected to stereotyping.One finds multiple cases of the Japanese drawing contrasts between therude but metaphysically capable Chinese and the polite, precise andthoroughly materialistic Dutch.9 Finally, despite official bans, the Chinese,who continued to maintain contact with other European nations, broughtEuropean products - including books written in both their originallanguage and in far easier-to-understand Chinese translations - into Japanso that it remained possible and was sometimes easier to obtaininformation about the West through channels other than the Dutch.

Whatever the conduit through which 'Western' goods and knowledgereached Japan, however, it is ultimately the case that the greatestdeterminant of their meaning and use rested on the ways and contexts inwhich they were locally appropriated. To answer the questions with whichI began, then, it is necessary to appreciate the dynamics of ambientJapanese culture.10 This can help us ascertain not only what kinds ofproducts interested the Japanese and in which circumstances they tookpossession of them. It also guides us towards understanding the usestowards which they put putatively 'Western' goods and ideas.

With this said, where do we need to look for answers to our questions?We could, as many have done, focus especially on the official corps oftranslators who were commissioned to serve as intermediaries between theDutch and Japanese. We could also zero in on the pilgrimages made atregular intervals by the head of the VOC factory in Dejima, his physicianand a small number of officials, along with their wares and knowledge toEdo, where they were required to pay homage to the government thatdeigned to allow their continued presence in Japan. We could insteadbegin by comparing Western texts and images with their Japanesetranslations. Or we could choose to cast our net more widely and examinethe ways in which imported (and locally imitated) goods that were mostclosely associated with Europe were taken up by Japanese culture in abroader, more popular sense.11

Here, I briefly sketch a picture that allows us to bring together andmake sense of evidence from all these sources. I want to show that what has


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traditionally been spoken of as 'the transfer of European science andtechnology' to Japan should be considered instead in terms of the localconsumption and appropriation of foreign products. This requires ourappreciation of Japan's unique cultural context in which governmentpolicies, urbanization and commercialization meshed with more localtraditions and interests to form a complex and interactive whole.

GOVERNMENT POLICIES: PRODUCTIVE INITIATIVES AND SOCIO-POLITICALCONTROL

The actual situation in Japan was in fact quite different from the country'scliched image as a fully closed society. Government edicts did indeed seekto guard the borders and control intercultural exchange, but this needs tobe contextualized.12 Edo was far more than an arena of adaptive reaction.As home to the shogun's court, it housed government initiatives thatsought out the kinds of knowledge and know-how deemed useful for theexpansion of Japan's military strength and economic well-being (asdefined by the government's interests, of course). It is worth noting thatsuch import substitution and (at least quasi-) mercantilistic initiatives boreinteresting similarities to contemporary European practices, particularlyin Sweden and a number of German states where the ruling andbureaucratic elites pursued policies directed towards creating a paterna-listic society in which the material and moral welfare of the state and itspopulation were united into a single goal.13 But it is also (perhaps more)important to recognize their reflection of domestic developments in therealm of neo-Confucianism as well as in elements of reigning militaryphilosophy, which stressed 'a starkly rational and realist approach'.14

While it is not the purpose of this essay to trace an intellectual history ofJapanese attitudes towards knowledge production, it is certainly relevantto note that within the very elite circles that advised on and helpedconstruct government policies, the dominant philosophical domain of neo-Confucianism included voices favouring a more empirical and practicalorientation towards nature in relation to the apprehension and use ofknowledge.15 The most explicit - and early - proponent of this orientationwas Kaibara Ekkan (1630-1714), the son of a physician who gave up hisown medical practice to teach Confucian ethics and to write on a variety ofsubjects including agriculture and the flora of Japan. So broad andinfluential were his concerns that the VOC physician Phillip von Sieboldretrospectively (and Euro-centrically) referred to him as the 'Aristotle ofJapan'. Writing in Japanese rather than Chinese, the more usual languageof contemporary philosophical texts, Kaibara found a relatively largeaudience for his version of neo-Confucianism. A key element of hisphilosophical outlook was its emphasis on the direct study of nature as astep in the investigation of the ultimate principle of things. Thus,notwithstanding criticism from those who disagreed with his views,Kaibara managed to integrate the organized observation of nature into aphilosophical scheme that was situated squarely in the mainstream of


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accepted thought. This means that the direct and organized observation ofnature could be - and no doubt was by some - appreciated as part andparcel of neo-Confucianism rather than as a foreign activity (such as'Western science') whose purposes were contrary to the philosophicalsensibilities of official culture.16

Upon reflection, it isn't surprising that Japanese officials should havebeen interested to stimulate the production and appropriation of knowl-edge and know-how in areas such as gunnery, surveying, astronomy andmedicine. This was essential for maintaining and strengthening theShogun's hold on power, relative both to perceived domestic and foreignchallenges and threats. Neither should it be surprising that governmentofficials also took active measures to stimulate knowledge and know-howthat could help improve agriculture, industry, mining and metallurgy - allnecessary to nourish a growing market economy, from which it hoped toprofit. These initiatives resulted in much more than the study andtranslation of Western books, though it is nonetheless emblematic that thefirst project undertaken by the government translation bureau, finallyestablished in 1811, was the translation of Noel Chomel's DictionnaireOeconomique (1709 and subsequent editions), which offered an encyclopae-dic treatment of domestic activities ranging from agriculture, animalhusbandry and fountain designs to soap and starch manufacture, cottonspinning and various artisanal skills.17

By examining the broader consequences of such policies, we are broughtto consider important points at which political and economically baseddecisions and practices spilled over into cultural activities and trends. Thegovernment's focus on improving medicine, farming and mining, forexample, helped stimulate growing interest and involvement in naturalhistory, gardening, collecting and (realist) artistic depiction on the part ofJapan's cultural elite, which could and did lead to interaction withWestern sources.18 Further, because government initiatives also took theform of sending expert investigators and inspectors to various parts ofJapan, sometimes fortuitous and certainly productive meetings could takeplace between members of the Edo elite who had more ready access toVOC pilgrims, their knowledge, skills and products, and provincials(many of whose outlooks were already affected by the government's policyof enforcing periodic residence in Edo - see below). And, while suchpolicies stimulated the inter-regional travel of knowledge and know-howwith interesting and fruitful results, it also fed the very market-relatedculture that came to house an alternative context in which 'Western' goodsmight be investigated and appropriated.

THE URBAN SETTING

In his historical survey of Japanese industrialization, Ian Inkster outlinesthe key economic, political and demographic trends that characterizedTokugawa Japan (1603-1868), concluding with a comparison betweenthese 'Tokugawa dynamics and the "western model'" (or models) that


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preceded modern industrialization.19 Urbanization, widely recognized asan important context for and reflection of modern economic development,was certainly evident in Japan; Edo was home to almost a millioninhabitants in the eighteenth century and a number of other relativelylarge cities were disbursed throughout the country as well. We should notforget that each of these urban centres was distinguished by its own socio-cultural atmosphere: Kyoto housed the court of Japan's shujo (emperor)and its attendant pretensions; Osaka was Japan's commercial and bankingcentre; Nagasaki contained the foreign communities of Dutch and Chinesetraders whose presence added a unique flavour to local culture; provincialcities such as the ancient capital Nara retained the feel of an earlier ageand were seen as out of step with the latest developments of culturallythriving centres such as Edo.20 This certainly implies the dangers ofconsidering Japanese urban development in terms of a single pattern,especially one whose developmental contours are that of '(western)modernisation'.21 At the same time, these cities were connected to thesurrounding countryside and, ultimately, to each other by increasinglywell developed (though still, at times, precarious) networks of agriculturalproduction and distribution, manufacture and trade. They were alsolinked by a complex political system that, together with these othernetworks, helped provide Japanese cities their cultural complexion.22

At the political centre of this complex network stood the shogun's city,Edo. Similar to but more forcefully than what Louis XIV attempted atVersailles, the shogun's government (bakufu) sought to centralize andstrengthen its rule by requiring provincial lords (daimyo), their families andretainers to alternate their residence between their local homes and Edo ona regular basis (sankin kotai). Not only did this stimulate inter-regionalmingling and the rise of a recognized code of elite cultural behaviour. Tocater to this elite migration of luxury consumers, a large influx ofmerchants, trade and services also came to populate the city. Somewhatfamiliar to European historians, this catalyzed more general culturaldevelopments, the results of which coloured Edo's urban culture andcreated liminal spaces within which former distinctions between socialgroups either began to blur or were actually replaced by new forms ofcultural expression. While urban consumers became increasingly inter-ested in observing and owning novel and often, therefore, 'Western' goodssuch as glassware and optical instruments, these spaces - which frequentlycoincided with the city's 'floating world' (i.e. pleasure district) - providedespecially fertile ground for the appropriation and critical examination ofgoods and ideas that were originally rooted in the mindful hand's tension-filled European economy of production and governance.

We can tie this immediately to the daily registers of the VOC in Dejimathat inventoried the type and quantities of both company and privateimports, as Dutch traders were only too happy to comply with localdemand for mirrors, glassware, spectacles, telescopes and various otherscientific devices. But, if this underscores that Dutch supply of consumergoods was explicitly shaped by Japanese demand, it also draws our


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attention to a range of Japanese co-optations as depicted in contemporaryJapanese prints and illustrations: the domestic use of 'Western' instru-ments, such as the highly popular static electric generator (erekiteru)\ theprojection of imported goods and instruments such as telescopes andelectrical machines as advertisement for a commercial establishment'sfashionability; the appropriation of Western characters, commodities andscientific paraphernalia by Japanese authors and artists, often for the sakeof parody or as a stepping-stone to more local philosophical or culturalconcerns. Not only, then, were optical machines, automata and so forthrendered as objects of material consumption or used to manipulate andchange the perspective from which Japanese audiences might look at theirworld. Japanese authors and image makers transplanted 'Western' goodsinto imagined worlds inhabited by local tropes and values, turning toolsthat might be used to examine, interpret and manipulate the natural andmaterial world (s) into vehicles for examining their own domestic worlds ofmoral and spiritual judgment.23

FROM GOVERNMENT POLICY TO MEDICINE AND ART: 'WESTERN' ANAT-OMY AND 'REALIST' ILLUSTRATION

What were the results of the inter-regional travel of knowledge and know-how stimulated by Tokugawa policies? How did these results mesh withthe simultaneous rise of an urban-based and market-oriented culture interms of interest in and the appropriation of 'Western' goods andknowledge? In this and the following section, I examine these questions byfocusing, first, on related developments in medicine and pictorial art and,next, on cultural productions that were rooted in Edo's 'floating world'.

As has been well documented, the corps of translators who served asintermediaries between VOC personnel, virtually none of whom couldspeak Japanese, and Japanese, who couldn't speak Dutch, also providedan important conduit through which innovative medical practices andcritical awareness of European natural knowledge reached interestednative audiences. Because their duties included examining European booksbrought to Dejima to make sure that they contained no traces ofChristianity or other sources of potential subversion, the brighter and moreserious of these men had an opportunity to engage with discussions andimages that presented different visions of the world. Hence, for example, itwas a retired translator, Shizuki Tadao, who introduced Newtonianphysics to Japan, through his critical 'translation' of and commentary on aDutch version of John Keill's Introductiones ad verum physicam et veramastronomian.^

That such projects involved more than passive acceptance andtranslation of Western 'truths' reminds us of developments that had beentaking place in Japanese merchant culture under the Tokugawa regime -the cultural milieu from which the translator corps was drawn. Suchindividuals would not have been raised in an elite cultural context inwhich education was guided by neo-Confucianist considerations of nature,


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humanity and the place of both in the greater scheme of things. But, astouched on in the previous section, Japanese urban settings housedincreasing attention to similar questions, with results that might place bothimported and autochthonous concepts, procedures and illustrations undercritical scrutiny. It would be surprising if (at least) the more literary andphilosophically oriented of Nagasaki's translator community wereuntouched by this trend.

It would also be surprising if they were untouched by the practical andprofit-oriented atmosphere of merchant activity. Translators' involvementin medical practice and education that integrated what they both saw andread in Dejima can be understood as manifesting these various facets.Hence, influential and remunerative schools of 'Dutch' medicine wereestablished by (former) translators, some of whom had obtainedcertificates from the VOG's resident surgeons, to train local practitioners.Among those who attended such schools were men who went on to becomehighly placed physicians and authors within the elite circles of Japanesesociety. Members of the Dejima translators' corps were also among the firstto produce Japanese versions of European medical and anatomical texts,which ranged from partial translations to original works that reflected theauthor's consideration of what he had read and observed. Among suchtranslators was Yoshio Kogyu (1724-1800), who translated numerousmedical treatises and garnered such a major reputation in the field that hewas asked to pen an introduction to the epoch-making book Kaitai shinsho,to which we will return shortly.25

Lest we fall back into the comfortable idea that these translationsprovide evidence for a kind of one-way traffic between Europeaninnovation and Japanese translation and adoption, we need to keep inmind that explicit Japanese requests were what brought European medical(and other) texts to Japan. The books transported to Dejima by VOCships were primarily in response to Japanese orders. Obviously, then, weare dealing with customers who had a good idea of what they wanted, evenif they weren't familiar with the specifics of what they would find in thebooks they ordered. This reminder sets the stage for our appreciation of thefirst recorded human anatomy performed in Japan, in 1754, at the requestof the Kyoto physician Yamawaki Toyo (1705-62).

When reading about Yamawaki, the Western reader might bereminded of the European Reformation, during which time reformersincorporated new methods and sources into their quest to 'cleanse'contemporary practices and recover the integrity of ancient wisdom. Whilesuch projects were motivated by reformist urges, however, the con-sequences could take things in a rather different direction than originallyintended; we need only consider what developed from the initiatives ofNicolas Copernicus and Martin Luther to see the most extreme examplesof this point. In any event, Yamawaki was convinced that directexamination of human cadavers would help demonstrate the truth oftraditional anatomy. In preparation for the dissection of a human cadaver,he dissected an otter and obtained a Dutch translation of Johannes


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Vesling's Syntagma anatomicum, which contained illustrations featuringhuman torsos whose organs were made visible by the skin having beenfolded neatly back like curtains adorning a stage.

The description Yamawaki gave of his experience in his 1759 anatomytext %pshi (On the Viscera) resonates interestingly with contemporarydevelopments in neo-Gonfucianism that underscored the importance ofdirect investigation of nature. He wrote:

Theories may be overturned, but how can real material things deceive? Whentheories are esteemed over reality, even a man of great wisdom cannot fail toerr. When material things are investigated and theories are based on that,even a man of common intelligence can perform well.26

To record and share his anatomical experience with others, Yamawakiengaged his disciple Asanuma Saketsune to make four on-the-spotdrawings that Asanuma then recreated as wood-block prints toaccompany the text. While at least one historian has criticized theseillustrations as being unrealistic, it is interesting to note the following.First, in addition to his medico-anatomical interests, Asanuma was apractising artist aligned with the Maruyama School, which is character-ized by art historians as mixing 'Western' realism and domestic decorativetraditions.27 Second, the illustrations are indeed relatively rough, but thislack of polished presentation can actually be seen as reflecting their originsas on-the-spot sketches of a very messy process - one that had to beperformed relatively rapidly because of the lack of refrigeration to keep thecadaver from decomposing. Finally, the stylized elements that can bedetected do indeed hearken at least partially back to the torsos exposed inVesling's book. Done in a simpler cartoonesque manner and without thedrapery of human skin, Asanuma's rump looks akin to a simple kijkdoos - apeepshow box whose front wall has been removed to allow easierobservation of the domestic scene within.28 As we will see in the followingsection, imported and domestically made peepshow boxes becameextremely popular in Japan's cities during the eighteenth century.

News of Yamawaki's dissection and diffusion of his £oshi stimulated averitable flurry of human dissections in the coming years. This trendculminated in the 1774 publication of Sugita Genpaku's Kaitai Shinsho(New Book of Dissection], a text that is often seen as marking the truebeginning of Rangaku, anachronistically defined by Numato Jiro and othersas the systematic study of European science and technology.29 While it isclearly an overstatement to consider this text as ushering in a newmovement, there is no denying that Genpaku's text generated greatinterest. Here, I reconstruct the important elements that led to thecomposition and publication of Kaitai shinsho, with three goals in mind.The first is to lay bare the network of activity in which its production tookplace - a network that manifests the rippling effects of bakufu policiesdiscussed in the second section of this essay. The second is to examineGenpaku's text as an exercise in rhetoric and pictorial persuasion, whichsought to elevate the reputation of its author and his circle at the expense


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of anatomical work that had already been done by others. Third is toindicate that, nonetheless, Genpaku's text has much to tell us about thedeveloping character of Japanese interests in coupling the reading ofEuropean texts to the direct examination of nature.

This story begins not with the examination of human viscera, but with ajourney to the bowels of the earth. Japan was blessed with sizable metaldeposits within its borders upon which the government relied for bothdomestic coinage and foreign trade. This made mining a crucial activity,which the Shogun's central administration and regional governmentofficials sought to improve in the eighteenth century by sending expertinspectors to various sites throughout the realm. This was especially true inthe latter decades of the eighteenth century, which periodically witnesseddevastating weather conditions, poor harvests, rural and urban unrest (thelatter punctuated by fires that ravaged the wooden structures thatpopulated Japan's cities) and government treasuries in need of revenue.The most famous of these inspectors was Hiraga Gennai (1729-79), whotravelled to provincial Akita in northern Japan (about 450 kilometresnorthwest of Edo/Tokyo) in 1773 to consider ways of improving yieldsfrom its important Ani copper mine.30

Hiraga Gennai had already lived an interesting life up to this point,which is relevant to mention here. Born into a minor samurai family, hegained a position as herbalist to a daimyo who dabbled in 'Dutch Studies'and, was consequently sent by him to study in Nagasaki where longinteraction with Chinese, Portuguese and Dutch medicine and trade hadmade it a centre for both medical training and interaction with foreigngoods and practices. Hiraga Gennai took full advantage of his time inNagasaki and began deepening his knowledge of natural history, whichwas not only crucial to his development as an herbalist, but which alsostood him in good stead as he subsequently cultivated an expertise inmining and mineralogy. Soon thereafter, he chose to give up his positionand status as a samurai and to further his studies in Edo as a ronin(masterless samurai) - which he managed to do, it would seem, withoutlosing social status or cultural credibility.

Among those with whom Hiraga Gennai associated in Edo was a groupof highly placed physicians and amateur artists whose interests merged in aspecial focus on 'Western' anatomy and realist pictorial depiction. Aprominent member of this circle was Satake Shozan (1748-85), who wasboth daimyo of Akita and author of the first Japanese study of the artisticrealism in which he stressed that art should be 'an instrument of nationalutility'.31 Along with becoming acquainted with much of the city'sintelligentsia, Hiraga Gennai visited with the VOC representatives whocame to Edo on their yearly trade mission, establishing himself amongboth Japanese and Dutch as an author, collector, inventor and man ofimpressive learning. Through his contacts with the Dutch, he alsoprocured European art supplies such as oil paints, whose properties andprovenance he studied as part of his natural history investigations andwhich he used to create his own realist tableaux. Coupled with subsequent


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travels, all this would feed into innovative developments in the worlds ofcommercialized natural history, artistic and medical practice.

As stated, Hiraga Gennai found himself in the region of Akita in 1773 toadvise on how to maximize output at the local mines. While there, hechose a new assistant, the artist Odano Naotake, who enjoyed the daimyo'spatronage. Given leave to follow Hiraga Gennai back to Edo, Naotakefound himself appointed governmental 'agent for mining and goods'. InEdo, Hiraga Gennai brought him into contact with Sugita Genpaku, who,along with Ryotaku Maeno and Nakagawa Jun'an, was translating aDutch translation of Adam Kulmus' Ontleedkundige Tafelen (AnatomicalTables) of 1734, and needed someone to illustrate it.

Unlike the four plates composed by Asanuma to accompanyYamawaki's £oshi, Naotake's illustrations were - with the exception ofgiving Japanese characteristics to the faces he drew - fairly exact copies ofalready extant anatomical compositions. But their production nonethelessmanifests an importantly hybrid nature: to 'reproduce' the images hechose to include, Naotake had somehow to traverse the representationaldistance between 'Western' copperplate illustrations and the woodblocksupon which Japan's thriving publishing industry relied. His adoptedrealism and adaptive techniques thus provide an interesting bridge to hislarger artistic oeuvre, as Odano Naotake and a small circle of well placedfriends and patrons formed what has become known as the Akita Ranga(Akita Dutch painting) school, in which Western pictorial techniques wereintegrated in more traditional forms of pictorial expression.32 Most AkitaRanga paintings adapted a high degree of realism, Western perspective andshadowing to depict traditional subjects such as flowers, birds and naturalvistas on traditional surfaces such as parchment and silk.33

If the trail of these illustrations made to accompany the translation of aEuropean anatomy text leads us to a school of painting noted for its hybriduse of materials, techniques, subjects and perspectives, what of thediscipline of anatomy with which they were also associated? As AnnickHoriuchi has argued, Genpaku overstated the innovative character of hisanatomical practices and the publication of Kaitai shinsho. Nonetheless, hisrecollections - which so many commentators have (too unquestioningly)relied upon to structure their narratives of this episode in Japanese history- provide us with important clues regarding the local context andsignificance of stressing direct experience as a way to acquire knowledge.

In deciding to translate Kulmus' anatomy text, Genpaku made ashrewd choice. A number of European anatomy books were extant inJapan by that time.34 What distinguished Kulmus's book from other, moreelaborate publications and recommended it for translation was itsrelatively compact and elementary presentation. It promised to providea handy resource, even more so since the published translation was onlypartial. As such, it was bound to reach a larger audience than would aweighty, complicated and expensive tome. That this was indeed a primarygoal of Genpaku's is emphasized by the fact that one of his fellowtranslators, the highly proficient and meticulous Maeno Ryotaku,


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withdrew his name as co-translator when the book was published. UnlikeGenpaku, he valued thoroughness and high quality over the rapidappearance of an admittedly incomplete text.

But Kaitai shinsho, buttressed by Genpaku's reconstructed history of itscomposition, was meant to do more than speedily convey empiricalinformation about human anatomy. As Horiuchi has sketched, it wasmeant also to contribute towards Genpaku's reputation and that of theculturally elite Edo milieu in which he operated, at the expense of the roleplayed by those associated with the Nagasaki corps of translators - a movethat was bound to help raise the status of the knowledge and subjectinvolved. Consequently, Genpaku downplayed the impact of both priortranslations and dissections, while he embroidered on the claimedinnovation of his marriage of direct experience and textual imagery andthe heroic drama of translating Dutch terminology into Japanese.

Ironically perhaps, the willingness to publish an incomplete translationwas counter-balanced by the great care taken with its illustrations. Thedetail achieved in Naotake's woodblock 'copies' of exquisite Dutchanatomical images leant Kaitai shinsho a visually based weight andauthority that texts such as %pshi lacked. It was through such illustrations,in fact, that individuals such as Genpaku had first been drawn to the ideaof witnessing a real dissection - to see whether such vividly precise imagesmatched what was present in the flesh. He explicitly mentioned the platesaccompanying Kulmus' book and those in Lorenz Heister's Heelkundigeonderwijzingen (Surgical Lessons) as his original sources of inspiration, thoughwe need to recall how mentioning such 'insights' might actually havehelped mask his debts to domestic practices. Just as he claimed that theseillustrations had spurred him to change his view of the human body, so didGenpaku begin Kaitai shinsho with the stated hope that 'all those who readthis book [will] change their outlook'.35

His success in this regard can be measured in three related ways. First asa widely acclaimed representative of Rangaku, the book helped creategrowing interest and involvement in the integration of European studies ofmedicine and nature into the Japanese corpus of learning. Second, amongthose whose outlook was affected were bakufu officials who subsequentlygranted patronage to Genpaku's disciples, no doubt seeing them ascarrying on the tradition he claimed to have initiated. And, finally, hemanaged to change the outlook of posterity by painting a convincingreconstruction of the early years of Rangaku that diminished home-grownefforts to reform anatomical knowledge, especially the important roleplayed by Nagasaki translators and physicians. Instead, he presented ahistorical picture that countered the 'stultifying' traditions of Chinesemedicine to the heroic efforts made by him and his elite Edo collaboratorsto introduce a new and equally foreign tradition of European origins.36 Itis only in the past few years that historians have begun to rediscover thedomestic character of developments so long ascribed to 'foreign influence'.

What makes this doubly ironic is the fact that Genpaku elsewhereattributed his desire for reform in Japanese anatomical understanding to a


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very different and completely Japanese source: Ogyu Sorai's militarytreatise Kenroku gaisho. According to Genpaku:

Sorai writes that true warfare is very different from what so-called masters ofthe art of war teach us. Topography may be hilly or flat, and armies may bestrong or weak. One cannot make identical cut-and-dried preparations thatwill be right for all times and places . . . . Victory or defeat are determined on acase-by-case basis by constant study of strategic principles and by thecapacities of great generals.37

While Genpaku sought to fashion himself as a great general in the battlefor human health and self-knowledge, he claimed the need for directobservation and analysis of nature - precisely the attitude fostered bynumerous Japanese scholars and physicians since at least the time ofKaibara Ekkan.

As already discussed above, this was also the attitude encouraged bycontemporary artists such as members of the so-called Akita Ranga school,who linked the adoption of Western perspective and realism in theirartistic depictions to a stance of 'national utility'. And, here, we see theformation of an interesting set of intersections, with Hiraga Gennai at thecentral point of contact. For it was he who went to Akita on a government-sponsored mission to improve mining practices and output. It was also atleast partly through his involvement with circles in both Edo and Akita,where interests in medicine, anatomy and realist depiction overlapped,that interest in European methods and media of artistic productionincreased and the illustrated publication of Kaitai shinsho was achieved.

Interestingly, we find him also connected to another locus of artistic andtextual production that sought to introduce Japanese audiences to visionsof nature drawn with a realist perspective. The artist and popularizingpolymath Shiba Kokan ((1747-1818), who has sometimes been over-enthusiastically credited with the introduction of Western painting style toJapan and who (perhaps equally overenthusiastically and certainlyerroneously) claimed to have introduced the Copernican system intoJapan, was encouraged by Gennai to pursue his studies of Dutch sourcesand seems to have received some level of patronage thanks to Gennai'sintervention.38 Among his achievements, Shiba Kokan could include theintroduction of copperplate etching to Japan; he completed his firstcopperplate etching, a cityscape of Edo, in 1783 and his impressivehemispheric-relief world map in 1792-93.

But he also published texts that re-presented Japanese appropriations offoreign goods in a way that effaced the local context that in fact shapeddemand and provided meaning, in favour of a projected contrast betweenDutch innovation and Chinese conservatism. While agreeing with theAkita Ranga painters, with whom he was in close contact, that art andobservation ought to contribute to the 'national good', Shiba Kokanattributed the 'spirit of reality' upon which this claimed utility restedexclusively to Dutch medical and pictorial art, granting it superiority overthe 'Chinese' tradition with which he identified contemporary Japanesepractice:


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Medical science cures illness with medicine. Relating this metaphorically topainting, let us call medical science the brush, illness the picture, andmedicines the colours. The attempt of medical science to cure a specific illnesswith general medicine, or the attempt of the brush to correct a picture withcolour, is like not knowing exactly where the illness originates or just what is atfault in painting. The primary aim of western art is to create a spirit of reality,but the Japanese and Chinese paintings, in failing to do this, become mere toysserving no use whatever.39

Here, polemics helped mask history. For, rather than present acomplicated story of multiple Japanese appropriations through whichforeign knowledge and know-how were domesticated and integrated withlocal practices, Shiba Kokan drew a stark picture of opposing forces:conservative tradition versus productive innovation. Associating suchclaimed novelty with the 'Dutch' qualities of precision and utilitysharpened his message and lent it a certain cultural cachet, butsimultaneously projected the Japanese as passively caught between thetraditions and practices of others.

If this section's discussion of anatomy and art began with Yamawaki'sideal of harnessing direct observation to the recovery of ancient knowl-edge, which he identified with Chinese tradition, then it ends with aforward-looking urge that identified similar practices with the even moreforeign Dutch. Alongside Japan's longstanding history of closely orche-strated international exchange, the foreign 'other' thus provided a safe -because culturally distanced - space within which to engage in critical (ifmasked) self-analysis and change. The following section shows this to havebeen the case as well for the appropriation of a fascinating variety ofimported consumer goods.

BACK TO EDO: 'WESTERN' GOODS AND INSTRUMENTS IN THE JAPANESEIMAGINATION

In his provocative book, The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gazeand Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan, Timon Screech richly demonstratesthe need to go beyond an examination of the immediate contacts between'historically significant' Dutch and Japanese individuals and of theseJapanese individuals' 'discovery' of Western knowledge as embodied inbooks and instruments if we are to appreciate Japanese appropriation, re-production and consumption of'Western' products and practices. (Indeed,he makes a point of redefining the word 'Dutch' to indicate a Japaneseprojection rather than an objective label.) Screech makes his case byturning to literary and artistic evidence from the late eighteenth centurythat documents the way in which 'Western science' was perceived and putto work culturally within the broader, more popular sweep of Japaneseculture. Martha Ghaiklin complements this by tracing the influx ofmaterial goods into Japan, based on a view that the circulation,appropriation and consumption of objects provided an equally (if notmore) crucial conduit for the domestic construction of 'Europe and its


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influence'.40 In both these cases, we are drawn to look beyond elite circlesas we consider the questions with which we began. For, as I want toindicate in this final section, much culturally productive work was done inthe liminal pockets provided by the increasingly vibrant urban culture towhich merchants, their customers and socio-cultural collaboratorscontributed. Here, I can do no more than make my way into this hugetopic by turning to the objects and displays featured by Screech in his book- the quantitative and culturally qualitative importance of which areunderlined by Chaiklin's findings.

Urban Japanese consumers were mad about objects and occasions thatfed their apparent love of novelty and desire for visual stimulation. Theycoveted Dutch glassware, mirrors and domestically made prints of foreignvisitors, as well as Dutch-made (or locally imitated) instruments thatextended visual abilities while displaying human ingenuity and skill, suchas eyeglasses, telescopes, microscopes, various measuring devices andtimepieces.41 Alongside or in place of personal ownership, spectatorsflocked to commercial displays and spectacles that used optical instru-ments, such as magic lanterns and perspective boxes offering three-dimensional peepshow views of miniaturized scenes. Also popular weredemonstrations of and treatments with electrical machines and automata.

It is of note that one could tell (at least superficially) similar storiesabout contemporary European metropoles such as Paris, Amsterdam andLondon, where spectators also gathered at theatres, fairs and publicgardens to witness visually manipulative shows and dramatic demonstra-tions of nature in harness.42 Considered apart from the cultural differencesthat coloured visitors' experiences, what interests us here is that these wereall sites that both fed off and fostered socio-cultural mixing and innovation.Traditional barriers were muted or replaced, on one hand, by the creationof spectacles that were themselves the hybrid products of elite and morepopular forms of inquiry, display, critique and entertainment. Buttransgressions of traditional boundaries had also to do with patterns ofconsumer behaviour. In the context of an increasingly evident marketeconomy, cultural elites chose to congregate in places where the social codeallowed for interaction with other social and cultural elements. If this gaverise to burlesque and bawdy forms of behaviour and entertainment, it alsoled to productive contacts between cultural elites, showmen andentrepreneurs.

An important study waits to be done along these lines, for example, thatexamines the activities surrounding the Due d'Orleans, who continued hisfamily's tradition of patronizing any number of projectors, inventors andscientific experimenters while simultaneously turning the Palais Royaleinto a huge and hugely popular pleasure garden in the centre of Parisduring the 1780s. There, one could visit a museum turned theatre Tor theadvancement of knowledge' established by the balloonist Pilatre de Rosier.One could also haunt clubs and cafes where the smart set mingled with(natural) philosophers, artists and men of letters to discuss nature,literature, art and music, or simply to play a game of chess. Or one could


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shop for items ranging from Chinese powders and pills to jewellery, textilesfrom around the world, equestrian supplies and scandalous publications.No less than five opticians operated shops at the Palais Royale, where onecould purchase barometers, thermometers, eye-glasses, telescopes andluminous phosphorous.43 Like their counterparts in London, Amsterdam,Edo, Kyoto and Osaka, Parisians rushed to own and observe items andexperiences from far-flung lands, while witnessing the secrets of nature andhuman cunning displayed in dramatic fashion.

Historians of European science have focused on the tensions producedat this time by the market's increasing role in the overlapping realms ofentertainment and knowledge production. On one hand, expandingpatterns of commodification and consumption made previously eliteconcerns and delights available to a much broader swathe of society, whileit worked to erode cultural differences and question the status quo. On theother hand, it increasingly provided the very tools, resources, skills andprofits required to support the production of (natural) knowledge.Looking particularly at the career of electrical machines and theiroperators in Georgian Britain, Simon Schaffer describes how this conflictmanifested itself in the need to manage electrical displays and medicaltreatment so as not to run afoul of a socio-cultural order built on theasserted distinction between serious instruction and popular entertain-ment. Shaffer writes 'If this distinction broke down, so did the moral orderof natural philosophy'. He and others have traced the way in which GreatBritain's official institutions of science helped police the divide betweenwhat they deemed serious inquiry, reason and control, on one side, andpopular consumption, enthusiasm and uncouth labour on the other.44

In a previous publication, I questioned whether the commercializationof society was necessarily experienced as a threat to the philosophical andcultural order everywhere in Western Europe by examining the electricalmachine's contemporary history in the Netherlands — a long-urbanizedcontext in which the market was not generally considered antagonistic tothe status quo.45 In keeping with this, we might ask ourselves whether itwas no more than an innocent historical fact that it was the Dutch - andDutch merchants, at that - who provided such a prominent conduitthrough which 'Western' goods and knowledge arrived in Japan.46 It iscertainly the case that what might have been regarded as embodiments of(Western) knowledge and know-how appeared first in Japan ascommodities, that is as objects of (commercial) exchange.47

Various historians have commented on the intimate relation betweencommerce and the construction of knowledge during the early modernperiod. Most recently, Harold Cook devoted a book-length study to thisquestion in the context of examining the links between seventeenth-century Dutch commerce, medicine and science.48 Matters of Exchangepresents the thesis that these overlapping realms were held together by thevery same currency that made the growing mass of global exchangespossible: ' . . . matters of fact.' Cook recognizes that these 'facts' themselveshad to be manufactured and is keen to show them as both the by-product


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and the coin of intercultural trade. What interests us here is that his bookboth demonstrates and explains the dominance of a particular kind ofknowledge and know-how, which enabled and profited from Dutchcommercial activities - one in which the results of the intimatecollaboration between mind and hand were parsed into individual factsand commodities that could be collected, exchanged and manipulated forfurther, value-added transactions by both the Dutch and their foreigncustomers.49

While the central focal point and intellectual raison d'etre of Cook's bookis ultimately the Netherlands, the general thrust of this essay has been tofocus our attention on the characteristics and components of Japanesesociety and culture, to help assess what became of European products oncethey entered the port of Nagasaki. I therefore want to draw the reader'sattention back once more from the Dutch to Japan, whose consumersseemed so keen to observe, acquire, collect, represent and exchange bothmanufactured embodiments of 'matters of fact' and the instruments thatwere capable of generating them. This leads to an examination of aJapanese cultural institution that not only provided a safety valve for thepotential disruptions caused by the country's growing market economyand the influx of foreign goods and ideas, but went farther to nourishcultural novelties of its own.

To regulate potential pressures brought on by relatively rapidurbanization, paired with the presence of a growing stock of merchantswho had low socio-cultural status but economic clout and samurai whoofficially belonged to the highest ranks of society but often foundthemselves either far removed from their traditional vocations or withoutgainful employment of any kind, the Edo government licensed specialareas in its major cities where the usual codes of behaviour weresuspended. These pleasure districts, known poetically as 'the floatingworld', came to offer more than just carnal relief, however. They nurturedthe development of a creatively rich, alternative culture, whose heritagehas provided us with our most vivid images of eighteenth-century Japaneseurban life.

Alongside the geishas and kabuki actors, merchants on the make andfrustrated samurai, habitues of the 'floating world' included some ofeighteenth-century Japan's most intriguing authors, whose works rangedfrom fiction and social satire to serious Rangaku treatises. This social mixwas supported by the development of a material culture and patois thatintegrated Dutch words and imported goods with daily (nightly?) life inthe floating world. Under a pseudonym chosen especially for thisdemimonde, for example, Hiraga Gennai penned a variety of works,including studies of mechanics, natural history and the highly popularsubject, electrical machines - which he had helped to introduce, byconstructing the first Japanese generator some time before 1771.

Everything and everyone were potential targets and media for socialcommentary in this ultra-trendy world. It is of special note, then, that somany authors chose to use 'Westerners', their goods and instruments as


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vehicles for making their point.50 Filled with complicated word-plays andridiculously exaggerated circumstances, these sometimes widely readliterary productions further heightened the renown of such goods, theirforeign pedigree and owners, but certainly not as celebrated means foruncovering natural truths and dominating the material world. Rather,their identities and meanings floated along with the contexts in which theywere taken up and used. At times, the thrust was simply to laugh at thebuffoonery of the constructed 'other'. But the purpose could also be moreserious, as when the obviously materialistic preoccupations of the Dutchand their investigative instruments were used as a mirror in which toreflect on which values connected best to a search for deeper insight andunderstanding. Here, we see articulate observers wrestling with the effectsof worldly and self-interested commerce on their society's moral economy,clearly concerned with the more profound consequences of living in aworld of manufactured and manipulable fact.

CONCLUSION

This essay began by noting that the recently published volume The MindfulHand can and should be situated in a more global context. On one hand,further work needs to be done to demonstrate how the global circulation ofpeople, knowledge, skill and goods during the early modern eraproductively fed and profited from the processes and products generallyassociated with European knowledge and know-how.51 On the other hand,further work is needed to trace what became of the mindful hand'sproducts (whether material goods, skills or embodied knowledge) and(socio-cultural, political and/or economic) relationships in which theirproduction was enmeshed, once these goods were transported beyondEurope's borders. Such an endeavour can be approached in different ways.Rather than, for example, considering 'the West and the rest' in terms ofthe 'diffusion of Western science and technology' or through a comparisonbetween productive practices in Europe and elsewhere, I have focused hereon the extra-European context and content of local appropriations thatdid so much to determine what was imported, how imported goods andskills were (e)valuated, interpreted and used, and the ways in which thevery category of 'Western' knowledge and goods was projected asculturally significant.

Examining the case of eighteenth-century Japan has led us to an imageof a complex and dynamic society characterized by, among other things, acentralizing government engaged in policies intended to strengthen bothits power and the economic vitality of its dominions; an array ofindividuals associated either directly with carrying out governmentpolicies or with the dominant political and cultural power structure; anda highly developed urban context noted for housing both a growingconsumer market and cultural alternatives to officially sanctionedproductions and attitudes. In each case, and sometimes in the context oftheir tensions and interactions, contact (direct or through Chinese


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mediation) with the 'Dutch', their wares, skills and embodied knowledgewas continually orchestrated by and filtered through complexly localeconomies of pecuniary, political, philosophical and cultural requirements,demands, prejudices and hopes.

Government policies, for example, adopted a utilitarian view thatencouraged its agents and clients to pick and choose among availablegoods, instruments and practices in keeping with their own needs anddesires, as well as those of the state. For its corps of translators, who foundthemselves most closely and frequently associated with employees of theVOC and who moved between the requirements of their functions, themerchant milieu from which they came, the evolving medical market(which some of them helped to shape) and their own interests, this provedan especially fruitful market. Finally, the farther goods and ideas movedfrom their point of entry at Dejima, the more plastic they proved to be.Artists in Akita used Dutch oil paints and perspective to recreate Japaneselandscapes, while urban entrepreneurs sold tickets for the chance to beelectrified and floating world literati sent hot-air balloons sailing onimaginary voyages and attached magic lanterns to their characters' bodiesin search of a ray of deeper truth.52

The outcome of these activities certainly did as much to construct alocal constellation of meanings for 'Western' knowledge, know-how andmaterial goods as it did to further their assimilation into the marketplacesand consciousness of the Japanese. The dependence of 'Western' productson domestic interest and interpretation is perhaps most neatly symbolizedby the fact that the VOC factory (we see the original use of the word'factory' here, indicating an outpost and warehouse rather than a site ofincreasingly mechanized production) at Dejima was itself only kept afloatby the shogun's financial support during the Napoleonic years, after theVOC had gone bankrupt and the Netherlands ceased to function as anindependent land. There was no obvious reason in such a context toassociate 'Dutch learning' with notions of 'progress' or 'superiority'. Butthere were many reasons and ways, as we have seen, to utilize suchresources for local purposes.

Returning to the suggestion made at the beginning of this essay thatboth the mindful hand and the sources of its managed erasure wereubiquitous, a certain modification would seem to be in order once we turnto locations such as Japan during the late eighteenth century. Not only didDutch-Japanese trade entail an extraction of the commodified products of'European' knowledge and know-how from a regime within which theiroriginal production and valuation were linked to tensions betweenpractical and cultural constructions of the relation between mind andhand. Japan was a complex land whose culture and society werestructured by a myriad of its own categorizing systems - systems thatplotted identities and difference onto a domestically grown grid ofsignificance and value.53 It was within this context that the introduction of'Western' goods and ideas - themselves, as I indicated at the start of thispaper, the result of a productive context enmeshed in global trade -


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contributed to an ongoing domestic discussion on the valuation of thehand, eye and mind as media of productive observation, manipulation and(knowledge) production.

Notes and References1. L. Roberts, S. Schaffer and P. Dear (eds), The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention

between the Late Renaissance and Early Industrialization (Amsterdam, 2007).2. See, e.g. L. Hilaire-Perez and C. Verna, 'Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in

the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era: New Approaches and Methodological Issues',Technology and Culture, 2006, 47: 536-65; J. Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of theKnowledge Economy (New Haven, 2003); M. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of theIndustrial West (Oxford, 1997); History of Science, 2007, 45: Special issue: 'Reflections on JoelMokyr's The Gifts of Athena'. This topic has renewed relevance, given recent debates regardinghow to 're-tool' knowledge production as a means to increase economic productivity, underthe banner of building a 'knowledge economy'.

3. Thanks to Simon Schaffer for this pithy illustration. While not the point of this essay,it is intriguing to consider why this machine, which enjoyed such great visibility in eighteenth-century European culture, was also taken up with such enthusiasm in Japan.

4. On the hybrid activities of individual members of ships' crews, see R. Sorrensen,'The Ship as an Experimental Instrument in the Eighteenth Century', Osiris, 1996, 11: 221-36. On the collaboration between government institutions, trading companies and scientificsocieties, see K. Raj, 'Eighteenth-Century Pacific Voyages of Discovery, "Big Science", andthe Shaping of an European Scientific and Technological Culture', History and Technology,2000, 17: 79-98. Simon Schaffer has shown how this kind of collaboration was at work in thedockyards where the ships that carried these expeditions were built. See S. Schaffer, '"TheCharter'd Thames": Naval Architecture and Experimental Spaces in Georgian Britain', inRoberts et al, op. at. (1) , 279-305. That this collaboration was historically crucial isunderscored by the fact that the Ming government chose to withdraw support in 1433 for thekind of shipping that could have made and sustained China as a global shipping power.'Within a few decades, the initiative in long-distance exploration - and later in trade, too -passed to the Europeans', K. Pomeranz and S. Topik, The World that Trade Created (London,2006), 47.

5. The bibliography of recent work done in this area is too vast to cite here. I limitmyself to Roy MacLeod's instructive introduction to the Osiris volume dedicated to scienceand the colonial enterprise - Osiris, 2000, 15: 1-13 and S. Schaffer, L. Roberts, J. Delbourgoand K. Raj (eds), The Brokered World: Go-Between and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820 (SagamoreBeach, MA, 2009).

6. R. Liss, 'Frontier Tales: Tokugawa Japan in Translation', in Schaffer et al., ibid.', B.Gramlich-Oka, 'Kirishitan ko by Tadano Makuzu: A Late Tokugawa Woman's Warnings',Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies, 2004, 8: 65-92.

7. That Christianity was experienced by the Japanese as threatening has to be takenseriously. Consider, for example, that as many as 75,000 people had converted to Catholicismin the city of Nagasaki by 1605. Consider also the way in which the missionary and morematerially invasive practices by Russians in the north of Japan were viewed with alarm by theturn of the nineteenth century. See, e.g. ibid. On Japan's ongoing relations with China andKorea, see T. Kazui and S. Downing Videen, 'Foreign Relations during the Edo Period:Sakoku Reexamined', Journal of Japanese Studies, 1982, 8: 283-306.

8. The Chinese also had to work under formal restrictions, which included tradequotas, limited travel rights and having their trading post situated in a single place - Juzenji -where a special Chinese town was constructed. Perhaps one in five inhabitants of Nagasakiwas Chinese in the 1780s.

9. On stereotyping of Chinese, see R. Toby as cited in B. L. Walker, 'Foreign Affairsand Frontiers in Early Modern Japan: A Historiographical Essay of the Field', Early ModernJapan: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2002, 10: 44-62, at p. 54. Interestingly, Walker commentson how masquerading as a foreigner provided Japanese with a liminal space within whichthey could appropriate the kind of cultural freedom gained by existing (temporarily) as a


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cultural 'other'.10. I certainly don't mean to imply that 'Japanese culture' can be understood here in

some kind of monolithic sense. See, rather, M. E. Berry, 'Was Early Modern Japan CulturallyIntegrated?', Modern Asian Studies, 1997, 31: 547-81.

11. On relations between the Dutch and Japanese translators, see, e.g. N. Jiro, WesternLearning: A Short History of the Study of Western Science in Early Modern Japan, trans. R. C. J.Bachofner (Tokyo, 1992). On Dutch 'pilgrims' to Edo and contacts between VOC officialsand the Japanese elite, see, e.g. F. Lequin, The Private Correspondence of Isaac Titsingh(Amsterdam, 1990); T. Screech, Secret Memoirs of the Shoguns: Isaac Titsingh and Japan (London,2006); T. Screech, Japan Extolled and Decried: Carl Peter Thunberg and the Shogun's Realm(London, 2005); W. van Gulik, A Distant Court Journey: Dutch Traders Visit the Shogun of Japan(Amsterdam, 2000). Regarding the comparison of Western publications and their Japanesecounterparts, the locus classicus is S. Genpaku, Rangaku kotohajime (1815), which recounts theemblematic translation of a Dutch anatomy text into Japanese. See Dawn of Western Science inJapan (Rangaku kotohajime}, translated by Ryo Z6 Matsumoto, supervised by T. Ogata (Tokyo,1967). See also H. Johnson, Western Influences on Japanese Art: Akita Ranga (Amsterdam, 2004),which focuses on the translation in relation to trends in Japanese art associated with the so-called Akita Ranga school of painting. On the consumption and appropriation of'Dutch' ideasand goods within Japanese popular culture, see T. Screech, The Lens within the Heart: TheWestern Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (London, 2002) and M. Chaiklin,Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Culture: The Influence of European Material Culture onJapan, 1700-1850 (Leiden, 2003).

12. Along with the import and export of material goods and resources, trading with theDutch was used as a conduit for military and political intelligence as well as, more properly,scientific and technical knowledge. For a historical and historiographical review of Japanesepolicies in relation to the construction and management of its borders, see Walker, op. cit. (9).

13. The historian Annick Horiuchi goes so far as to claim that 'the will to contribute tothe prestige of the state and the welfare of the people underlay all scientific inquiry that tookplace in early modern Japan'. See her 'When Science Develops outside State Patronage:Dutch Studies in Japan at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century', Early Science and Medicine,2003, 8: 148-72, at p. 158. On comparable policies and societies in Germany, with specialemphasis on their relation to science, see H. Lowood, Patriotism, Profit, and the Promotion ofScience in the German Enlightenment: The Economic and Scientific Societies, 1760-1815 (New York andLondon, 1991); for Sweden, see L. Koerner, Linnaeus: Mature and Nation (Cambridge, MA,1999).

14. J. McMullen, 'Tokugawa Intellectual History: The State of the Field', Early ModernJapan, 2003, 10: 22-38, 72-85, quotation on p. 30.

15. It is also beyond the scope of this essay to show that 'Chinese' imports, including thephilosophical tradition of Confucianism, need to be understood in terms of Japaneseappropriation. Nonetheless, this parallel exercise needs to be accomplished in order,ultimately, to appreciate Japanese history in relation to its encounters with the rest of theworld. Consider, for example, Tetsuo Naiita's definition of Tokugawa Confucianism:'Tokugawa Confucianism [is] a thought system used initially by Japanese thinkers to orderand explain an indigenous ethical and political reality ....', T. Naiita, 'Intellectual Change inEarly Eighteenth-Century Tokugawa Confucianism', Journal of Asian Studies, 1975, 34: 931-44, at p. 931.

16. For an accessible account of Kaibara Ekken's philosophy, see M. E. Tucker, Moraland Spiritual Culturation in Japanese Neo-Confucianism (Albany, 1989), esp. 28, 44-6.

17. 'Dictionnaire conomique, contenant divers moyens d'augmenter son bien, & deconserver sa sante, avec plusieurs remedes assurez & eprouvez pour un tres-grand nombre demaladies, et de beaux secrets pour parvenir a une heureuse & longue vieillesse. Quantite demoyens pour clever, nourrir, guerir & faire profiter toutes sortes d'animaux domestiques,comme Brebis, Moutons, Bufs, Chevaux, Mulcts, Poules, Abeille, & Vers a Soye. DifferensFilets pour la peche de toutes sortes de Poissons, et pour la Chasse de toutes sortes d'Oiseaux& d'Animaux, &c. Une infinite de secrets decouverts dans le Jardinage, la Botanique,1'Agriculture, les Terres, les Vignes, les Arbres; comme aussi la connoissance des Plantes desPai's etrangers, & leurs qualitez specifiques, &c. Les moyens de tirer tout 1'avantage desFabriques de Savon, d'Amidon; de filer le Coton, de faire a peu de frais des Pierres artificielles,


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fort ressemblantes aux naturelles, de peindre en migniature sans scavoir le dessein, &travailler Bayettes, ou Etoffes etablies nouvellement en ce Royaume, pour 1'usage de ce Pai's,& pour 1'Espagne, &c. Les moyens dont se servent les Marchands pour faire de grosetablissemens, ceux par lesquels les Anglois et les Hollandois se sont enrichis en trafiquant desChevaux, des Chevres, des Brebis, &c. Tout ce que doivent faire les Artisans, Jardiniers,Vignerons, Marchands, Negocians, Banquiers, Commissionnaires, Magistrats, Officiers deJustice, Gentilhommes & autres d'une qualite, & d'un emploi plus releve, pour s'enrichir, &c.Chacun pourra se convaincre de toutes ces veritez, en cherchant ce qui peut lui convenir,chaque chose etant rangee par ordre alphabetique, comme dans les Dictionnaires', Journal desSfavans, 1718, XLII: 657.

18. For details, refer to Johnson, op. cit. (11) , 26ff. Note that, in the case of domesticgrowing of medicinal herbs, interest was also paved by earlier and contemporary Chinesemedicinal practices. Much of these activities fell under the rubric of honzogaku (inadequatelytranslated as 'natural history'). See F. Marcon, The Names of Nature: The Development of NaturalHistory in Japan, 1600-1900 (Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 2007).

19. I. Inkster, Japanese Industrialization: Historical and Cultural Perspectives (London, 2001),24-34.

20. J. L. McClain and W. Osamu (eds), Osaka: The Merchants' Capital of Early ModernJapan (Ithaca, 1999); T. Screech, The Shogun's Painted Culture: Fear and Creativity in the JapaneseStates, 1760-1820 (London, 2000), 48 for a discussion of Nara.

21. For an interesting attempt to compare Edo's urban development with Paris, see J. L.McClain, J. M. Merriman and U. Kaoru (eds), Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in theEarly Modern Era (Ithaca, 1997).

22. For an overview of and the relations between population, economic and politicaltrends, see A. Hayami, 'Japan in the Eighteenth Century: Demography and Economy', in L.Blusse and F. Gaastra (eds), On the Eighteenth Century as a Category of Asian History (Brookfield,VT, 1998), 131-46. For the continued vulnerability of both networks of agriculturalproduction and infrastructure, see Screech, op. cit. (20), 56-110.

23. Numerous illustrations of these 'Western' goods in various contexts of Japaneseappropriation can be found in Screech, The Lens within the Heart, op. cit. (11) .

24. S. Tadao, Rekisho shinsho (New Book on the Calendar and Figures (of the Sky)) (1798-1802). For details, see Horiuchi, op. cit. (13).

25. Horiuchi, op. cit. (13), 159-63.26. Y. Toyo, £oshi, quoted in H. Sukehiro, 'Japan's Turn to the West', trans. B. Tadashi

Wakabayashi, in M. B. Jansen (ed.), Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge, 1989), 446.27. The Maruyama or Kyoto school started with Maruyama kyo, a Kyoto artist who

began as a toymaker and painter of scenes for viewing through stereoscopes, the first of whichwere of Dutch manufacture, imported to Japan by Chinese merchants in 1718.

28. For the illustration in question, see S. Kuriyama, 'Between the Mind and Eye:Japanese Anatomy in the Eighteenth Century', in C. Leslie and A. Young (eds), Paths to AsianMedical Knowledge (Berkeley, 1992), 34.

29. Jiro, op. cit. (11) , 67.30. Gennai was also a mine owner in his own right. Johnson, op. cit. (11) , 31. For more

details on this polymath's fascinating career, see R. Liss, op. cit. (6); S. Hopkins Jones Jr,Scholar, Scientist, Popular Author Hiraga Gennai, 1728-1780 (dissertation, Columbia University,1968); H. Maes, Hiraga Gennai et son temps (Paris, 1970).

31. Kuriyama, op. cit. (28), 36.32. Odano Naotake relied closely on extant Dutch illustrations primarily done by

Gerard de Lairesse for Govert Bidloo's Anatomia humani corporis, which provides anotherglimpse at how many Western publications were available in Japan. Timon Screech uses theword 'painstakingly' to describe the translation process from copperplate engraving towoodcut, op. cit. ( 11 ) , 89.

33. In her study of Akita Ranga, Hiroko Johnson seeks to demonstrate that this artistic'school' also owed much to Chinese sources - especially the work of Shen Nanpin, remindingus of the need to guard against thinking narrowly in terms of 'Western influences' on Japanrather than in terms of Japan's appropriative relations with the world.

34. The number of European dictionaries and texts that discussed geography, medicine,pharmacy and navigation was quite large by this time, thanks largely to the 'private trade'


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sanctioned by the VOC and through Chinese trading channels. See, e.g. Jiro, op. cit. (11) , 57.35. Quoted in Kuriyama, op. cit. (28), 22.36. Genpaku, op. cit. (11), 25, 51-2.37. Quoted by B. Tadashi Wakabayashi, Modern Japanese Thought (Cambridge, 1998),

46.38. C. French, Shiba Kokan: Artist, Innovator, and Pioneer in the Westernization of Japan (New

York, 1974).39. S. Kokan, Seiyogo dan (Discussing Western Painting) (1799), excerpted in Wm.

Theodore de Bary, Sources of Japanese Tradition (Cambridge, 1958), 558.40. Chaiklin, op. cit. (11) .41. In addition to the VOC's daily registers, see Genpaku, op. cit. (11), 17.42. See McClain et al, op. cit. (21).43. For a description of the Palais Royale, see R. Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular

Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford, 1989), 236-49. Interestingly, Isherwood citesthe chant of a hot chestnut vendor at the Palais, which shows that even he was affected by theheady mix of consumption, entertainment and knowledge that marked the garden'satmosphere. The chestnut vendor asserted that he 'had also applied chemical means topreserve the food; to ferment the chestnuts while preserving all their succulent molecules' (p.240).

44. S. Schaffer, 'The Consuming Flame: Electrical Showmen and Tory Mystics in theWorld of Goods', in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London,1993), 489-526, at p. 512; I. Morus, 'Currents from the Underworld: Electricity and theTechnology of Display in Early Victorian England', Isis, 1993, 84: 50-69; J. Golinski, Scienceas Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 (Cambridge, 1992).

45. L. Roberts, 'Science Becomes Electric', Isis, 1999, 90: 680-714.46. At the risk of repeating myself, it is worth reiterating that the difficult-to-assess role of

Chinese merchants in this process requires further development before a full picture canemerge. Hopefully, it suffices here to remark that they too were engaged in commerce, whichplaced the European goods they brought to Japan in a not fully dissimilar commercial contextto those that were introduced by the Dutch.

47. I have placed the word 'commercial' in parentheses because some of these itemsarrived in answer to requests from the court at Edo. They were perhaps, then, not directlyobjects of commercial exchange, but were certainly offered as a means to 'grease the wheels' oftrade.

48. P. Smith and P. Findlen (eds), Merchants and Marvels (London, 2002); H. Cook,Matters of Exchange (New Haven, 2007).

49. For details of this point, see my review of Matters of Exchange in History Today, 2007,57(8): 62-3.

50. Should we see this as an obvious counterpart to the European penchant for settingcritical remarks in exotic mouthpieces? One could refer to countless works such asMontesquieu's Lettres persanes, Diderot's Les bijoux indiscrets and Supplement au voyage deBougainville.

51. For this approach, see Schaffer et aL, op. cit. (5).52. See, e.g. Screech, op. cit. (11) , 109-12, 225-9.53. Berry, op. cit. (10).


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The West Had Science and the

Rest Had Not? The Queries ofthe Mindful Hand

I A N I N K S T E R

QUERIES OF THE MINDFUL HAND

How does the 'mindful hand' threaten existing distinctions betweensomething called the 'history of science' (the scientific revolution and allthat) and something recognizable as 'the history of technology' (theindustrial revolution and all that)? Clearly, if much of materialadvancement into modernity has come from hybrid sites of knowledge,skills and techniques, then discourses that settle around firm dichotomiesbetween science and technology are likely to be only partially successful inexplaining the dynamics of the past. So, an implication of this project isthat such institutionalized discourses should be abandoned. Somewhatmore formally, can the 'mindful hand' become a useful engine ofcomparison at a global level? If the 'mindful hand' was a true mechanismof change in the early-modern West, then was its absence a significantfeature of the regimes of material production in non-Western parts of theworld?

If the purported distinction between the world of the hand and theworld of the mind is a social construct of the clerical masters of the early-modern Western world, then the task of the critical historian might becertainly at least two-fold. First is to show how the distinction betweenhand and mind was created and maintained, and the social function thatsuch a dichotomy served in different locations of early modernity. Here,historians might well illustrate what Roberts has aptly labelled the'coercive rhetoric and the brutal deeds' of those literary classes determinedto re-forge hierarchies in the changing world of novel commerce,knowledge and technique.

Second is to show how actual historical sites of innovative knowledgeand material advancement did not emerge from such a distinction, butrather from the auspicious workings of the 'mindful hand'. Thus, in herdiscussion of the working environment of Christiaan Huygens at theBibliotheque Royale in Paris, Fleischer describes how he 'received variousguests, ambassadors, merchants, engineers. His study became a Dutchmeeting place, a site for discussions and exchanging knowledge and goods'.


206 The Queries of the Mindful Hand

And, furthermore, without such a 'network of politicians, amateur-friendsand family, objects and ideas could not be circulated, nor transformed intonew elements of natural inquiry and invention'.

The case-study traditions of history of technology at times haveneglected the effective contexts of technological innovation, especially if weplace such contexts as lying at least partially beyond ancillary techniques,institutions and information or training systems. Indeed, some historiansseem to assume that the effective environment of technological change isan unproblematic reflection of the 'national' industrial culture withinwhich the change is taking place. It is this perspective that can lead to thenotion that since all tinkerers and engineers live in a common nationalculture, the achievements of a Watt or a Marconi are either massivelyexaggerated, incremental outcomes of the 'atmosphere of the age', moreawkwardly, that they were mere participants within an evolutionarystream or, at the opposite extreme, that they were deviant heroes who lieoutside their cultural mainstreams.1 The notion that local sites ofendeavour might vary quite radically even within a single national settingallows for more colourful argument and a more extensive empirical base.The mindful hand may flourish within characteristic collective sites as wellas be a characteristic of individual humans.2 The interpretations oftechnology in complex sites within the present collection of essays hasshown that the knowledge-practice distinctions that we all tend to carry aspart of our historical approach are normally blurred, that neither side ofthe distinction may be formally maintained, that knowledge is often asmuch a matter of the wielded weapon as it is an external resource forpractical action, and that the interactions of key individuals within andbetween sites were enormously complex and normally of profoundimportance to ultimate outcomes. In the editorial words of Roberts andSchaffer, 'this world was made up of a regime both hybrid and interlinked.Ingenuity, know-how and sets of skills mattered in studios and libraries,workshops and markets, courts and mills'.3 The task of the historian, then,is to make sense of specific articulations between different versions ofingenious knowledge and knowledgeable techniques. As our contributorsto this collection show, such articulations quite commonly took placewithin complex sites of creative endeavour.

Historians now write much about the impact of national or localcultures upon aspects of material advancement; it has also become acommonplace in contemporary innovation studies, science policy andpublic policy discussions, especially amongst those whose job it is toconstruct sites of advanced discourse and application such as science citiesor technology parks.4 But a leading question emerges: What has been therelationship between 'material and knowledge production regimes' -which may be translated as features of 'national cultures' - and actualinnovation in specific sites of material or technological advancement? Thisis a question of potentially global and timeless import. With reference tothe hybrid activities occurring within advanced sites of the mindful hand,it is reasonable to postulate that site advancement did not depend directly


Ian Inkster

upon the 'culture' of the national regimes in which they were located,perhaps financed, perhaps even instigated. Is it not, then, time to abandonhistorical approaches that focus on the supposed attributes of so-callednational cultures?

How does the notion of the mindful hand fare when we move away fromsites of initial technique advancement to those of its active consumption,bearing in mind once more that 'follower' sites are very rarely passivereceivers of blueprint knowledge and technique? Do such sites need toreplicate centres of leadership (a seeming belief of many policy makers andadvisers in Europe and Asia today) or have they historically shown otherstrengths or weaknesses? We might presume that the ready presence of the'mindful hand' in consumer sites would allow greater capacity foradaptation to local circumstance of the knowledge or machinery enteringfrom elsewhere, indeed to entirely new sets of creative advancement. Thisis an argument at times offered to explain the success of Meiji Japan.5 Incontrast, a clerical or scholarly hierarchy might impose enormous tasks offormal learning and institution-building on a system hardly able to copewith their expense or afford the time of their construction. The absence ofthe 'mindful hand' will thus impose inhibitory costs upon later developers,especially if such absence is itself a reflection of the social power of anexisting clerisy.6

Of greater importance to global historians, the 'mindful hand' rubricthreatens all analyses that postulate clear distinctions between the 'them'and the 'us' of the material world. Were winners and losers in fact arrayedalong one side of a matrix that, on its other axis, observed similardistinctions between knowledge (usually Science) and its applications?May we continue to tell the history story in terms of 'Western' science andits downstream applications versus the 'culture of the other' and itsupstream prohibitions? Against recent archival work, should we continueto dismiss the system of Imperial examinations in China as restrainingtalented scientific enquiry and, thus, technological advancement? Ormight we more seriously interpret such vigorously hierarchical systems asinhibitory of material advancement, not so much because they precluded'science', but because they reduced the effective proximity between thosewho produced and gained status from knowledge and those who workedintelligently with their hands at the same time as they minimized rewardsto artful labour?7 These are very different ways of looking at our world andour history. The student of the 'mindful hand' might rather ask: Whatevidence do we have that sites existed in Imperial China that fusedknowledge, artisanal skills and technique enquiry into one workingcomplex? Note, we are not asking here that the knowledge or thetechnique should somehow represent parallels with developments in theWest. Within a perspective of the 'mindful hand', of skills and specific sitesof activity, the character of the relationships between things (in this case,site hybridity) becomes as important as the character of the things.

Finally, did the intrusion of the West on other areas of the globe fromthe early-modern period reduce or inhibit the emergence of the 'mindful


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The Queries of the Mindful Hand

hand' in such other places? If Western threats and challenges forced a setof policies in late nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia that effectively ruinedgreat numbers of traditional kustarni industry sites in textiles andmetallurgy, did this, in turn, reduce the capacity of such sites to act asfollower sites of the 'mindful hand'? If British commercial policies andaggressions weakened the economy of craft knowledge in many parts ofIndia during the nineteenth century, did this, in turn, erode the existingsites of the 'mindful hand' and reduce the potential for materialdevelopment in twentieth-century India?8

AT THE LEVEL OF THE WORLD

By using formal measures of achievement, such as income, nutrition orconsumption per capita, an older economistic positivism could address theproblem of the great bifurcation of the world with reasonable certaintyand authority. The contemporary switch to the themes of 'culture' -institutions, knowledge and intellect, social interests and so on - hasthreatened such seemingly neutral comparisons and methods. Now, anyprogramme that utilizes material on interests, institutions, instruments andknowledge as some type of explanation of the global bifurcation of rich andpoor faces the problem of finding comparators that will not beimmediately condemned as Eurocentric and beyond the post-modernpale. We now contend that the 'mindful hand' approach may representjust such a desired engine of comparison.9

With our list of queries, we invoke the claim that 'mindful hand'approaches may be utilized to interpret fairly global events withoutbecoming even covertly Eurocentric. The simplifications evoked by usingterms such as 'science' have in fact complicated discussions concerning theGreat Divergence of historical experiences that took place between theWest and the rest some time in the early-modern period. As soon as wewrite that the West Had Science and the Rest Had Not, then we are on theroad to an explanation of world history that obscures so many forms ofknowledge and a multitude of styles of application and gainful production.The question remains, how far can we go with comparison and theconstruction of more global views? Can we escape the simplicities of starkdichotomy, attain a non-Eurocentric stance and yet gain in coherence?Can we begin to communicate a new approach to world history throughacknowledging the mindful hands that lurk within sites of technologicalendeavour?

Relations or links between state authorities and creative sites appear asa potential global theme. How influential has the state been in creating,encouraging or inhibiting the mindful hand within creative sites ofendeavour? In late developers, there is good evidence that large, civil-engineering projects, such as the arsenals at Jiangnan or Yokosuka, weredesigned to deliberately foster close relations between existing handicraftsand artisanal skills and introduced machinery and formalized knowledge,and Meng Yue has referred to 'hybrid science' in just this regard.10 But, in


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any system in which skills or knowledge might frequently travel, so too canauthority and its injunctions, and these may be such as to inhibit ratherthan encourage novelty. The problem of authority seems to loomespecially in sites based on large, public goods technologies such as docksor irrigation schemes or at such places as customs and excise offices, at thevery heart of early-modern fiscal-military states. Might it be possible towrite global history that embraces such cases and distinctions? How werethese elements configured in different cultural and material settings? If thestate, at times, coordinated proximity between knowledge and technicalenquiries - can this be found elsewhere than in Europe and, if so, weresuch sites eminent in the creation of material advance, in creativeadaptation of the tools or techniques of others? Authority might well, as inseveral European cases, harness useful and reliable knowledge to addressopposition to new practices, organizations or techniques. How often maythis be found in early-modern Asia?

If projects were, as often as not, sites for decisions and knowledgeaccumulation, verification and modification, how did different regimesmanage such processes to their advantage? With such civil engineering, wedo seem to have a 'public goods' situation for knowledge - projects areahead of demand at great cost and possible large risk, and are thus notundertaken by any conventional market—entrepreneurial nexus. If theyare not state-run officially, then they certainly need state patronage - fromfen drainage to canals to locomotive railroads, contracting, legalmechanisms and regulations are all required and, here, a public displayof seemingly authoritative knowledge was a requirement for mostproponents or antagonists, and this was set within a tenuously elongatedprocess. Is it possible for historians to analyse the range of such sites interms of the existence of the 'mindful hand' within them?

Returning to one of our leading queries above, just how representativewere creative technological sites? Surely, this enquiry should adopt acomparative and global aspect? The Venetian dockyards did not representordinary Italian technique; neither did Henry the Navigator's famousobservatory and school of navigation set up at Sagres represent the normalcongeries of skill found in Portugal. It might nonetheless be recalled thatthese were principally assemblage technology sites, and of ultimate concernto governments. Much has been written on just how enclavist or foreign suchlarge-scale public goods sites were, whether those of Peter the Great inRussia or the arsenals of late-nineteenth-century China and Japan. Didtheir undoubted absorption of high skills from everywhere in the globe, andtheir frequent use of displays of formalized useful and reliable knowledge aspart and parcel of their local political and cultural persuasions, create amode of technological advancement that has coloured the perceptions ofmany historians and swept from view the more mundane sites of mechanicalengineering endeavour in small, competitive and far more numerous andpervasive artisan workshops? More interestingly, may the balance of theseperspectives be redressed in a new global cultural history of technologybased on the complete range of sites of endeavour?


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The Queries of the Mindful Hand

A final global query: Is it ever possible for a truly effective site oftechnical advancement to exist relatively bereft of our 'mindful hand? DoPh.D.s a productive regime make? It might be tempting to argue thatrecent and contemporary experience may boast the great salience of largesystems of formal knowledge and organized sequences of its application inboth private and public sectors. Many commentators on Japanese successin the 1980s and 1990s emphasized the seeming centrality of massiveMoonlight (energy), Sunshine (energy) and Fifth Generation (computer)projects.11 Against such an argument, we may weigh the seemingly poorreturns to many such projects, as well as the work of such recent historiansas Ghristophe Lecuyer, who have shown that greatest success has arisenwhen super-sites of endeavour (in his case, Silicon Valley during 1930-70),have evolved from earlier and simpler sites of craft, industrial expertise andtacit knowledge.12

So, if the 'mindful hand' is not all in the past, may it now be nurtured atthe global level in some effort to more seriously address the failure oftechnological change to become the lever that shifted the entire world intoprosperity?

Notes and References1. For representative contrasting approaches to this, see T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of

Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1970); D. Lamb and S. M. Easton, Multiple Discovery (London,1984); S. Schaffer, 'Making up Discovery', in M. A. Boden (ed.), Dimensions of Creativity(Cambridge, MA, 1994), 13-51.

2. I. Inkster, Technology in World History: Cultures of Constraint and Innovation,Emulation, and Technology Transfers', Comparative Technology Transfer and Society, 2007, 5:108-27.

3. L. Roberts et al., The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance toEarly Industrialization (Amsterdam, 2007), preface, xix.

4. M. Castells and P. Hall, Technopoles of the World: The Making of 21st Century IndustrialComplexes (London, 1994); A. Hommels, Unbuilding Cities: Obduracy in Urban SociotechnicalChange (Cambridge, MA, 2005); C. Leadbeater and J. Wilsdon, The Atlas of Ideas: How AsianInnovation Can Benefit Us All (London, 2007).

5. However, this is often complicated by a nihonjinron approach, in which this attributeis seen as intrinsic to a thoroughly unique Japanese culture, even to claims of a Japanesesystem that denies the very individualities that dichotomies such as mind and hand require. Ifall working individuals are effectively relatums, as in the Masuda model, then all groups willhave some capacity to organically generate mindfulhandedness and hybrid advances and nosuch dichotomies should emerge as natural features of the cultural system. See K. Yoshino,Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan (London, 1992); Masuda Foundation ResearchProject Team for Japanese Systems, Japanese Systems: An Alternative Civilization (Yokohama,1992).

6. This sort of point is most commonly raised for the followers of the nineteenthcentury, often under a broadly Gerschenkronian framework: see P. A. Gerschenkron, EconomicBackwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 1966) and I. Inkster, Science andTechnology in History: An Approach to Industrialisation (London, 1991). Nevertheless, pre-industrialized Europe witnessed sites of followership that could well be analysed in terms ofthe functions of the mindful hand. Was the mindful hand less and less present as we movefrom centres of leadership such as England or France towards the German states or Russia, orwas it not? See I. Inkster, 'Mental Capital: Transfers of Knowledge and Technique inEighteenth Century Europe', Journal of European Economic History, 1990, 19: 403-41; I. Inkster,'Technological and Industrial Change: A Comparative Essay', in R. Porter (ed.), TheCambridge History of Science, Vol. 4, Eighteenth Century Science (Cambridge, 2003), 845-81.


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7. M. Lackner and N. Vittinghoff (eds), Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning inLate Qing China (Leiden, 2004); B. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550-1900(Cambridge, MA, 2005); C.-Y. Liu (Jerry), 'Comparative Studies of European and ChineseCultural Identity: A Conceptual and Historical Approach', Ph.D. dissertation, Faculty ofArts and Humanities, The Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom, 2002; J. C.-Y.Liu, 'Cultural Logics for the Regime of Useful Knowledge during the Ming and Early QingChina c. 1400-1700', 9th Global Economic History Network Conference, LSE and WenzaoUrsuline College of Languages, 9-11 May 2006, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

8. I. Inkster, 'Lessons of the Past? Technology Transfer and Russian Industrialisationin Comparative Perspective', Science, Technology and Society, 1998, 3(2): 307-33; A. Maddison,'The Historical Origins of Indian Poverty', Banca Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review, 1970,23: 46-72; K. N. Chaudhuri, 'India's International Economy in the 19th Century: AnHistorical Survey', Modern Asian Studies, 1968, 2: 105-26; H. D. Woodman, 'Imperialism andEconomic Development: England, the United States and India in the Nineteenth Century',Research in Economic History, 1977, 2: 141-72.

9. I. Inkster, 'Thoughtful Doing and Early-Modern Oeconomy', in L. Roberts et al., op.cit. (3), 443-52.

10. T. Hashimoto, 'Introducing a French Technological System: The Origins and EarlyHistory of the Yokosuka Dockyard', East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine, 1999, 16: 53-72; Yue Meng, 'Hybrid Science versus Modernity: The Practice of the Jiangnan Arsenal1864-1897', EASTM, 1999, 16: 13-52.

U . S . Tatsuno, The Technopolis Strategy (New York, 1986); Y. Yamamoto, T. Kawamotoand D.-S. Oh, The Science City in a Global Context', International Science CitySymposium, Kansai Science City, Japan, 16-23 October 1994; M. V. Brock, Biotechnologyin Japan (London, 1989).

12. C.-M. Lee, W. Miller, M. Hancock and H. Mowen (eds), The Silicon Valley Edge: AHabitat for Innovation and Entrepreneur ship (Stanford, CA, 2000); C. Lecuyer, Making SiliconValley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech 1930-1970 (Cambridge, MA, 2005).


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Contents of Former Volumes

TWENTY-FIFTH ANNUAL VOLUME, 2004 (9780826471871)

MARTIN WATTS and D. JOHN LANGDON, An Early TowerWindmill? The Turweston Tost Mill' Reconsidered.NICK HAYES, Prefabricating Stories: Innovation and Systems Technol-ogy after the Second World War.JAN VAN DEN ENDE, Impacts of Technology Reassessed: A Retro-spective Analysis of Computing Technology.IAN INKSTER, Introduction: Indisputable Features and NebulousContexts: The Steam Engine as a Global Inquisition.MARK ELVIN, Some Reflections on the Use of 'Styles of ScientificThinking' to Disaggregate and Sharpen Comparisons between China andEurope from Song to Mid-Qing Times (960-1850 CE).ROB ILIFFE, Comments on Mark Elvin.H. FLORIS COHEN, Inside Newcomen's Fire Engine, or: The ScientificRevolution and the Rise of the Modern World.ALESSANDRO NUVOLARI, The Emergence of Science-Based Tech-nology: Comments on Floris Cohen's Paper.GRAHAM HOLLISTER-SHORT, The Formation of KnowledgeConcerning Atmospheric Pressure and Steam Power in Europe fromAlcotti (1589) to Papin (1690).KENT D. DENG, Why the Chinese Failed to Develop a Steam Engine.DAVID WRIGHT, Response to Kent Deng.CHUN-YU LIU, Response to Kent Deng.RICHARD L. HILLS, The Development of the Steam Engine from Wattto Stephenson.IAN INKSTER, The Resources of Decisive Technological Change:Reflections on Richard Hills.NATHAN SIVIN and Z.JOHN ZHANG, Steam Power and Networks inChina, 1860-98: The Historical Issues.R. BIN WONG, A Comment on Sivin and Zhang.

TWENTY-SIXTH ANNUAL VOLUME, 2005 (9780826489708)

HOWARD DA WES and CHRISTOPHER DAWES in collaborationwith GERRY MARTIN and ALAN MACFARLANE, Making Thingsfrom New Ideas.

History of Technology, Volume Twenty-nine., 2009


NICHOLAS GARCIA TAPIA, The Twenty-One Books of Engines andMachines Attributed to Pedro Juan de Lastanosa.R.ICHARD L. HILLS, Richard Roberts' Contributions to ProductionEngineering.MICHAEL PARIS, Promoting British Aviation in 1950's Cinema.

Special Issue: Engineering DisastersR. ANGUS BUCHANAN, Introduction.DAVID K. BROWN, Maritime Disasters and the Law.DEREK PORTMAN, Suspension Bridges.R. ANGUS BUCHANAN, The Causes of the Great Sheffield Flood of1864.P. R. MORRIS, Semiconductor Manufacturing and Chemical Contam-ination within Silicon Valley.BERENDA J. BUCHANAN, Gunpowder: A Capricious and UnmercifulThing.JOHN H. BOYES, Engineering Disasters: Thoughts of a FactoryInspector.PETER STOKES, Fatigue as a Factor in Aeronautical Disasters.DAVID ASHFORD, Design Compromises in the Space Shuttle.HENRY PETROSKI, Past and Future Bridge Failures.

TWENTY-SEVENTH ANNUAL VOLUME, 2006 (9780826495990)

HANS ULRICH VOGEL, The Diffusion and Transmission of theRotary-Fan Winnowing Machine from China to Europe: New Findingsand New Questions.DAVID PHILIP MILLER, Watt in Court: Specifying Steam Enginesand Classifying Engineers in the Patent Trials of the 1790s.ANGEL CALVO, Business and Geopolitics in the International Transferof Technology: Spanish Submarine Cables, 1849-1930.

Special Issue: The Professional Identity of Engineers, Historicaland Contemporary IssuesIRINA GOUZEVITCH AND IAN INKSTER, Introduction: Identify-ing Engineers in History.ANDRE GRELON, French Engineers: Between Unity and Heterogene-ity.MARIA PAULA DIOGO and ANA CARDOSO DE MATOS, Being anEngineer in the European Periphery: Three Case Studies of PortugueseEngineering.ANTONI ROCA-ROSELL, GUILLERMO LUSA-MONFORTE,FRANCES BARCA-SALOM and CARLES PUIG-PLA, IndustrialEngineering in Spain in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: FromRenewal to Crisis.


214


TWENTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL VOLUME, 2008 (9780826438751)

JAMES SUMNER AND GRAEME J. N. GOODAY, IntroductionLAURA DeNARDIS, IPv6: Standards Controversies around the Next-Generation Internet.ANDREW J. RUSSELL, Standardization across the Boundaries of theBell System, 1920-38.STATHIS ARAPOSTATHIS, Morality, Locality and 'Standardization'in the Work of British Consulting Electrical Engineers, 1880-1914.CHRIS OTTER, Perception, Standardization and Closure: The Case ofArtificial Illumination.JAMES SUMNER, Standards and Compatibility: The Rise of the PCComputing Platform.FRANK VERAART, Basicode: Co-Producing a Microcomputer Esper-anto.KAREN SAYER, Battery Birds, 'Stimulighting' and Twilighting': TheEcology of Standardized Poultry Technology.

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