The Celestial River: A Reconstruction

Abstract

Those of us who wish to acquire an understanding of the history of science and technology in China are fortunate. Joseph Needham's work on the subject, which started to appear in 1954, is now near completion.1 It not only provides new insights and knowledge, but helps us to understand the tantalizing descriptions of old apparatus which have no surviving artifacts or illustrative diagrams. These descriptions present problems of reconstruction not yet decisively solved. No doubt this is partly due to the extraordinary economy of expression employed in these texts: At first sight they often appear quite unintelligible. One wonders if it is at all possible to reconstitute the ancient apparatus on the basis of apparently enigmatic texts which may well contain errors of transcription. This suspicion is counterbalanced by the equally obvious idea that our lack of ready understanding may be due to the large cultural difference, manifest also in its technological aspects, between the China of many centuries ago and the world we are living in now. We cannot dismiss these descriptions as corrupt before we have explored all avenues of interpretation; we have to guard ourselves against the temptation to emend these texts until a reconstruction emerges which may be readily understood in terms of present-day technology, even though its historical value remains questionable. In the text analyzed below the one emendation found necessary concerns a common scribal error.