The Explanations of Snow in the Taixi shuifa 泰西水法 (Hydromethods of the Great West, 1612) and Their Reception beyond the Ming–Qing Transition

Abstract

The Taixi shuifa (Hydromethods of the Great West, 1612), composed jointly by the Italian Jesuit Sabatino de Ursis and the Chinese official Xu Guangqi, is much more than a technical treatise about Western hydraulic pumps. It also contains an extensive theoretical chapter about the “principles of water” (shuili), including some questions about snow and the formation of its hexagonal crystals in the atmosphere. This essay takes the idiosyncratic answers given in the Taixi shuifa as an example of some of the characteristics of West–East knowledge transfer during the early modern period. Compared to traditional Chinese ideas about these phenomena, the explanations given in the Taixi shuifa appear as a creative combination of standard Renaissance knowledge with a novel quest for experimental verification and first attempts at a mathematization of nature that are not found in subsequent Jesuit works on this topic. However, despite an initially lively response on part of the learned audience during the Ming–Qing transition, the innovative approach of the Taixi shuifa did not eventually lead to decisive changes in traditional Chinese perceptions, and thus foreshadows the growing divergences in scientific developments between China and the West.