Ferdinand Verbiest Research Articles

Introduction and Development of the Screw in Seventeenth-Century China: Theoretical Explanations and Practical Applications by Ferdinand Verbiest

This research note gives a short account of the introduction of the screw into China. It focuses on the transmission of the technological knowledge and practical application of screws by the Jesuits of the China mission in the seventeenth century. The main source used is Terrenz (Johann Schreck) and Wang Zheng’s Yuanxi qiqi tushuo (Record of the Best Illustrations and Descriptions of Extraordinary Devices of the Far West), which in chapter two contains a description in twenty-one sections of the screw as the sixth of the six single machines. This source is significant as Ferdinand Verbiest, who focussed on the practical applications of the screw, copied some parts of the text in his Lingtai yixiang zhi (Treatise on Astronomical Instruments at the Imperial Observatory; 1674) and some of the illustrations in his Yixiang tu (lllustrations of Astronomical Instruments). The research note starts with an analysis of Verbiest’s text on the use of screws, which is linked to illustration 87 (Fig.4) in the Yixiang tu. Other applications of mechanical techniques can be seen in his illustrations 62, 66 (see Fig. 2, 2a, 2b), 67 (Fig. 3) and 88 (Fig. 5), but without any explanations. They were presumably introduced by Verbiest as additional reference material for those interested in the practical use of screws. This is followed by an analyis of Verbiest’s explanations of the use and particular functions of screws as provided in the specific texts dedicated to each of his six new instruments. Finally, the origin of the Yixiang tu prints will be elucidated and the original pictures from the Western sources reproduced.

The Jesuits in China and the Circulation of Western Books in the Sciences (17th-18th Centuries): The Medical and Pharmaceutical Sections in the SJ Libraries of Peking

In total, 281 medical and pharmaceutical books, and some journals (including ‘general’ ones, such as the Gazeta de Lisboa) are preserved in the so-called Beitang collection (Peking). These, in the main, originate from the pre-1773 Jesuit collections in Peking and elsewhere. They constitute, together with other written sources, a primary source reflecting the medical aspect of the Jesuit presence and activities in seventeenth till eighteenth century China. It is possible to identify a core of 68 items brought to Peking in 1623. This is followed by a decline (in the number of acquisitions, and probably interest in upgrading the collection), until in 1685 Ferdinand Verbiest tried to provide fresh impulse to book acquisition, without significant results. Yet, medical books continued to arrive until the very end of the Jesuit presence in Peking, apparently more often at the (French) Beitang than the Portuguese college (Nantang), with its strong focus on mathematics, linked to the activities in the Astronomical Bureau of its residents. I try to tease out details of the identity of the readers and their interests, which turn out to be multi-faceted and heterogeneous, due to the relatively long (200 year) period of acquisition. These reflect factors such as the evolution in European medicine and pharmacology, the multi-national composition of the staff, their different professional backgrounds and level of instruction, and the various types of diseases they were confronted with.

Florence C. Hsia . Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2009 . Pp. xv, 273. $45.00.

The vast majority of sources examined by the author in this study are in French archives and were originally written or printed in French. Therefore, this reviewer wonders why the title of the book is not more explicit: the subtitle “French Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China” would seem more appropriate and would better identify the field of research. In the first fifty pages, the author discusses the founding fathers of the Jesuit Mission in China—Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and his two most famous successors, Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666) and Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688). She primarily describes how the figure of the missionary‐scientist in China came to be and the role that such missionaries played in the Chinese imperial bureaucracy, particularly as presidents of the Astronomical Bureau starting in 1639. This presentation of the general context of the seventeenth century mission is of interest, of course, but is not the most original part of the book.

Francesco Sambiasi, a Missing Link in European Map Making in China?

When the Jesuit missionaries began to work in China, they attracted the attention of the Chinese by introducing European knowledge. This is the context in which Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni, Francesco Sambiasi and Ferdinand Verbiest made their Chinese‐language world maps. Sambiasi was a man of many talents. He was a tactful diplomat and a learned scientist. His world map shows him to be a skilful adapter of earlier knowledge, which he passed on to future generations. The six known copies of his map are in two versions, printed from two sets of wood blocks (c. 1639). A text at the top of one version explains why the world must be seen as a sphere, which demonstrates how these maps were meant to convince the Chinese public of European scientific findings.

A shared view of the heavens

A woodcut of Ferdinand Verbiest, the Kangxi Emperor's Flemish astronomer and mastermind of Beijing's Ancient Observatory, records a remarkable seventeenth-century cultural exchange. Martin Kemp explains.

Tianchao de bengkui: Yapian zhanzheng zai yanjiu (review)

Reviewed by: Tianchao de bengkui: Yapian zhanzheng zai yanjiu David Cheng Chang (bio) Mao Haijian 茅海建. Tianchao de bengkui: Yapian zhanzheng zai yanjiu 天朝的崩溃: 鸦片战争再研究 (The collapse of the Celestial Empire: A reanalysis of the Opium War). Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2005. 600 pp. Paperback 32.00 RMB, isbn 7-108-02294-x. Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) famously stated that "every true history is contemporary history," suggesting that the representation of history reflects the circumstances and attitudes of historians in their contemporary times.1 Chen Yinke (1890–1969), probably the most revered historian in twentieth-century China, advocated historical writing with "well-informed sympathy," that is, a thorough understanding of the historical context.2 These two seemingly contrasting dicta by Croce and Chen encapsulate the dilemma confronting every historian: Can a historical narrative be historical and contemporary at the same time? Mao Haijian's Tianchao de bengkui: Yapian zhanzheng zai yanjiu suggests an affirmative answer. While another leading Chinese historian, Luo Zhitian, sees the inherent conflict between the historical and the contemporary in Mao's book, this reviewer finds that Mao's contemporary concerns do not detract from his historical scholarship.3 In this weighty work of more than 400,000 Chinese characters, empirical contexualization with "well-informed sympathy" underpins Mao's arguments, which are of both historical and contemporary significance. In unprecedented detail, Mao reconstructs the history of the First Opium War from 1839 to 1843. In his effort to "use ideas of their time to explain historical actors' thoughts and actions" (pp. 2–3), Mao begins the book by rehabilitating Qishan, who was vilified in both contemporary accounts and nationalist historiography as a "treacherous official" and "traitor." He also debunks the mythology of Lin Zexu as the polar opposite of Qishan, an official of complete probity, competence, and vision. Armed with a large amount of archival and documentary evidence, mostly from the Number One Historical Archives in Beijing, the author demonstrates the speciousness of the simplistic and moralistic model of "a two-line struggle between the patriotic line of Lin advocating resistance and the traitorous line of Qishan proposing capitulation" (p. 22). Contrary to the traditional view that sees the policy division along the fault line of ethnicity, Mao points out that once the war was under way, "in the war zones of Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu," irrespective of ethnicity, "none of the officials with actual responsibility … still advocated 'jiao'" (剿, literally meaning suppression, but here denoting uncompromising resistance), a uniformity in striking contrast to the fact "none of the officials in nonwar zones suggested 'fu' (抚, appeasement)" (p. 424). Mao consistently makes a distinction between two types of judgment, moral and political (i.e., practical), and his [End Page 533] focus is on the latter. Eschewing self-righteous, moral judgment, Mao's "well-informed sympathy" enables him to appreciate the actual political predicaments historical actors were facing. As a military historian by training, Mao's unrivaled expertise on the military aspect of the war shines throughout the book. In chapter 2, Mao analyzes the substantial gap between Chinese troops and the British, in terms of both technology and organization. Mao observes that the main function of the Qing army was for suppression of domestic unrest, not external warfare (p. 53). In striking resemblance to the Ming military described by Ray Huang, the Qing troop mobilization still relied on "a medieval financial system" supported by "donations" (juanshu 捐输), which often involved, in practice, coercion (p. 422).4 The most glaring deficiency was in technology. Chinese firearms were mostly imitations of Western imports in the Ming, lagging the British by more than two hundred years (p. 34). A series of maps outlining each battle demonstrates the gap in military tactics and strategy, as the British executed the same battle plan in various landing operations, and the Qing army was repeatedly rendered defenseless, with the exception of the Zhenjiang battle (p. 443). Mao highlights the bitter irony of Emperor Daoguang inquiring about world geography after China's defeat, while a fine world atlas made by Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688) was left collecting dust in a palace warehouse (p. 430). In sharp contrast to Mao's reasoning, looking at the same or similar evidence, including the...

Review: Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (1623–1688) and the Chinese Heaven: The Composition of the Astronomical Corpus, its Diffusion and Reception in the European Republic of Letters

Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (1623–1688) and the Chinese Heaven: The Composition of the Astronomical Corpus, its Diffusion and Reception in the European Republic of Letters By Noël Golvers . (Leuven Chinese Studies, 12.) Leuven : Leuven University Press / Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation, K. U. Leuven . 2003. 676 €67 . ISBN 90 5867 293 x.

On their own terms: science in China, 1550-1900

List of Maps, Illustrations, and Tables Chinese Dynasties Abbreviations Preface I. INTRODUCTION Prologue Finding the Correct Conceptual Grid What Should Be the Literati Theory of Knowledge? Late Ming Classicism in the Context of Commercial Expansion Printing Technology and Publishing Naturalization of Anomalies in Ming China and Early Modern Europe 1. Ming Classification on the Eve of Jesuit Contact Ordering Things through Names Collecting the Collectors Late Ming Statecraft, Mathematics, and Christianity Mathematics, and Christianity II. NATURAL STUDIES AND THE JESUITS 2. The Late Ming Calendar Crisis and Gregorian Reform Development of the Ming Astro-calendric Bureau Evolution of the Late Ming Calendar Crisis Gregorian Reform Jesuits and Late Ming Calendar Reform 3. Sino-Jesuit Accommodations During the Seventeenth Century European Scientia and Natural Studies in Ming-Qing China Literati Attacks on Calendar Reform in the Early Qing Ferdinand Verbiest and the Kangxi Emperor 4. The Limits of Western Learning in the Early Eighteenth Century The Kangxi Emperor and Mei Wending The Rites Controversy and Its Legacy French Jesuits in the Kangxi Court The Newtonian Century and the Limits of Scientific Transmission to China 5. The Jesuit Role as Experts in High Qing Cartography and Technology Mensuration and Cartography in the Eighteenth Century Cartography, Sino-Russian Relations, and Qing Imperial Interests The Jesuit Role in Qing Arts, Instruments, and Technology III. EVIDENTIAL RESEARCH AND NATURAL STUDIES 6. Evidential Research and the Restoration of Ancient Learning Early Qing Critiques of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming Medical Works and the Recovery of Antiquity Chen Yuanlong and the Mirror of Origins Encyclopedia Revival of Ancient Chinese Mathematics 7. Seeking the Truth and High Qing Mathematics High Qing Views of the Investigation of Things Mathematics in an Age of Evidential Research Nativism and Early Nineteenth-Century Mathematics IV. MODERN SCIENCE AND THE PROTESTANTS 8. Protestants, Education, and Modern Science to 1880 Protestant Missionaries in China Protestants and Modern Science in Shanghai Introduction of Modern Mathematics and the Calculus The Shanghai Polytechnic and Reading Room 9. The Construction of Modern Science in Late Qing China Early Science Primers Edkins's Primers for Science and the Problem of Darwin in China From the Scientific Book Depot to the China Prize Essay Contest Prize Essay Topics and Their Scientific Content Medical Missionaries since 1872 and Medical Questions as Prize Essay Topics Natural Theology, Darwin, and Evolution V Qing Reformism and Modern Science 10. Government Arsenals, Science, and Technology in China after 1860 From Chinese Working for Missionaries to Missionaries Working for the Dynasty Post-Taiping Reformers and Late Qing Science The Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai Technical Learning in the Jiangnan Arsenal and Fuzhou Navy Yard Naval Warfare and the Refraction of Qing Reforms into Failure Reconsidering the Foreign Affairs Movement 11. Displacement of Traditional Chinese Science and Medicine in the Twentieth Century Western Learning Mediated through Japan Naval Warfare and the Refraction of Qing Reforms into Failure Science and the 1898 Reformers From Traditional to Modern Mathematics Modern Medicine in China Influence of Meiji Japan on Modern Science in China APPENDIXES 1. Tang Mathematical Classics 2. Some Translations of Chemistry, 1855-1873 3. Science Outline Series, 1882-1898 4. Partial Chronological List of Arsenals, etc., in China, 1861-1892 5. Table of Contents for the 1886 Primers for Science Studies (Gezhi qimeng) 6. Twenty-three Fields of the Sciences in the 1886 Primers for Science Studies 7. Science Compendia Published in China from 1877 to 1903 8. Some Officially Selected Chinese Prize Essay Topics from the Shanghai Polytechnic 9. Scientific Societies Formed between 1912 and 1927 Notes Bibliography of Chinese and Japanese Sources Acknowledgments Credits Index

La fabrica de las ilusiones: Los Jesuitas y la difusion de la perspectiva lineal en China, (1698-1766) (review)

Reviewed by: La fábrica de las illusiones: Los Jesuitas y la difusión de la perspectiva lineal en China, (1698-1766) John W. Witek S.J. (bio) Elisabettta Corsi . La fábrica de las illusiones: Los Jesuitas y la difusión de la perspectiva lineal en China, (1698-1766). Centro de Estudios de Asia y África. México City: El Colegio de México, 2004. 242 p. Paperback, ISBN 968-12-1125-1. In the past few decades, studies on the cultural contacts between China and Europe during the late Ming and early Qing period have opened new perspectives. International symposia in honor of Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), Giulio Aleni (1582-1649), Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1592-1666), and Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688) resulted in publications that highlighted new aspects of their lives and especially how they adapted Western works on mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and other topics for their Chinese audience.1 Yet little attention was given to the role of art as a means of developing the missionary enterprise. Elisabetta Corsi, a sinologist at the Center for Asian and African Studies, has reversed that trend with her fascinating study on the Jesuits and the diffusion of lineal perspective in early eighteenth-century China. This monograph portrays the history of a book, Shixue (Science of vision), whose origins developed from the friendship of Jesuit Brother Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) and Nian Xiyao (1671-1738). In the brief introduction Corsi outlines lineal perspective in China before the arrival of Castiglione at the Beijing court in 1715 and credits Ricci with the first examples through four illustrations of his that he sent to Cheng Dayue (1541-1616?), who published them in his Chengshi moyuan.2 Scattered references to perspective appeared in some later Chinese works but it was Giovanni Gherardini (1655-ca. 1723), a layman in service to the Beijing court as a painter from 1699 to 1704, who taught the technique of perspective to the artists of the court. Gherardini was a disciple in the grand tradition of the Jesuit Brother Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709), the author of Perspectiva Pictorum et Architectorum (Rome, 1693) and the architect of St. Ignatius Church in Rome. It was Pozzo's study that became the focus of Nian's Shixue. In the first chapter Corsi presents a brief biography of Nian, who was acquainted with several Jesuits in Beijing. Nian, the older brother of the military leader Nian Gengyao (1679-1725), was a fine painter and an author of mathematical works, especially on logarithms and trigonometry. A member of the Chinese Bordered Yellow Banner, Nian Xiyao did not participate in the state examinations (p. 47), but in the first year of the reign of the Yongzheng emperor (1723-1735) he was appointed governor (xunfu) of Guangdong and concurrently vice-minister (tongzhi) of the prefecture of Jingdong in Yunnan. In 1725 he was promoted to the Ministry of Public Works and a year later became inspector of customs at Huai'an and superintendent of the imperial porcelain factory at Jingdezhen. Under his [End Page 398] supervision until 1736 new techniques and new designs were introduced, including the famille rose. Nian was eventually removed from that office on charges of corruption and died two years later. To explain further the connection of Nian to the Jesuits, Corsi describes his relationship with the Jesuit Jean-François Foucquet (1665-1741), who from 1711 to 1716 (not 1710, as Corsi states, incorrectly following Joseph Needham) became involved in a protracted disagreement with his confreres over the use of newer Western data supporting Copernicanism for astronomical observations in Beijing. Neither the fragments of a biography of Nian before 1720 in Chinese sources nor the Western biography of Foucquet published in 1982 portray Nian as a participant in the translations of the data on the new astronomy.3 Corsi offers the hypothesis that Nian had such a role, though she presents no supporting documentary evidence. Yet she correctly portrays Nian's views on Chinese chronology as they affected Foucquet a few years later. In the next chapter, "The Work: Shixue or the "Science of Vision," Corsi indicates that its author, Nian Xiyao, mentions in the preface...

Book Review: A Jesuit Astronomer's Report from China: Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (1623–1688) and the Chinese Heaven: The Composition of the Astronomical Corpus, its Diffusion and Reception in the European Republic of Letters

Book Review: A Jesuit Astronomer's Report from China: Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (1623–1688) and the Chinese Heaven: The Composition of the Astronomical Corpus, its Diffusion and Reception in the European Republic of Letters

Western Learning and Christianity in China: The Contribution and Impact of Johann Adam Schall von Bell, S.J. (1592-1666) (review)

Reviewed by: Western Learning and Christianity in China: The Contribution and Impact of Johann Adam Schall von Bell, S.J. (1592-1666) Franklin J. Woo (bio) Roman Malek, S.V.D. , editor. Western Learning and Christianity in China: The Contribution and Impact of Johann Adam Schall von Bell, S.J. (1592-1666). Sankt Augustin, Germany: Jointly published by China-Zentrum and the Monumenta Serica Institute, 1998. xlvi, 616 pp. (vol. 1); xlii, 617-1,259 pp. (vol. 2). Hardcover DM 200 (2 vols.), ISBN 3-8050-0409-5. Founded in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) and directly responsible to the pope and to its own general, the Society of Jesus was a part of the Counter-Reformation of the Catholic Church, the purpose of which was to defend and promote the Catholic faith everywhere in the world ad majorem Dei gloriam, "to the greater glory of God." Well-known Jesuits who served in China are the Italian Matteo Ricci (Li Madou ) (1552-1610), the German Johann Adam Schall von Bell (Tang Ruowang ) (1592-1666), and the Belgian Ferdinand Verbiest (Nan Huairen ) (1623-1688). Perhaps not so well known, but no less important, are their Chinese converts and counterparts among the scholar-official literati such as Xu Guangqi (Paul) (1562-1633), Li Zhizao (Leo) (1565-1630), and Yang Tingyun (Michael) (1557-1627). Without the assistance of the Chinese, foreigners in China in the past, as in the present, could accomplish little. All three of these men were scholars of the Confucian classics holding jinshi degrees and high positions as officials in the imperial court. They not only facilitated the introduction of their Jesuit tutors in Western learning [End Page 28] into the official environment and the subsequent establishment of churches in China, but also defended and protected them in times when priests and other Jesuits came into conflict with the authorities or local Chinese. The Jesuits were noted for their method of propagating the Christian faith through accommodation to the cultures of their host countries. The method of accommodation was introduced by Francis Xavier (1506-1552), the missionary who worked in India and Japan, a country he felt would never be converted to Christianity unless China, the cultural center of East Asia, was first brought into the faith. Though Xavier himself never entered China proper, his accommodation method was nevertheless applied there by Alessandro Valignano (1538-1606), the Jesuit Visitor to the Far East, after it was initiated and implemented in exemplary fashion by Father Matteo Ricci. And the Jesuits brought to China not only their religion but mathematics, science, Western technology, and whatever art and gadgetry that they felt would help win the acceptance by the Chinese for them and, more importantly, for their gospel message. This two-volume publication consists mainly of the proceedings of the International Schall Symposium held in Sankt Augustin, Germany, in May 1992, one of the major events in celebration of the four-hundredth Anniversary of the birth of Johann Adam Schall von Bell, who was born in Cologne (or possibly Luftelberg) on May 1, 1592. Other 1992 celebratory events included the issuance of commemorative postage stamps in April by the German Federal Minister for Post and Telecommunication, a pontifical mass held on May 3 in Cologne, a public festival in the town of Luftelberg, and other symposia in Germany. In Taiwan, an International Conference on Schall was held by the Catholic Fu-jen University in Taibei. The collection gathered here consists of fifty-three scholarly papers including an introduction in English by the editor Roman Malek. The essays are printed in their original language: English (twenty-seven), German (eight), Chinese (seventeen), and French (one).1 The English and German essays all have a brief summary in Chinese, while the Chinese essays have a summary in either English (fifteen) or German (two), depending on the second-language proficiency of the Chinese author. Like most scholarly proceedings in their final publication, these two volumes include a few contributions not from the original symposium, for augmentation and coherence. The essays are organized under a wide umbrella to include not only missionary concerns and methods, but natural science, philosophy and religion, and East-West cultural interaction and...

The Reconstruction of Imperial Mathematics in China During the Kangxi Reign (1662-1722)

AbstractContrary to astronomy, the early modern Chinese State did not systematically sponsor mathematics. However, early in his reign, the Kangxi Emperor studied this subject with the Jesuit missionaries in charge of the calendar. His first teacher, Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688) relied on textbooks based on Christoph Clavius' (1538-1612). Those who succeeded Verbiest as imperial tutors in the 1690s produced lecture notes in Manchu and Chinese. Newly discovered manuscripts show Antoine Thomas (1644-1709) wrote substantial treatises on arithmetic and algebra while teaching those subjects. In 1713, the emperor commissioned a group of scholars and officials to compile a standard survey of mathematics (Shuli jingyun, "Essential principles of mathematics"). This work opened with the claim that mathematics had its roots in Chinese Antiquity. However, it can be shown that the Jesuits' lecture notes were the main source of the Shuli jingyun. The reconstruction of mathematics under Kangxi's patronage is thus best characterised as the imperial appropriation of Western learning.

Astronomical Instruments and Their Users: Tycho Brahe to William Lassell (review)

Reviewed by: Astronomical Instruments and Their Users: Tycho Brahe to William Lassell* Deborah Jean Warner (bio) Astronomical Instruments and Their Users: Tycho Brahe to William Lassell. Edited by Allan Chapman. Aldershot: Variorum, 1996. Pp. xii+320; index, illustrations. $94.95. In the third essay in this book, Allan Chapman identifies “the essential ingredients of a scientific problem” as “the need for accurate observation, exact instrumentation and conclusions based on careful measurements as opposed to purely theoretical criteria” (pp. 70–71). This point of view explains Chapman’s continuing interest in the relationship between the design and construction of astronomical instruments and the observations that could be and actually were made with those instruments. He brings to this task a familiarity with surviving instruments and a sophisticated reading of the documentary record, both astronomical and technological. Moreover, having replicated and then made observations with a number of historic instruments, he has a tangible appreciation of the skills needed to accomplish the various tasks involved. The book contains several essays on the accuracy of scale graduations on various European instruments, a topic that Chapman discusses at length in his monograph Dividing the Circle: The Development of Critical Angular Measurement in Astronomy, 1500–1850 (New York: E. Harwood, 1990). The strength of this book, however, is the substantive essays on individual astronomers and instrument makers. One, for instance, concerns Tycho Brahe’s attention to and success with improving the stability and graduations of his angle-measuring instruments. Another pertains to the Tychonic instruments that the Jesuit missionary Ferdinand Verbiest built for the Imperial Observatory in Peking in the 1670s. This essay is largely based on Verbiest’s text and 105 woodcut illustrations showing the instruments and many construction techniques. Yet another describes Chapman’s reconstruction of two of Pierre Gassendi’s large angle-measuring instruments [End Page 557] that Gassendi’s hometown commissioned for the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1992. Most of the essays in this collection pertain to English astronomy. The earliest concerns Jeremiah Horrocks, whom Chapman describes as “one of the first men in England to grasp the significance of what was going on in contemporary European astronomy” (p. 334). Chapman wrote the piece on the 350th anniversary of the 1639 transit of Venus, an astronomical event that Horrocks was the first to predict and observe. To understand Horrocks’s investigations better, Chapman replicated his technique for measuring the solar diameter and achieved similar results. One essay studies George Graham, the first important English artisan to apply scientific experiments and understanding to the design of instruments. Another examines Jesse Ramsden, whose linear and circular dividing engines mechanized the production of the graduated scales needed for practical purposes such as navigation, surveying, and architecture. Ramsden’s apparatus provided the funds that enabled him to make innovations in research apparatus for astronomy and geodesy. Three essays in the collection pertain to English astronomers who expanded the light-gathering power of their telescopes and used these instruments for physical rather than positional work. In his account of William Herschel, written for the 250th anniversary of his birth, Chapman explains that Herschel saw the telescope not as an adjunct to the graduated scale but as his primary tool of investigation. An essay about William’s son, John Herschel, celebrates the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1992. Chapman calls attention to his personal fortune, which paid for the apparatus and the leisure he used for his original research. (In one year at the Cape of Good Hope, Herschel spent more than seven times the annual salary of the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich.) After acknowledging the importance of the money that William Lassell earned from his brewery, Chapman turns his attention to the details of casting and polishing metal mirrors, and the mechanics of the large equatorial mounts that enabled astronomers to track astronomical objects as the earth turned on its axis. Alas, the publisher of this volume is not as concerned with style as were the astronomers and instrument makers of whom Chapman writes. The seventeen essays collected here first appeared in various journals published between 1976 and 1994, and each retains its original pagination and style of footnotes or endnotes...

Book Review: Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688): Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer, and Diplomat

Book Review: Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688): Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer, and Diplomat

Books on Cultural Exchange between China and the West in the Late Ming and Early Qing

Feature Reviews 19© 1995 by University ofHawai'i Press BooL· on Cultural Exchange between China and the West in the Late Ming and Early Qing Mme Yves de Thomaz de Bossierre. Jean-François Gerbillon SJ., (16541707 ): Un des cinq mathématiciens envoyés en ChineparLouis XIV. Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation, 1994. 211 pp. JosefKolmas, translator and editor. Karel Slavícek: Listy ? Ciny do vlasti a jina korespondence s evropskymi hvezdari (1716-1735): Lettersfrom China to His Native Country and Other Correspondence with European Astronomers (1716-1736). Prague: Vysehrad Publishers, 1994. 270 pp. Eugenio Menegon. Un solo Cielo: Giulio Aleni SJ. (1582-1649): Geografìa, arte, scienza, religione dall'Europa alla Cina. Brescia: Grafo, 1994. 217 pp. John W. Witek, editor. Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688): Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer and Diplomat. Monumenta Serica Monograph Series 30. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994. 602 pp. Noel Golvers. The Astronomia Europaea ofFerdinand Verbiest, SJ., (Dillingen, 1687): Text, Translation, Notes and Commentaries. Monumenta Serica Monograph Series 28. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1993. 547 pp. Catherine Jami and Hubert Delahaye, editors. L'Europe en Chine: Interactions scientifiques, religieuses et culturelles auxXVIIe etXVIIIe siècles. Mémoires de l'Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises 34. Paris: Collège de France, 1993. 255 pp. Zhang Yongtang 3Sa^. Mingmo Qingchu lixue yu kexue guanxi zailun MitÍOS^IPWBB^SII (New discussion on the relationship between neo-Confucianism and science in the Late Ming-Early Qing Period ). Taibei: Xuesheng Shuju, 1994. 287 pp. J. S. Cummins. A Question ofRites: Friar Domingo Navarrete and theJesuits in China. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993. 349 pp. Hardcover $67.95. The eight books under review present a good picture ofthe state ofresearch on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural exchange between China and theWest. 20 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 1995 The classical approach of all of this research focuses on missionary activities and is fully based on Western sources.1 The book by Mme Yves de Thomaz de Bossiere can be situated in this category. Her two previous works brought together material concerning Antoine Thomas, S.J. (1644-1709) and FrançoisXavier Dentrecolles, SJ. (1664-1741). Her new work presents a figure who is not very well known. lean-François Gerbillon (1654-1707) is one ofthe so-called "mathematicians" sent to China by Louis XIV ofFrance. Gerbillion was a translator at the negotiations that resulted in the Sino-Russian Treaty ofNertchinsk (1689), and he also left a report on eight trips during which he accompanied Emperor Kangxi in the Mongol region. Unfortunately Thomaz' work presents less new material than it seems to contain at first sight. Chapter 2 on the Nertchinsk treaty and chapter 3 on Kangxi's inspection and hunting trips are summaries of primary and secondary sources that are readily available. The more interesting part is the transcription of Gerbillon's letters, in chapters 4 and 5. They give the historian an idea of the observations and thoughts of a more ordinary missionary in Beijing at the end of the seventeenth century. They also contain some rare descriptions of the personality and the activities ofEmperor Kangxi. Quite a few deal with the intra-Jesuit conflicts between the Portuguese and French fathers and the intra-Church conflicts concerning the Chinese rites. These letters may not add many new insights to the general knowledge of East-West contacts in the late seventeenth century, but they are now at least made more easily available to specialists. The letters of Karel Slavicek, S.J. (1678-1735), have also been made available as translated and edited by Professor Josef Kolmas, chairman of the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. As a missionary, Slavicek stayed mostly in Beijing in the period following Gerbillon. Slavicek was a mathematician, an astronomer, and a musician who was in correspondence with the foremost European scholars of the day, such as the St. Petersburg Sinologist T. S. Bayer (1694-1738) and the astronomer and geographer J.-N. Delisle (16881768 ), also of St. Petersburg. These letters include a number of scholarly observations , remarks, calculations, and drawings, which are of interest to the historian of the European discovery of Chinese science, especially mathematics and astronomy . The present publication...

Court Divination and Christianity in the K’Ang-Hsi Era

It has been said that “ astrological interpretations are neither mumbo jumbo nor unsuccessful science. They are best understood, like modern economic indicators, as a technical framework for policy debates, resolved, as often as not, on other grounds. Faith in the validity of astrological categories, like confidence in extensively manipulated statistics today, persists despite their repeated failure to deliver accurate predictions.” The same might be remarked of divination as an element in the formation of imperial Chinese policy. This study aims to demonstrate that astrology, siting, and hemerology, because they provided a form for resolving opposed interests, played focal roles in great events . Their neglect by historians of science is unwarranted. Conversely, it is impossible without considering the involvement of divination to understand many changes in government policy. Yang Kuang-hsien’s celebrated anti-Christian movement in the K’ang-hsi era deeply influenced the scientific and cultural interchange between China and the West. Most previous studies of these movements have been focused on the calendar controversy between Yang and the Jesuits Johann Adam Schall vo n Bell (T’ang Jo-wang) and Ferdinand Verbiest (Nan Huai-jen). The inquiry summarized in this paper, however, indicates that deliberations in 1658 on the time of burial for Prince Jung, the fourth son of the Shih-tsu. the Shun-chih emperor, were pivotal for the fortunes of Christianity in the late seventeenth century. Hemerology, the choice of lucky days, an art tied to (among other activities) the siting of tombs, has been since the Han one of the most important responsibilities of the court astrologer, who was expected to propose dates for state ceremonies. Two groups of people, led by Yang and Schall respectively , used different traditions of hemerology in their attempts to control the Imperial Board of Astronomy. Both sides used sudden shifts in the political situation to attack their opponents. The controversy prompted the royal astronomers to involve themselves in what had been a long-standing dispute over siting among astrologers serving the common people. This case, previously seldom discussed, was in many ways the most important of the incidents that triggered the anti-missionary agitation in the early K’ang-hsi period. This seemingly trivial polemic over the time of an infant’s burial, in view of its fateful consequences for the introduction of Western thought into China, will serve as an excellent example of the political significance of astrology, siting, and hemerology. A second example discussions of the Dalai Lama's visit to Peking in 1652, in which traditional astrology played a larger role, demonstrates that its uses in political debate were part of a set of roles shared by the divinatory arts.

Tycho brahe in china: the Jesuit mission to Peking and the iconography of European instrument-making processes

Summary In the late 1660s, Ferdinand Verbiest, a Flemish Jesuit missionary in Peking, was instructed to re-equip the Imperial Observatory. The new instruments which he caused to be built were modelled neither upon contemporary European prototypes, nor those of traditional Chinese astronomy, but on the pieces in Tycho Brahe's Mechanica, of eighty years before. The Chinese instruments were lavishly illustrated, moreover, in 105 woodcuts that contained detailed representations of their processes of construction. It is argued that these illustrations not only give us valuable insights into what the technical Jesuits did in Peking, but show how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European craftsmen constructed their instruments, for while the location was Oriental, the technology was Western. They can also give important insights into how Tycho's prototypes had been built, and provide us with useful information regarding European instrument-making technology.

Jesuit Missions in China during the Last Years of K'ang Hsi

IT IS A GENERALLY accepted fact that the Jesuits won their way into the confidence of Emperor K'ang Hsi through their scholarship, especially in the realm of science. The Jesuits were of value to the emperor as instructors in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, botany, medicine and surgery, anatomy, plane and geodetic surveying, cartography, and flood control. They served him as personal physicians. They dispensed charity for him. They acted for him as ambassadors to Europe and as negotiators of a treaty with Russia. They interpreted for him from the Latin, French, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Chinese into his native Tartar. One of them translated into Tartar a European textbook on anatomy. Eight Jesuits and one Augustinian spent ten years in mapping the entire kingdom of China. K'ang Hsi had become acquainted with the usefulness of the Jesuits through the varied services rendered him by Father Ferdinand Verbiest. All Jesuits who entered China after the death of Verbiest in 1688 were looked upon as possible servants for the emperor. Their role as pros-