Dagmar Schäfer

The Historical Roots of Modern Bridges: China’s Engineers as Global Actors

Ever since China’s Republican era (1912–1949), engineers in the country have invoked the past to bolster their social status and political influence. By the late twentieth century, engineers had become key political decision-makers, instrumentalising artefacts and historical texts to verify their technical prowess and legitimise their socio-political power over the longue duree. This chapter illustrates the myths and ideals that engineers employed before, during and after the Cold War era to achieve this standing. It outlines how the engineering ethos came to include both the technical and socio-political skill of bridge-building, and then, in a second step, translated into a national and international strategy of materialised arguments, in which infrastructural and other engineering projects (rather than political debate) increasingly assumed the role of a social problem-solver and a means to enforce political objectives.

Dorothy Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. xii, 330 pp. Illustrations (color and b/w), Maps, Tables, Bibliography, Glossary, Index. US

of speech, which are “forgotten” in usual interactions, but recalled to evidence when translation is necessary to achieve communication. It is therefore legitimate for contemporary researchers to regret that “L’enjeu n’était pas d’embrasser l’étrangeté de l’Autre pour enrichir sa propre existence, mais de comprendre avec précision cette étrangeté afin de mieux la réduire” (p. 387). However, the effort of Jesuit missionaries has to be seen in the context of 17th century mentalities. From this point of view, expressions like “dogmes aristotéliciens-thomistes” (p. 286) are too general to describe the multiples faces of Neo-scholastic theology in the 17th century: after the nominalist crisis and the beginning of critical reading of the Bible, many thinkers comment on Aquinas with Augustinian glasses. In the case of the Jesuits, the influence of the Coimbra Commentaries could be an illustration of their complex relation to Aristotle. This last remark does not cast a shadow on the scientific excellence of the work of Wu Huiyi. It is a great contribution to better understand the circulation of ideas between China and the West, and to have a clearer vision of the role played by subjectivity in translation. At the end of the book, a number of reader-friendly annexes help to give a precise overview of the period. The style is clear and direct, and the author also made great efforts to identify the names of places, books and characters. The reviewer recommends this book to anyone interested in better understanding the Jesuit translations between 1687 and 1740 and the circulation of knowledge between China and Europe, or simply to anyone curious to become more familiar with the historical in-betweenness of the history of the missions.

45 (HB). ISBN 978-0295999180

Die Region Ostasien umfasst heute die nationalstaatlichen Gebiete der VR China, der Mongolei, Nord- und Sudkoreas, Taiwans und Japans. In den Kaiser-, Konigreichen und Territorialfurstentumern, die diesem Raum eine lange politische Geschichte gaben, entwickelten sich unterschiedlichste philosophische Schulen, in denen seit mehr als 2000 Jahren diskutiert wurde, was Wissen ist, wie man weis, oder welches Wissen gut oder wahr ist. Eliten institutionalisierten die Erforschung des Himmels, das Studium der Mathematik, Riten und Musik und forderten die Publikation philologischer und philosophischer Studien genauso wie die Sammlung pharmazeutischen Wissens zu Pflanzen, Tieren und Materialien in Materia Medica.

China und Japan

Archival household records and artifactual evidence suggest that the Qing emperors and ‘court officials’ use of models was part and parcel of a systematic appropriation of in-between communication devices in technical and artistic production. This essay analyses when and how officials and craftsmen employed models with a view on architecture and jade production. What made such sampling fashionable and what function did actors of the period assign to such devices for the circulation of aesthetic and technical concerns? Starting with a highly personal case of communication between the emperor and jade craftsmen the chapter shows how models became part of the standardization of methods of circulation across trade boundaries. Bureaucratic handling promoted the unification of descriptive and prescriptive modes that included both sketching and three-dimensional modeling. Clerks further explained material, size and color schemes on yellow strips attached to the model. In such bureaucratic procedures actors considered the aesthetic and technical information given in models conclusive and valid. Imperial workshops then functioned more as design bureaus than as producing sites per se.

Knowledge by design - architecture and Jade models during the Qianlong 乾隆 reign (1735–1796)

A society and scholarly culture united in its use of one language dominates the general view of Late Imperial China’s sciences. Recent studies have suggested, however, that in the past, as in the present, multilingual practices might have been the norm. Asian-language historians have shown that Chinese script embraced many tongues, intonating the characters in different dialects and giving them new meanings in Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese. Rather than assuming that a hegemonic approach to language was a given in historical China, this essay suggests that we should ask why—or even if—this was the case, given that scientific knowledge was continuously transmitted to China from other learned traditions (Persian, Indian, European) and that new objects and practices entered Chinese learned discourse from diverse vernacular cultures that flourished on the local level throughout the empire. The essay discusses how to understand scientific and technological developments against changing views of Late Imperial China as a culture enmeshed in plurilingual practices.

Thinking in Many Tongues: Language(s) and Late Imperial China’s Science

In the year 1842, the Mancunian Thomas Bellot (1806–1857), assigned to a British army post in Qing China between the two Opium Wars (First War 1839–1842, Second War 1856–1860), sampled the street markets and fairs of the Yangtze delta, thereby acquiring a couple of contemporary Chinese books. A doctor and humanist, Bellot showed a learned interest in treatises on herbs and illness, language and classic literature. Curiously though, a small mass-market booklet on embroidery also made its way into the collection that Bellot brought home. Why Bellot was attracted by what he called a ‘Ladies book of patterns for working embroidery, for pillows, shoes etc.’, is a question that deserves a moment’s thought (see Plate 6). What interests me in this chapter is the existence of the embroidery pattern book in itself, and what this says about knowledge exchange in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century global trade. Pattern books, delineating the various steps of production and sampling designs, witness an incipient knowledge codification process. Bellot’s Qing pattern book embodies a special moment in which a technical format easily traversed cultural and knowledge spheres. My story in this chapter concerns the factors that made this exchange possible. Central, then, is the pattern book as a symptom of two quite diverse cultural approaches to production management and design.

Patterns of Design in Qing-China and Britain during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

This chapter scrutinizes the Chinese concepts and modalities of practical knowledge transmission that informed state models of craft production. The main example is silk manufacture: a complex socio-technical system involving core issues of the Chinese world. The thematic concern of this chapter lies in the technical side of communication, that is, how actors and agents created channels and packaged and conveyed information to make production work. The first emperor of the Ming, Zhu Yuanzhang, carefully allotted responsibilities to either the craftsman or the official, the workshop and local, regional or central state administration so that experience could grow and stabilize on each level, while a system of regular reports ensured the vertical information flow. Silk production in dynastic China took place in four different fields: (1) the government, (2) in private family households, (3) in commercial workshops and (4) within religious structures in temples and monasteries. Keywords:China; craft; Ming; silk; Zhu Yuanzhang

Silken strands: Making technology work in China

Inscriptions have mainly been discussed as an important source to aid the analysis of the nature and extent of state control over production and manufacture in Chinese history. This essay takes a different approach and discusses the conceptual development of inscriptions with a view toward their potential as an instrument to inspire trust. The aim is new insight into how Chinese culture historically implemented, expressed, and received rights within material production. This reveals some of the factors that affected practical knowledge transmission in Chinese culture. Starting with inscribed bricks, the article dissects textual sources and the complex world of inscribed artifacts and their purposes. The Ming state originally established the practice of inscribing names and dates to regulate responsibilities and rights within material production. Toward the end of the Ming period, the private sector increasingly focused on inscriptions as a means to propagate the origin and ownership of goods. Inscriptions thus were utilized to regulate both production and use. How did the Ming state conceptualize inscriptions? On which basis could the shift from production marker to ownership claim take place, and how was it received? The answers to these and similar questions are highly relevant, as methods of control and their implementation indicate actual practices of appropriation, in contrast to the ideals pursued in official or private documentation. Situating utilitarian usages within the larger landscape of inscription practices and regulatory mechanisms indicates the broader landscape within which technological development took place in Chinese culture.