East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)

Flitsch, Mareile

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Jacob Eyferth, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a 
Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920-2000, 
Cambridge (Mass.) and London: Harvard University Press (Harvard 
East Asian Monographs 314), 2009, 334 pp. 
Mareile Flitsch 
[Mareile Flitsch, Chair of Social Anthropology and Director of the Ethnographic 
Museum at the University of Zurich. She studied sinology and anthropology in 
Münster, Paris, Shenyang (PR China) and Berlin and received her Ph.D. and her 
habilitation from Freie Universität Berlin in 1990 and in 2001 respectively. 
Specialising in Chinese anthropology as well as in anthropology of technology, she 
has published extensively on issues of skilled practice in everyday China, for 
example the monograph Der Kang: Eine Studie zur materiellen Alltagskultur 
bäuerlicher Gehöfte in der Manjurei (2004). Contact: flitsch@vmz.uzh.ch] 
Would not anyone opening a book on crafts expect it to also tell one about 
the skills of craftsmen? As the current anthropological debate on 
apprenticeship shows, it is not that easy to talk and write about skill. 
Academics tend rather to be interested in knowledge, technical ways of 
doing things, tools or matter, and strategies of solving social or economic 
problems. It is much less common for social scientists to talk about skill, “as 
a system of embodied orientations” (p. 17), about what makes a craft 
special, what needs socio-technical knowledge, and what needs to be 
transmitted.  
For some years now, though, we have witnessed a publication-
productive practical turn in Western studies on China, as a result of which 
modernisation processes gradually emerge in their many facets of 
transformations of the material texture of the everyday, of gradual and 
often non-synchronous changes in quotidian knowledge and work. With 
his study on the life-world of Sichuan papermakers, Jacob Eyferth adds a 
particular perspective to this field. In focussing on the skills and practical 
knowledge of these local craftspeople, he is able to concretise in which way 
the larger historical processes of the transformation of Chinese everyday 
life, as well as that of peasants into citizens of the nation-state in twentieth-
century China, implies—as Eyferth puts it—“skill-extraction” that led to “a 
massive transfer of technical control from the villages to the cities, from 
primary producers to managed elites, from women to men” (p. 2). 
The book under review puts skills at the centre of its focus, talks about 
the negotiation of the value of skills, and about the transformation of a 
particular skill-scape in the modernisation process in twentieth-century 
China. A community of craftsmen and papermakers is presented as a com-
218                                                                                                 EASTM 36 (2012) 
munity of “skilled practitioners”, those who know how to make paper 
from bamboo, who think and act in their world in terms of papermaking, 
who know that this is hard work, that this needs enduring patience, and 
know how it is linked to grain. They know the consistency and smell of 
pulp, and know about vats or about what the wall feels like on which the 
paper is spread to finally dry. All throughout the book the reader has a 
skill perspective in mind. He or she waits for the word skill to appear, 
learns to contemplate the fate of papermakers in terms of what becomes or 
has become of their skills, and grasps an idea of how it must feel when 
skills become obsolete, fragmented, when they get lost, or when decision-
making institutions simply lack appropriate insight and implement politi-
cal strategies that run counter to the skilled papermakers. 
Practical knowledge of craftsmen has found an interest among literati 
throughout Chinese history, especially so from the second half of the nine-
teenth century onwards. Economists, chroniclers, historians and technical 
painters, as well as early Western-trained engineers, took an interest in 
tools, machines, production processes, production statistics, workshop 
organisation and the like. In passing they also noted religious issues, and 
perhaps even the family and kinship structure on which workshop 
organisation was based. This practical turn, thanks to which practical 
knowledge in China was written down, preserved—the word “extracted” 
seems odd to us here—, depicted and photographed, was one expression of 
Chinese reactions to Western scientific discourse, as well as to modern 
technologies of reproduction of knowledge. This practical turn relates to 
what Eyferth calls the process of “skill extraction”. He seems to include an 
emic perspective of the papermakers, who have always been aware of the 
risks if outsiders knew too much about the skills crucial to their craft. For a 
couple of reasons—explained in this book—such “skill extraction”, an 
intense interest in studying and recording manual papermaking techno-
logy for purposes of reform initiatives and industrialisation—culminated in 
Republican times and in the 1950s. 
In his book, Eyferth starts from the texts—and thus extracted know-
ledge—of literati and scholars to look at the transformation of the life-
world of Chinese craftsmen from the late nineteenth through the twentieth 
century, marked by the end of Imperial China (chap. 2), the Republic of 
China between 1911 and 1949 (chap. 3), the founding of the PRC in 1949 
with the Great Leap Forward, the famine, and the Cultural Revolution in 
the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s (chap. 4-6) and the economic reforms since 
the 1980s (chap. 7-9). This latest era, by the way, was the stage of the story 
at which Eyferth pursued his interviews in Sichuan. He was confronted 
with some of the logical consequences of this—potentially being identified 
with “spies” regarding a now precious manual technology, witnessing a 
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revival of religious practice, witnessing discourse on the new situation and 
reflections on change and times gone by, and facing a lack of archival 
materials due to the destruction of archives in times of civil war and the 
Cultural Revolution. (pp. 18-19) 
In focussing on “the material and the everyday” (p. 1) in village China 
at work, Eyferth takes the example of papermakers in rural Sichuan as the 
background for telling the story of a crucial yet under-researched trans-
formation of the workplace in China. It resulted, as he puts it, in a 
“redistribution of skill, knowledge and technical control” (p. 2). 
Jacob Jan Karl Eyferth, currently professor of Chinese history at the 
University of Chicago, trained as an historian and sinologist in Berlin, 
Leiden, Hangzhou and Oxford, has worked at the Fairbank Center for East 
Asian Studies, at Rutgers University and at Simon Fraser University—and, 
by the way, also trained as a carpenter before turning to academia. Well-
equipped by these backgrounds, he has gathered data from intensive 
archival research, and field interviews and on-the-spot information among 
Sichuan papermakers between 1995 and 2004. He gives an account of the 
social history of papermakers in twentieth-century China, developing his 
interpretation of their history in nine chapters and an elaborate conclusion, 
in a well-produced book furnished with a Chinese character list for selected 
names and terms, a comprehensive bibliography and an index. 
Eyferth situates his study methodologically between history, social 
history, economic history, phenomenology, cognitive sciences and anthro-
pology of technology. This enables him to develop his own approach to the 
papermakers’ community of practice and skill, as such communities of 
shared knowledge were, in particular ways, hit by and shipped through 
the turbulent decennia of political and economic change. 
The book offers multi-dimensional perspectives on the transformation 
of their life and work and is, first and foremost, interesting to read. 
Through minute descriptions, quoting from interviews with papermakers 
that include their terminology, and texts from their work songs—one 
regrets that the publishers did not include original Chinese language song 
texts—Eyferth allows insights into the pleasures, hardship, toil and joy of 
the papermakers. He depicts an everyday working life where taxation and 
grain procurement, a customary reward system, hard work and rights to 
take breaks and proper meals, struggles over rights regarding skills and 
competences, access to paper drying walls in the compound of another 
family or issues of long distance transport and possibilities of innovating 
technical processes were imprinted into the course of peoples’ daily lives 
and routines. His historical analysis provides Eyferth with a grid within 
which to situate the contents of his interviews. 
220                                                                                                 EASTM 36 (2012) 
Against a common model of a “rural-urban divide” (p. 2) that, accord-
ing to James Scott, modernising states tend to construct as “state simplifi-
cations” (p. 3; Scott 1998) and through which the skills of rural people are 
contested and denied, Eyferth re-establishes the “skillful peasant” (p. 5) 
“centrally concerned with the production and reproduction of economi-
cally useful skill” (p. 6). In “looking through the lens of skill” (p. 7), he 
approaches economic life asking what drives and forms social and 
particularly kinship organisation and the reproduction of knowledge in 
society. In the case of China, with its long history of local rural craft 
specialisation, which was appreciated and in many ways fostered by the 
elite and literati, the negotiation of the political and economic importance 
admitted to specialised labour and labourers and their products comes into 
focus. 
Like other craftspeople in China, the Jiajiang 夹江 papermakers pro-
duced and still produce a local product of national importance. Through-
out the turbulent political processes that shook the PRC in its first 50 years, 
the community of papermakers has been driven along, caught in the 
attempts to construct a new socialist society, with its re-categorisation of its 
citizens, attempts to integrate them into economic planning, to centrally 
organise the industrialisation of their products, and finally appearing to 
make their skills obsolete. Factors that characterised this history seemed at 
times trivial. The classification as belonging to the category of peasant 
could force the papermakers to have to exploit their poor land for 
agriculture and sacrifice their bamboo woods (hence the title “Eating Rice 
from Bamboo Roots”). This also led to the fact that the papermakers were 
very heavily hit by the great famine at the beginning of the 1960s (chap. 6). 
The distance to the county seat—the comparison of Hexi 河西 and Hedong 
河东 as places of different distances and the consequences they endured 
due to this difference which runs through the book—could be a decisive 
factor. The degree of insight or even ignorance of local cadres and decision-
makers into the skills and thinking of papermakers could be another. The 
fate of the papermakers depended heavily on the translation of their needs 
on a local level, if not to the national government. It thus depended, 
Eyferth argues, on translators and activists like the courageous party 
secretary Shi Dingliang (Pseudonym) and his impressive engagement with 
bureaucracy on behalf of the papermakers after the great famine (chap. 6). 
The history of the papermakers in twentieth century China has, as 
Eyferth shows, also been a social history of the transformation of a local 
craft. In the beginning we see an agnatic, kinship based community of 
skilled labourers producing for retailers who sold handmade paper to 
urban elite consumers. In the end he describes an extended household 
family workshop industry in the 1980s’ economic reform period, retailing 
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directly to connoisseur consumers and shops for luxury paper, and about 
to renew kinship ties ritually (chap. 9, about the Jiadangqiao 加档桥 stele). 
The fact that in the end, with the economic reforms, hand-produced paper 
kept its importance for connoisseurs for whom it became a luxury art-
paper product, while cheap paper was re-used in rituals which had been 
banned until then, seems ironic. But the evolving market economy since the 
1980s also created a new market for the papermakers. This led to the re-
evaluation of still existing skills, techniques, and local products. Today we 
observe in China the reformation of the craft due to the luxury market as 
well as due to counterfeiting. 
Eyferth makes such processes concrete. He looks at this history from 
two perspectives: that of the skilled craftsmen, and that of a socialist state 
implementing its policies towards the craftspeople. He introduces the 
notion of skill as a resource of a community of practitioners, a resource that 
has always been and still is “contested and subject to distribution strug-
gles” (p. 11). His book is about the history of struggles for skill protection 
vs. skill extraction. Skills, Jacob argues, are constantly negotiated, even 
within the papermaker community, where knowledge and the acquisition 
of skills are kept in the family through exclusion, exclusion also, for 
example, of out-marrying members from certain craft knowledge. Eyferth 
introduces the notion of de-skilling—again following James Scott, who 
read the way the modern state pursued his interest in the “dispossession of 
subaltern groups” (p. 12; Scott 1998)—in appropriating their resource skill 
for a better planning of the economy and for developing the country and 
industry. Here, Eyferth speaks of “socialist deskilling”: “My focus is on a 
process of stateled skill expropriation that began tentatively in the 1920s 
and culminated in the campaign and struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.” (p. 
13) In the end it has been the socialist state, he seems to argue, which 
sacrificed local skill-scapes and manual labour for technological and social 
progress, for industrial state construction, and in the interest of state 
control over its citizens. The papermakers, on the other hand, “did engage 
with the revolution at a conceptual level” (p. 17), but they did it “acting 
from a background of previously acquired skills” (p. 18). Finally, the paper-
makers’ communities of skill could take advantage of economic and tech-
nical change. This had already started in the 1970s, when a black market for 
handmade paper evolved, and continued under the family contract system 
of the 1980s (chap. 7-8). The papermakers finally managed to revive their 
craft under conditions of part-mechanisation, which made their hard work 
easier, enabling them to “reconnect the social tissue that had become thin 
and fractured during the Mao years and to repair the structures that 
underpinned the reproduction of skill” (p. 21; chap. 9). 
222                                                                                                 EASTM 36 (2012) 
In 2011 this book was awarded the “Joseph Levenson Book Prize: Post-
1900 Category” by the AAS China and Inner Asia Council. It is a crucial 
oeuvre not only in the social history of modern Chinese crafts and 
technology, but also for Chinese anthropology. The image of “an almost 
total discontinuity in the Chinese workplace” in modern China, while 
“continuity in the workplaces tends to be conceptualised as an anachro-
nistic survival of pre-industrial habits” (Eyferth [Ed.] 2006: 3) has 
dominated the discourses on work in the early PRC long enough. In 
“looking through the lens of skill” Eyferth is able to distance himself from 
this discontinuity paradigm, and to give way to the appreciation of the 
value of other factors—the re-negotiation of the value of skills, ownership 
in and appropriation of knowledge, social change and its gender implica-
tions for the transmission of and access to skill, and, of course, skill 
extraction and processes of de-skilling. Thus he allows an entirely different 
image to emerge, one that helps to link the picture of the rural community 
of papermakers of the 1920s to that of the papermakers in the year 2000—
both performing similar work in now entirely different societies. No, the 
skills of the papermakers were not extinguished in the socialist period, 
simply because the skills were not just a matter of technical facts and 
prescription, but “distributed across a field of relations” (p. 16) with a 
“wide dispersal of information across heterogeneous media” (p. 16). 
Eyferth concludes that this was due to “the inability of state agents … to 
come to terms with the nature of physically embodied, socially embedded 
skills” (p. 227). 
The picture of a re-established order after socialism, though, is— and 
Eyferth’s descriptions allow us to imagine in which way—misleading. 
Between the two ends of the story lies a history of promises, hope and 
deception, of the inevitable logics of the everyday consequences and often 
not anticipated aftermaths of political decisions, of strategies of resistance, 
of courage and pride—if not of living up to promises once made by the 
socialist state that were not fulfilled. Today, a new page in the history of 
papermakers has opened with the declaration of Jiajiang papermaking as 
National Immaterial Cultural Heritage in 2006. The story of the paper-
makers in China is thus not finished. This book leaves readers full of 
curiosity. 
References 
Eyferth, Jacob (2003), “De-Industrialization in the Chinese Countryside: 
Handicrafts and Development in Jiajiang (Sichuan) 1935 to 1978”, The 
China Quarterly 173: 53-72. 
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―――― (2003), “How not to Industrialize: Observations from a Village in 
Sichuan”, The Journal of Peasant Studies 30 (3/4): 53-74. 
―――― (ed.) (2006), How China Works: Perspectives on the Twentieth-century 
Workplace, London: Routledge. 
―――― (2006), “Introduction”, in Eyferth (ed.), How China Works, pp. 1-24. 
―――― (2006), “Socialist Deskilling: The Struggle over Skills in a Rural 
Craft Industry, 1949-1965”, in Eyferth (ed.), How China Works, pp. 41-58. 
Scott, James (1998), “Citizenship and Skill in Twentieth-century China”, in 
James Scott, Seeing like a State (Draft Version, n.D.), New Haven: Yale 
University Press. 
Scott, James (1998), Seeing like a State, New Haven: Yale University Press. 
 


Jacob Eyferth, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920-2000

Berque, Augustin

166                                                                                                  EASTM 35 (2012) 
 
Hans Ulrich Vogel and Günter Dux (eds.), Concepts of Nature: A Chinese-
European Cross-Cultural Perspective, with an overview and introduction 
by Mark Elvin, Leiden/Boston: Brill (Conceptual History and Chinese 
Linguistics; 1), 2010, 566 pp. 
Augustin Berque 
[A geographer and orientalist, Augustin Berque (b. 1942) is retired professor at the 
Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris). He has published extensively 
on the relationship of human societies with their environment, especially in Japan. 
He advocates mesology (風土論 : the study of human milieux) as an onto-
geographical approach to human existence (see mésologiques.com). A member of 
the Academia europaea, he was in 2009 the first Westerner to receive the Fukuoka 
Grand Prize for Asian cultures. Contact: berque@ehess.fr] 
As noted in the acknowledgments, “this volume originated in a conference 
on ‘Understanding Nature in China and Europe until the Eighteenth Cen-
tury: A Cross-Cultural Project’, held in the city of Rheine in Westphalia, 
Germany, from March 22 to 25, 2000” (p. vii). It gathers together 17 articles 
by 15 authors, under the editorship of a sinologist (Hans Ulrich Vogel, 
University of Tübingen) and a philosopher and sociologist (Günter Dux, 
University of Freiburg), with a considerable help from another sinologist 
(Mark Elvin, Australian National University at Canberra), who contributes 
a substantial overview (pp. 1-55) and a synopsis of each contribution (pp. 
56-101). Thus, added to his own chapter (pp. 400-468), Elvin alone writes 
nearly one third of this huge collective work. 
The following themes are addressed in the book: “The Genesis of Philo-
sophy in the History of Mind: A Cross-Cultural Comparison between 
Classical Greece and China“ (Günter Dux); “The Universe as Cosmos: On 
the Ontology of the Greek World Image“ (Julián Pacho); “The Notion of 
Causality in Aristotle and the Medieval Philosophy of Nature: A Develop-
mental Approach“ (Ulrich Wenzel); “Cosmology and Concepts of Nature 
in Traditional China“ (John B. Henderson); “On Nature and Culture in 
Zhou China“ (Heiner Roetz); “Towards a Conceptual History of Some 
Concepts of Nature in Classical Chinese: zi ran 自然 and zi ran zhi li 自然之
理“ (Christoph Harbsmeier); “Mathematics, Nature and Cosmological In-
quiry in Traditional China“ (Karine Chemla); “When Shen Gua Encoun-
tered the ‘Natural World’: A Preliminary Discussion on the Mengxi bitan 
and the Concept of Nature“ (Fu Daiwie); “Becoming Acquainted with 
Nature from the Odes: Sidelights on the Study of Flora and Fauna in Song 
Dynasty’s Shijing 詩經 (Classic of Odes) Scholarship“ (Achim Mittag); 
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“Concepts of Nature in Traditional Chinese Materia Medica and Botany 
(Sixteenth to Seventeenth Century)“ (Georges Métailié); “The Investigation 
of Things (gewu 格物), Natural Studies (gezhixue 格致學), and Evidential 
Studies (kaozhengxue 考證學) in Late Imperial China (1600-1800)” (Benjamin 
A. Elman); “Personal Luck: Why Premodern China—probably—did not 
Develop Probabilistic Thinking“ (Mark Elvin); “’That Which Soaks and 
Descends Becomes Salty’: The Concept of Nature in Traditional Chinese 
Salt Production“ (Hans Ulrich Vogel); “The Myriad Things: Random 
Thoughts on Nature in China and the West“ (Wolfgang Kubin); “On the 
Relationship between Man and Nature in China“ (Helwig Schmidt-
Glintzer). 
Needless to say, discussing all of this variegated, and often extremely 
detailed material is beyond the scope of a single book review. I will concen-
trate, therefore, on some general ideas. First of all, let us render thanks to 
the three editors for having gathered and organized such rich reflexions on 
the cross-cultural analysis of the concept of nature. In the last quarter of a 
century or so, there have been many international conferences comparing 
the conceptions of nature (ziran guan 自然観) in the East and in the West, 
but seldom has the matter been explored so methodically. This work 
without doubt serves as a reference book on the question of nature in 
China (clearly more than in Europe), both for its texts and for the huge 
amount of bibliographical data concluding most of the chapters (e.g. 136 
titles in Vogel’s). 
Let us also thank Elvin for having written such a balanced synthesis of 
all that material, overcoming the inevitable discrepancies between nearly a 
score of different points of view on, and approaches to basically the same 
question, many of which are highly technical (especially Elvin’s own study 
on probability). This spares me the task of trying to do the same. I will 
rather discuss a few points, which to my mind are key.  
First of all, the choice of historical period, ending in the eighteenth 
century, is intended of course to limit the question to within a time frame 
when the European mode of relating to nature had not yet overwhelmed, 
in the form of the industrialized world, all the other modes, including 
traditional European ones. Before the industrial revolution, indeed, China 
and Europe might be compared more fairly, and, as is well known, this 
comparison might advantage China more often than the reverse. Accor-
dingly, for the sake of comparison, there are good reasons for having exclu-
ded the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, what had been going on 
before 1800 is precisely that which explains what happened later. This is 
particularly the case for the scientific revolution, which took place in 
Europe in the seventeenth century, and without which—at least to my 
mind—the industrial revolution would not have been possible. 
168                                                                                                  EASTM 35 (2012) 
 
This is certainly a controversial point, one that the book does not delve 
into systematically enough. For sure, many of the articles give us precious 
clues about the lack of a really scientific (in the modern Western sense) 
approach to natural phenomena in China; this is, for example, clearly 
expressed by the very title of Vogel’s article. Yet, this does not amount to a 
direct discussion. On the whole, this lack of a direct appraisal of the 
scientific revolution reminds one of Kenneth Pomeranz’ The Great Diver-
gence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton 
University Press, 2000), the interpretation of which might easily lead one to 
think that, after all, the industrial revolution could be explained without 
the factor of modern science.  
As said above, I do not agree with this view. This is not only for the 
reason that what has become technoscience is nowadays inherent to 
industry, but rather because modern science and industry both stem from 
the same conception of nature as an object; and this is precisely the para-
digm which the scientific revolution definitely established. 
This exceeds the question of defining what the modern scientific 
method properly is; it rather becomes an ontological and logical problem, 
and in this respect, what is peculiar is the European historical path, not the 
Chinese one. What the Chinese knew about nature has a decisive trait in 
common with India, the Arab world, or Europe before the Galilean-
Newtonian paradigm: this knowledge did not leave aside human existence. 
This is expressed in the notion of cosmos, that is, a comprehensive order 
including both nature and the human. Of course, each culture expresses 
this common condition (viz cosmicity) in its proper terms. Much of the 
content of Concepts of Nature shows that, in various ways, the Chinese view 
of nature kept an analogical or correlative bent, reflecting the human onto 
the natural. Even though the systematic correlations between natural and 
social facts established by Dong Zhongshu during the Han dynasty may 
have been discussed later (resulting in a progressively more profane world-
view, as shown by several of the articles), physics never became indepen-
dent from political and moral considerations. Yet this is precisely what 
happened in modern Europe—at least in principle—, not elsewhere. 
The said principle is nothing other than dualism, which simultaneously 
absolutized the object (the res extensa) on the one hand, and the subject (the 
res cogitans) on the other. This radically abstracted the human subject out of 
nature, which became, by the same token, a pure object. As Descartes wrote 
in the Discours de la méthode, the cogito exists in itself: “(...) I knew then that I 
was a substance (...) which, in order to be, does not need any place (n’a 
besoin d'aucun lieu) (...)“.  
As one of the articles notes (Fu, pp. 306), it may indeed be contested that 
modern dualism ever existed, as Bruno Latour did in his controversial Nous 
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n’avons jamais été modernes (We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: 
Harvard University Press and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). To 
my mind, such arguments amount to confusing what Plato distinguished, 
an ideal paradigm on the one hand, and actual practice on the other. This 
distinction is precisely what, much later, made the scientific revolution 
possible; and this is because paradigms are that which leads practice into a 
certain historical direction. That is also what happened with modern dua-
lism as a paradigm: it has entailed such historical phenomena as the indus-
trial revolution, although no modern scientist, might he be Galileo or New-
ton, ever realized in his practice the cogito’s ideal abstraction. Newton in his 
practice as a historical person never transcended the contingencies of con-
crete space (which is heterogeneous, anisotropic and limited by a horizon), 
although his physics postulates an absolute, homogeneous, isotropic and 
infinite space. It may then be that Newton was not modern, but the princi-
ples of his cosmology indeed were, and that is what historically proved to 
be important. It later entailed, for example, the abstraction of “universal 
space“ in architecture. 
Both absolute space and time presuppose dualism. Without this condi-
tion, both remain related to human existence. Dualism in its turn logically 
presupposes the law of the excluded middle: either the subject (A) or the 
object (non-A), but no intermediate entity, which would be both A and 
non-A. Western logic, from Aristotle to Hegel and beyond until Lupasco, 
has clung to this law (Hegel’s synthesis overcomes the contradiction of the 
thesis and the antithesis, it does not make them coexist). Several chapters in 
Concepts of Nature deal with Aristotle, but none with this question. Yet, it is 
a decisive one, because the law of the excluded middle did not only entail 
dualism; it forcludes (rules out) symbolicity, a symbol being precisely that 
which makes A and non-A coexist in one and the same thing. This forclu-
sion of symbolicity has been inherent to Western rationalism at least since 
Plato’s Republic, from which the poets—in other words mythical thought—
are banned because “reason made that a duty for us“ (ho gar logos hêmas 
hêrei, I, VIII, 609 b 3). 
In China, contrary to Europe, the most elaborate form of logic—that of 
Buddhism—not only did not exclude the middle, it explicitly included it in 
the form of the Nagarjunian tetralemma: 1) affirmation (A); 2) negation 
(non-A); 3) neither affirmation nor negation (neither A nor non-A); 4) both 
affirmation and negation (both A and non-A). Particularly in Zen (Chan) 
Buddhism, this form of logic is also known, in Suzuki Daisetz’s 鈴木大拙 
terms, as the “logic of sokuhi“ (sokuhi no ronri 即非の論理). This may sound 
exotic, but it is in fact the very logic of symbolicity. Indeed, what the fourth 
lemma expresses is nothing other than what a symbol concretely embodies: 
the principle of the included middle, at the same time A and non-A.  
170                                                                                                  EASTM 35 (2012) 
 
Now, since a human is zôon logon echôn (a living being who possesses 
language), the human world is necessarily fraught with symbolicity. That is 
what the Greeks called kosmos, the Romans mundus, and the Chinese yuzhou 
宇宙. Conversely, what the law of the excluded middle and its forclusion of 
symbolicity eventually entailed, in the form of modern dualism and 
mechanicism, is a universe alien to human existence—that universe about 
which Pascal wrote “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me 
(le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie)“. And the reason why this 
universe, born from the scientific revolution, never appeared in China until 
brought in from the industrialized West, is fundamentally that Chinese rea-
son did not ban poets and symbols. 
There is not much about Buddhism in Concepts of Nature, and nothing 
about tetralemmas. To be sure, there are some discussions about logic, 
especially in Dux’ article, which puts forward, concerning China, a “sub-
jectivistic logic“. However, this article remains ambiguous about what the 
word “subject“ actually means. A subject in logic (S: zhuti 主題 or zhuyu 主
語) is opposed to a predicate (P: shuyu 述語); it is not opposed to an object 
(O: keti 客體 or duixiang 對象). On the contrary, what for the logician is the 
subject is precisely that which for the physicist is the object, i.e. that which 
the problem is about. Dux does not make this distinction, nor is he con-
cerned with predicates. Now, reality, be it in the human or animal world, is 
the way a subject (in the psychological sense, i.e. a certain being) interprets 
an object (i.e. a subject in the logical sense, S) by dint of some predicate (P); 
that is, puts it within a certain category (in Aristotle’s terms, a predicate is a 
katêgorêma). In other words, S is taken as P, through the subject’s senses, 
thoughts, words or action; and reality amounts to the relation S/P. 
Aristotelian logic is based on the identity of S, in which it is linked with 
the law of the excluded middle. This is also why modern dualism could 
absolutize the subject’s consciousness (the cogito) on the one hand, and the 
object on the other: they are two different substantial S, one being A and 
the other one non-A, with their respective identities. If one follows Dux’ 
expression, this might be called an “objectivistic logic“, as opposed to the 
“subjectivistic“ Chinese one. Yet in fact, there is not much objectiveness in 
that dualistic absolutization of S; because in reality (S/P), there can exist no 
S unless taken (predicated) as some P by a certain being. A pure S is a pure 
abstraction. And it is exactly such an abstraction which the modern Wes-
tern scientific paradigm amounts to. 
In contradistinction, Chinese logic appears as a logic of concreteness, 
that of a world actually inhabited by human beings, who feel, think, speak 
and act about the objects (S) in a certain way (P), making them real things 
(S/P). This logic, out of the universe (S), makes a cosmos (S/P), which 
speaks through symbols to the person’s mind. It differs from those “eter-
Reviews                                                                                         171 
 
nally mute and infinite spaces“ which were born from the scientific revolu-
tion. In other words, the Chinese did not decosmize their world, as did the 
Europeans with their respective world—at least paradigmatically, entailing 
in the long run tremendous practical effects. This process is what Heideg-
ger has called Entweltlichung, “deworlding“, adding that this gave rise to 
“Natur“ (as an object). It goes without saying that the Chinese ziran 自然, 
zaohua 造化 and the like (Harbmeier’s article is particularly enlightening 
about this terminology) did not become such a “Natur“. 
As Concepts of Nature does not pay much attention to Heideggerian 
phraseology, let us put this in a more precise way. What the process of 
decosmization means is that modern dualism has, at least in principle, 
reduced our ambient world or milieu (Umwelt, in Uexküll’s vocabulary) to 
an objective environment (or Umgebung). At about the same time when 
Uexküll, dealing in Germany with animals in general, established this 
essential distinction between Umgebung (which exists only for the scientist) 
and Umwelt (which is reality for any living being, and is always specific to 
that being, e.g. proper to a certain animal species), Watsuji, in Japan, estab-
lished a strictly homologous distinction between shizen kankyō 自然環境 
(the natural environment, as objectified by the natural sciences) and fūdō 風
土, i.e. the milieu proper to a given society.  
Here and there, in Concepts of Nature, one can catch a glimpse of that 
essential difference between environment and milieu, or Umgebung and 
Umwelt; but it is not systematized, nor even explicitly addressed.  For 
example, Kubin is perfectly right when he writes (p. 522), “I do not 
differentiate between nature and landscape in the Chinese context“. By the 
way, he might have added that one should not differentiate between nature 
and fengshui (a topic not addressed by the book, though eminently distinc-
tive of the Chinese conception of the natural environment). This means, in 
fact, that in China, the environment was not reduced to the Umgebung; it 
remained a milieu (an Umwelt). Or, to put it logically, reality remained a 
concrete S/P, it was not decomposed into two dualistic abstractions, A (a 
certain S, in this case the res cogitans) and non-A (another S, in this case the 
res extensa), forcluding (ruling out) the fact that human existence necessa-
rily predicates the environment (S) into a milieu (S/P), and that reducing 
S/P to S (i.e. the milieu to an objective Umgebung) amounts not only to 
decosmize, but to dehumanize the environment. 
If I have insisted here on these logical and ontological aspects of the 
question of nature, it is, needless to say, because I should have liked the 
book to have established more firmly these general and structuring aspects 
of the human relationship with the environment. Be that as it may, Concepts 
of Nature is an extremely rich source of detailed information, enabling one 
to elaborate that very problematic in its historical actualization. After 
172                                                                                                  EASTM 35 (2012) 
 
reading the book, one has plenty of concrete illustrations at one’s disposal, 
showing the respective merits and demerits of keeping nature as an 
appropriate cosmos, or of changing it into an alien, indifferent universe. In 
that sense, Concepts of Nature, though ending before the industrial revo-
lution, has much to teach us about our present environmental crisis, and 
gives us many hints about the ways to overcome it. 


Hans Ulrich Vogel and Günter Dux (eds.), Concepts of Nature: A Chinese-European Cross-Cultural Persepctive

Thompson, C. Michele

230                                                                                                 EASTM 36 (2012) 
 
 
Ann Jannetta, The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the ‘Opening’ 
of Japan, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 245 pp. 
C. Michele Thompson 
[Dr. C. Michele Thompson holds a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from the 
University of Washington. She is Professor of Southeast Asian History in the 
Department of History at Southern Connecticut State University. Her recent 
publications include co-editing Southern Medicine for Southern People: 
Tradition, Modernity, and the History of Medicine in Vietnam, Cambridge 
Scholarly Publications, 2012, “Setting the Stage: Ancient Medical History of the 
Geographic Space that is now Vietnam”, in Southern Medicine for Southern 
People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making and “Jean Marie Despiau: Much 
Maligned Physician in the Service of the Nguyễn Dynasty”, in Wynn Wilcox (ed.), 
Vietnam and the West: New Approaches, Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia 
Publications, 2010. Contact: thompsonc2@southernct.edu] 
One can tell from the title alone that Ann Jannetta’s The Vaccinators: 
Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the ‘Opening’ of Japan is a must read for 
historians who study vaccination and for scholars who study medicine in 
Japan. It is less obvious that Jannetta’s work has the potential to have a 
profound impact on Japanese studies in general if it finds the wide 
readership that it deserves. The Vaccinators takes the complex history of the 
introduction of Jennerian vaccination to Japan as a case study to refute the 
simplistic, primarily Amerocentric, notion that Japan was almost 
completely closed to foreign contact when U.S. Commodore Matthew C. 
Perry and his fleet arrived in March of 1854. Although this book is 
catalogued by the Library of Congress under “Smallpox—Vaccination—
Japan—History” and under “Smallpox vaccine—Japan—History” and 
under “Smallpox—Japan—History” it is also a highly sophisticated 
addition to works on the ‘political’ history of nineteenth- century Japan, a 
rather important time period.  
Jannetta begins The Vaccinators with an overview of the Japanese 
political situation in the decades leading up to Perry’s arrival. This includes 
detailed information on Japan’s ‘openness’ to western medical knowledge 
transmitted from the Dutch through a select group of Japanese scholars, 
many of whom were physicians. Jannetta continues with a sweeping 
overview of the impact of smallpox, worldwide, in the late eighteenth 
century. The author then moves on to a discussion of Edward Jenner’s 
experiments with cowpox, the publication of his findings, and a number of 
international efforts designed to diffuse Variolae vaccinae and to teach the 
techniques necessary to use and propagate it. Among these international 
Reviews                                                                                                                  231 
 
efforts was the introduction, from French held Île de France (Mauritius), of 
cowpox to the Dutch colonial city of Batavia, today’s Jakarta.  Smallpox 
vaccine (cowpox) was first successfully imported into the Dutch territories 
in what is today Indonesia on the arms of young children. At the time, 
young, usually male, children were used as living carriers of smallpox 
vaccine because arm to arm vaccination was the best method to transport 
the rare, in most of the world, and delicate cowpox virus and ensure that it 
would survive long enough to reach its destination. 
From Batavia information on vaccination reached the Dutch trading 
post near Nagasaki in August 1803 (p. 57). Thus, information on vacci-
nation first reached Japan, from the Dutch, over fifty years before Perry’s 
arrival. However, it took another forty-six years for the Dutch, after 
numerous failed attempts, to successfully import viable cowpox into Japan. 
By that time, 1849, a network had developed among Japanese physicians 
who had contacts of various sorts with the Dutch. Because of this network 
there were enough Japanese physicians with knowledge of vaccination that, 
once they had a source of viable vaccine, within a mere six months they 
were able to introduce vaccination to “all major regions of Japan” (p. 145). 
Jannetta provides an admirably detailed account of the development of this 
network. 
Prior to this successful introduction however the Dutch had, repeatedly, 
attempted to send cowpox lymph by methods other than arm to arm 
vaccination. All of these efforts were unsuccessful, the cowpox did not 
survive and the vaccinations performed in Japan failed. However, in the 
1840s, Japanese physicians who practiced Chinese style inoculation for 
smallpox, using attenuated smallpox virus, theorized that since smallpox 
scabs preserved the viability of the smallpox inoculum perhaps the same 
was true for cowpox. They requested that the Dutch send cowpox scabs 
from Batavia rather than continuing to send lymph. The Dutch cooperated 
with this novel, to them, request. The cowpox scabs provided efficacious 
smallpox vaccine and Japanese physicians immediately began propagating 
cowpox through arm to arm vaccination. 
However, one wonders why the Japanese had not requested that the 
Dutch bring cowpox from Batavia using the arm to arm method years 
before this? Or why the Dutch had not tried this. Although the author 
discusses how cowpox was brought to Batavia by arm to arm vaccination, 
how the arm to arm method was used to produce vaccinia on Java, and how 
after viable cowpox arrived in Nagasaki arm to arm vaccination was used 
to spread vaccination throughout Japan, the question of why the Dutch did 
not try to bring vaccine to Japan through arm to arm vaccination during 
over forty years of failed efforts is not addressed. Perhaps this question 
cannot be answered with the evidence available, but it is surprising that 
232                                                                                                 EASTM 36 (2012) 
this question is not even raised within The Vaccinators. There are a few 
other points that mar this very fine book. For example, there are a few 
points in the text where the term cowpox is transposed when what is 
clearly meant is smallpox. For example “Chinese physicians had found 
cowpox scabs to be less fragile and more easily stored than cowpox lymph” 
(p. 130). If Chinese physicians did indeed find this out about ‘cowpox’ 
rather than ‘smallpox’ this reader would be very interested in this 
information and would appreciate a reference for it. 
On a more positive note this book is particularly user friendly with a 
number of clear, appropriate, and well explained maps, tables, illustrations, 
and appendices which truly add to the scholarly value of the book. Ann 
Jannetta has done a wonderful job of presenting not only the medical and 
political but also the artistic, intellectual, religious and social context of the 
introduction of Jennerian vaccination to Japan. Further, her evidence and 
examples firmly support her assertion that Japanese physicians were 
“important agents of change” in contact with scientific information from 
Western nations long before Commodore Perry’s arrival (p. 182). The 
Vaccinators is a wonderful addition to the scholarly literature on the Dutch 
enclave in Japan, on nineteenth-century Japan, on the history of medicine 
in Japan, and on the history of the worldwide diffusion of vaccination. 


Ann Jannetta, The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the ‘Opening’ of Japan

Seifert, Andreas

202                                                                                                 EASTM 34 (2011) 
 
David Barker, Traditional Techniques in Contemporary Chinese Printmaking 
(Printmaking Handbook), London: A&C Black, 2005, 128 pp., ill. 
Andreas Seifert 
[Andreas Seifert is an independent post-doc researcher at the AOI at Tübingen 
University. In his dissertation, he discussed the development of Chinese Comic 
books in the twentieth century. He is currently doing research on Chinese popular 
culture and on security and military matters in contemporary East Asia. Contact: 
andreas.seifert@uni-tuebingen.de] 
 
Sinologists working on modern China tend to view woodcuts and 
printmaking for their role in the development of artistic style or their 
societal value. Starting points—among others—can be the woodblock prin-
ting movement initiated by the famous writer Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881-1936) in 
the early thirties of the twentieth century, or the employment of woodcuts 
as a propaganda tool during the war against Japan. The technical develop-
ment of woodcut printmaking in pre-modern times seldom features in re-
search as one of the roots of modern artistic practice.1 The title of the book 
presented here seems to fill this gap and to explore the usage of traditional 
technical skills in the contemporary art scene.  
Barker is Professor for printmaking at the School of Art and Design at 
the University of Ulster, and his small book appears as one of a series of 
printmaking handbooks aimed at students and others interested in the 
practical techniques of printmaking.2 This is important to note, since it is 
not the goal of the publication to present all aspects of printmaking in 
China over the period of the last 2200 years. The emphasis is on practical 
information on “how to do” to motivate students and printmakers explo-
ring new techniques. 
As an introduction to the topic he gives a short historical overview of 
the development of printmaking in China. Mentioning seals, stone rub-
bings and book printing, Barker situates the field of printmaking in the 
broad context of the reproduction of images and texts. Like the rest of the 
book, this part is illustrated with many examples, some of them repro-
                                                          
1 An exception to this might be Flath’s work on New Year Pictures (nianhua 年 
画) which traces the development of this printed material from late Qing dynasty 
up to the 1950’s. He focuses on social and artistic construction of New Year Pictures 
leaving the technical aspect mostly untouched. James A. Flath, The Cult of 
Happiness—Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China (Seattle: University of 
Washington Press), 2004. 
2 Other titles in this series include Japanese Woodblock Printing (Rebecca Salter, 
2001) and Printmaking for Beginners (Jane Stobart, 2005).  
Reviews                                                                                                                  203 
 
ductions, some focusing on technical aspects. All figures are in close con-
nection to the text and chosen to illustrate a specific method of printing. 
The emphasis on the practical aspect of printing already starts in this 
chapter and Chinese history is reduced to a rough timeline. For example, 
one might feel frustrated in only reading about an increase in printed 
materials during the Ming dynasty without any comment on the reason for 
this, but, again, this is not the objective of the author. Reducing the 
explanations of the societal or dynastic context of the development of 
printing leaves room for describing technical innovations made during a 
particular time. 
Departing from these introductory notes, Barker divides his text accor-
ding to the printing techniques used, starting with printing with water-
soluble colour, followed by printing with poster-colour and stencil prints 
and ending with dabbed print techniques. Attached are a small bibliogra-
phy, a glossary, an index and a list of suppliers (mainly in the US or UK). 
The chapter on techniques of printing with water-soluble colours 
touches on the main feature of Chinese woodblock printing and describes 
tools and basic techniques used in China for woodblock printing in general. 
The use of water-soluble colours enables the artist to experiment with 
shades and colour gradation. The controlled “bleeding” can be seen as a 
speciality of Chinese printing that allows the final result to look like a real 
Chinese painting. This reminds us that woodblock printing is used for the 
reproduction of paintings done in traditional style (guohua 国画). The chap-
ter is structured according to typical processes of printing: the selection of 
wood for the block to be printed, tracing from the drawing, cutting the 
block, the selection of printing ink and paper, and finally the printing itself. 
All steps are described in detail and are easy to follow. Tools and materials 
are explained and illustrated. Useful hints are given on how to handle 
problems or how to achieve specific visual effects. The following chapter is 
on printing with poster-colour and adds only minor information to the 
preceding section by giving additional hints for handling the more solid 
and less transparent colours. 
Stencil printing deals with a wide variety of printing with different tech-
niques on different materials. However, the introduction given by Barker in 
chapter four fails to explain more than the principal technique. Stencils 
have long been used in China for various purposes, such as fabric or wall 
decoration, and are widely associated with folk art. Barker describes stencil 
printing with regard only to printing on paper. Stencils can be used to print 
an image directly onto the paper, or in reverse to apply a colour resist onto 
it, which has to be removed once the printing is finished. The explanation is 
short and provides only an overview which could be used as a starting 
point, but for troubleshooting this seems rather insufficient. 
204                                                                                                 EASTM 34 (2011) 
 
The last chapter deals with dab printing, one of the oldest forms of 
reproduction in China. Dabbed prints from stone tablets, often simply 
called rubbings by Western scholars, have been collected and used for 
centuries by scholars and art lovers. Here Barker’s description very quickly 
departs from the explanations of the basics to modern utilisation of the 
principle techniques for artistic purposes. He once again highlights the 
value of traditional techniques for modern artistic expression. 
Barker is right when he points out that there are very few works in 
English that provide the reader with detailed descriptions of the printing 
techniques, tools, materials and methods used in traditional woodblock 
printing in China. For readers capable of reading Chinese materials this is 
not the case. Since traditional printing is part of artistic education in China, 
there are numerous handbooks to be found doing exactly what Barker tries 
to achieve. Students of printmaking can make use of the descriptions and 
illustrations provided by Barker as a starting point for their own experi-
ments and practice. They are detailed and useful. Other readers, however, 
not engaged in printing but interested in Chinese woodblock printing art, 
might find this book less inspiring. It can, though, be helpful in identifying 
techniques used by the printmaker when analysing a particular work. It 
might also be useful to know the techniques when comparing Chinese with 
other woodblock prints. In this respect it can serve as an introduction for 
art historians and sinologists planning to undertake further research on 
printing techniques used in a given period in history, or in examining the 
works of particular artists. For such readers it is very helpful that most of 
the terms for tools and materials described are given in English, Chinese 
characters and Pinyin. 


David Barker, Traditional Techniques in Contemporary Chinese Printmaking (Printmaking Handbook)

journal, EASTM

 Contents 
 
 
Special Issue 
 
Networks and Circulation of Knowledge: Encounters  
between Jesuits, Manchus and Chinese in Late Imperial China 
 
 
Note from the Editor-in-Chief 9 
 
 
Introduction from the Guest Editor 
— NICOLAS STANDAERT  12 
 
 
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 
—NOËL GOLVERS  15 
 
 
Jesuit Medicine in the Kangxi Court (1662-1722):                    
Imperial Networks and Patronage 
—BEATRIZ PUENTE-BALLESTEROS  86 
 
 
Research Note 
 
Introduction and Development of the Screw in Seventeenth-
Century China: Theoretical Explanations and Practical 
Applications by Ferdinand Verbiest  
—NICOLE HALSBERGHE 163 
 
 To be published in issue 35 
 
Chinese Sources of Missionaries’ Writings on Chinese History and 
Chronology 
—NICOLAS STANDAERT   
 
 
Biblical Chronology and the Theory of Six “World Ages” 
Transmitted to China: Gezhi aolüe 格致奧略 (1718/1820) 
—AD DUDINK   
Reviews 
 
Wu Yi-Li, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth 
in Late Imperial China 
—reviewed by Larissa N. Heinrich 195 
 
Livia Kohn, Chinese Healing Exercises: The Tradition of Daoyin  
—reviewed by Paul D. Buell  199   
 
David Barker, Traditional Techniques in Contemporary Chinese 
Printmaking (Printmaking Handbook)  
—reviewed by Andreas Seifert 202 
 
Hartmut Walravens (ed.), A Japanese Herbal in the Wellcome 
Institute for the History of Medicine 
—reviewed by Teruyuki Kubo 205 
 
Carla Nappi, The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its 
Transformations in Early Modern China 
—reviewed by Timothy H. Barrett 210 
 
Asaf Goldschmidt, The Evolution of Chinese Medicine:                         
Song Dynasty, 960-1200 
—reviewed by Valerie Hansen 219 
 
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the 
Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe,       
1650-1900 
—reviewed by Toby E. Huff 222 
 
Roger Hart, The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra  
—reviewed by Eberhard Knobloch 225 
 
Chao Yüan-ling, Medicine and Society in Late Imperial China: A 
Study of Physicians in Suzhou, 1600-1850 
—reviewed by Xiaoping Fang 228 
 
 Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial 
Thinking  
—reviewed by Walter Demel 231 
 
 
 


Zhang, Li

Peter P. T. Sah and the Synthesis of Vitamin C in China and Europe

Knobloch, Eberhard

Reviews                                                                                                                  225 
 
Roger Hart, The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 2011, XIII + 286 pp. 
Eberhard Knobloch 
 
[Eberhard H. Knobloch is Professor emeritus of History of Science and Technology 
at the Berlin University of Technology and Academy Professor at the Berlin-
Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW), the former Prussian 
Academy of Sciences. He studied mathematics, classical philology, and history of 
science and technology. He received his Ph.D. from the Berlin University of 
Technology. He is heavily involved in the edition of Leibniz’s posthumous writings 
and is currently project leader of two series of the academy edition of Leibniz’s 
Complete Writings and Letters and also of the Alexander von Humboldt 
Research group at the BBAW. Since 2005 he has been president of the 
International Academy of the History of Science, Paris. Contact: 
eberhard.knobloch@tu-berlin.de] 
 
In this work, the author uses an interdisciplinary, cultural-historical 
approach in order to study “the history of the emergence, dissemination, 
and legitimation of scientific knowledge in the context of non-Western 
cultures and systems of thought“. He “seeks to develop better approaches 
for analyzing science in non-Western cultures“ (p. XII). 
His special discipline is mathematics, his non-Western country is China. 
His case study is what he calls “linear algebra in China“. In opposition to 
the Chinese official Xu Guangqi (1562-1633) he comes to the conclusion that 
Chinese mathematics of the time was not in a state of decline and that what 
the West “discovered” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had 
already been known to the Chinese for more than a thousand years. 
This is certainly an ambitious claim and the book is worth careful study. 
It is meant to be the first “more technical and comprehensive historical 
work on the early history of linear algebra“ (p. 9). Hart makes every effort, 
often successfully, to cater to a wider audience, though his book is unavoi-
dably rather technical to a large extent.  
Thus, he begins with an overview of his book, a summary of the argu-
ment, the findings, historiographic issues and an outline of the chapters. 
Introductory explanations concern Chinese language and mathematics, 
especially the methods using counting rods, and modern mathematical ter-
minology focusing on augmented matrices, Gaussian elimination, and 
determinants. The relation between Chinese mathematical practices and 
Hart’s rewriting in modern terms, and his translations using modern 
mathematical terminology are of crucial importance for an adequate evalu-
226                                                                                                 EASTM 34 (2011) 
 
ation of his results. For example, he diligently distinguishes between deter-
minantal method, calculation, solution or determinantal-style (p. 26); the 
Chinese did not use equations so that he uses the notion of condition 
instead of equation; Chinese columns are represented by modern rows of 
matrices; and the old Chinese mathematical treatises did not use symbols 
as x1, x2 or aij for matrix coefficients but instead positional descriptions 
(p. 141), etc. A whole chapter is dedicated to the written records of early 
Chinese mathematics, that is to The Book of Computation (c. 186 BC) and to 
The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Arts (c. 100 AD), and underlines the 
difference between fangcheng practitioners and texts written by the literati 
who recorded those practices (p. 27). 
The five chapters 4 to 8 are the core of the book. First of all Hart deals 
with “excess and deficit“ problems in both of the mentioned sources. They 
are equivalent to systems of two conditions in two unknowns. Then he 
focuses on the fangcheng procedure as presented in the Nine Chapters. For 
good reasons he leaves the expression untranslated. Fangcheng problems 
are displayed in two dimensions on the counting board. The solution is 
similar to Gaussian elimination by a form of “cross-multiplication“ of the 
entire column by individual entries and back substitution.  
In order to facilitate the understanding Hart rewrites the fangcheng 
procedure in modern mathematical terms so that the differences between 
the two approaches become clear. The fangcheng procedure avoids calcula-
tions with fractions. This is one of Hart’s most important findings. 
The central purpose of his book (p. 180) is to reconstruct the mathe-
matical practices using the counting board. Hart frankly avows that his dia-
grammatic reconstruction is an hypothesis (p. 96), but it is certainly a very 
reasonable and plausible reconstruction. He has still to find any such 
diagram in extant Chinese mathematical treatises (p. 141). The diagrams 
show that it is not difficult to calculate the solution for fangcheng of any size. 
The last two chapters deal with determinantal calculations, especially 
with the so-called “well problem“ (problem 13 from fangcheng, chapter 8 of 
the Nine Chapters). In modern notation it can be described as a system of 
five equations in six unknowns. Again Hart first gives a diagrammatic 
reconstruction of the calculation, then a diagrammatic reconstruction in 
modern terminology. This time “cross-multiplication“ occurs as a multipli-
cation of individual entries. 
In this sense he can demonstrate that the terminus ante quem for the use 
of determinantal calculations to find the n-th unknown for problems in (n-1) 
conditions in n unknowns is about 1025. Determinantal-style calculations 
were likely known by the time of the compilation of the Nine Chapters. This 
is earlier by far than the corresponding calculations of Leibniz and Seki 
Takakazu. Yet, Hart does not discuss the essential differences between the 
Reviews                                                                                                                  227 
 
Chinese case study and (for example) Leibniz’s achievements. Leibniz 
really studied systems of linear equations, invented a suitable subscript 
notation, created the notion of a new mathematical object (resultant or 
determinant), deduced general theorems on these new objects, discovered 
the general combinatorial law of formation, etc. There is nothing like that in 
the Chinese texts, not even equations, as Hart admits. In which ways can 
one speak of linear algebra in China in view of these facts? Hart neither 
raises this question nor replies to it. He considers and analyzes in an 
admirable way complicated algorithms, procedures that are essentially 
equivalent to the solution of systems of n linear equations in n unknowns 
in modern algebra. Does such an equivalence entitle us still to speak of 
linear algebra? And if yes, why? What is the tertium comparationis? This 
remark is not meant to be a criticism. It is a hint at a serious historio-
graphical, semantic problem whenever one compares different mathe-
matical cultures and practices. 
The central thesis of the book is that it was the visualization in two 
dimensions of problems with n conditions in n unknowns that led to the 
discovery of solutions (p. 180). Visualization is the key to understanding 
the fangcheng procedure, which is easily demonstrated on the counting 
board. Hart rightly emphasizes that we have to distinguish between mathe-
matical practices and written records of these practices translated into 
narrative form. 
This challenging, inspiring book that is full of most valuable, new histo-
rical insights ends with three useful appendices: an overview of linear 
algebra problems that are in some ways similar to those found in Chinese 
treatises, bibliographies of Chinese mathematical treatises, and outlines of 
proofs of some modern theorems of linear algebra. 


Roger Hart, The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra

Heinrich, Larissa N.

 195 
REVIEWS 
 
Wu Yi-Li, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late 
Imperial China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, 378 pp. 
Larissa N. Heinrich 
[Larissa N. Heinrich is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of 
California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, 
Berkeley, in 2002. Her monograph, The Afterlife of Images: Translating the 
Pathological Body Between China and the West, was published by Duke 
University Press in 2008. Heinrich also co-edited with Fran Martin the volume of 
original essays Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and 
Chinese Cultures (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006). She is 
currently working on a book about the medically commodified body in 
contemporary Chinese and transnational cultures. Contact: lnheinrich@ucsd.edu] 
 
This monograph is a major contribution to a growing literature on the 
history of women’s reproductive health in late imperial China.1 Although 
its focus is on the shaping of the textual record, the epistemological debates, 
the many modalities associated with pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum 
care, and other “female” conditions, the book will be of interest to a num-
ber of fields ranging from history of science and medicine to anthropology 
to literature and culture studies. As Wu notes in her introduction, the book 
examines how “medical thinkers of late imperial China approached a set of 
universal concerns that have occupied all societies: promoting fertility, 
sustaining pregnancy, ensuring the safe delivery of healthy babies, and 
facilitating women’s postpartum recovery” (3). 
Wu mines the results of her comprehensive survey of printed records to 
identify distinct intellectual trends in late imperial fuke, or “medicine for 
women,” while at the same time taking into account the origins of these 
source materials (the politics of print production, the motivations for their 
production, etc.). In the book’s opening chapters, for instance, Wu gives us 
a detailed discussion of “amateur” publishing and distribution of medical 
texts; evidence of the religious motivations behind some of this publishing; 
and a careful outline of debates about epistemological legitimacy. Wu also 
attempts to account for the relative lack of women authors represented 
among these source texts by contextualizing the materials against the 
                                                          
1 One thinks for example of works in English by Chia-feng Chang, Charlotte 
Furth, Ping-chen Hsiung, Angela Ki Che Leung, and Judith Zeitlin, to name only a 
few. 
196                                                                                                 EASTM 34 (2011) 
 
broader backdrop of trends related to attitudes toward women in late 
imperial literary and print culture at large. Wu’s inclusion (not only in the 
introductory chapters but throughout the book) of accounts of both sides of 
various debates in the medical literature about “medicine for women”—
such as her explanation of divergent opinions about the benefits and draw-
backs of actively inducing birth—has the incidental benefit of contributing 
to dispelling contemporary fallacious understandings of “traditional” Chi-
nese medicine (or TCM) as a homogenous, rather than highly diverse and 
often contested, body of knowledge in the pre-modern period.  
The book’s earlier chapters, covering philological, theoretical, and con-
textual bases, set the stage for subsequent chapters’ attention to cosmolo-
gical explanations of childbirth, the complications of postpartum treatment, 
and the eventual dominance of various treatments, drugs, and schools of 
thought in medicine. In Chapter 3, “Function and Structure in the Female 
Body,” Wu deviates from what she identifies as “conventional wisdom that 
says Chinese doctors were uninterested in bodily structure, and that the 
womb was irrelevant to understanding the female body” by emphasizing 
questions of body morphology (85-5). Thus the chapter includes an exten-
ded discussion of the conceptual etymology of the “womb” (or what is 
translated/translatable as “womb”), a biography and discussion of the 
influential medical thinker and commentator Zhang Jiebin and his theories 
of womb structure, and an explanation of the development of the idea of 
“the womb as both a universal organ and one that took a particular mor-
phological form in women.” This emphasis on body morphology contri-
butes to the development of Wu’s provocative thesis that the literature on 
“medicine for women” of this period tended increasingly to move away 
from more essentialized understandings of gendered physiology and 
instead toward “the increasing subordination of female difference to a 
master narrative of bodily androgyny.” 
If Chapter 3 emphasizes a kind of discursive re-integration of questions 
of corporeality, then Chapter 4 (“An Uncertain Harvest: Pregnancy and 
Miscarriage”) turns to the more symbolic or globally metaphoric under-
standings of the womb in this period. Noting “the existence of a medical 
discourse of childbearing whose organizing metaphors underscored the 
mutability and unpredictability of pregnancy itself,” Wu here addresses 
contrasting theoretical and practical approaches to the management of the 
uncertainties of gestation, a process that was itself “highly contingent and 
easily subverted” (122). Thus the chapter looks closely at representations in 
the literature of diagnostic problems related to false pregnancy and the 
proper determination of the timing of birth, as well as conditions on “the 
continuum between what today would be called a miscarriage, a prema-
ture birth, and an intrauterine death.” The chapter contributes to loosening 
the grip of “earl[ier] analyses” that discerned in teachings about regulating 
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women’s bodies what Wu refers to as “the heavy hand of Confucianism.” 
Wu demonstrates compellingly that “[r]estrictions on women’s behaviour 
[…] were [rather than purely patriarchal] a general extension of broader 
social ideals of morality and order applicable to all people” (145). 
Building on this claim about the application of broader cosmological (as 
opposed to purely patriarchal) agendas to the regulation of women’s 
bodies, Chapter 5, “‘Born Like a Lamb’: The Discourse of Cosmologically 
Resonant Childbirth,” outlines the emergence of a non-interventionist 
approach to childbirth that prioritized recognizing birth as subject to the 
same general cosmic principles that governed other areas of life and health 
for both men and women. The early eighteenth-century scholar Ye Feng, 
for instance, argued strenuously against harsh drugs or dramatic inter-
ventions in childbirth, arguing that childbirth should be “easy”—“self-
correcting and self-driven”—provided cosmological rules were respected 
and allowed to run their course. In this view, correctly determining time of 
birth was imperative, as doctors (and patients) might be misled by false 
labors, water breaking, and other factors. Allowed to run its course, a 
“real” birth, Wu reminds us, could according to this line of thinking take as 
long as several years—determined by cosmological and other factors 
instead of by human intervention (Wu also describes analogous conditions 
in European medical contexts, such as one in which a fetus has died in the 
womb but is only expelled much later, that could explain the observed 
phenolmenon of such extremely long “gestation” periods). This chapter 
also includes an original discussion of apparent divisions in the mana-
gement of gestation, childbirth, and postpartum care along gender lines, 
whereby male literati doctors were disproportionately occupied by abstract 
questions of theoretical and cosmological resonance, while hands-on obste-
trics were left to midwives whom the literati tended to characterize as a 
“meddling” but necessary evil. According to Wu, one explanation for this 
hierarchically gendered ‘division of labor’ (Wu decorously avoids this pun; 
I am less considerate) had to do with mens’ professional aspirations as they 
tried to establish legitimacy based on textual mastery. Stereotypes of 
dangerous or meddlesome midwives, meanwhile, might be explained 
(among other reasons) by “the material conditions of childbirth prior to the 
twentieth century” when “the physical destruction of an unborn child 
could be the only feasible way to resolve an intractable labor” (186). 
Chapter 6, “To Generate and Transform: Strategies for Postpartum 
Health,” uses analysis of the rise and (sometimes) fall of Generating and 
Transforming Decoction, a “once-obscure remedy” that later “bec[ame] a 
prominent part of the literate medical repertoire,” as a means of organizing 
discussion of “debates over the nature of childbirth as well as larger 
contests for intellectual authority in Chinese medical circles.” Wu shows 
that male literati physicians may not have been as involved in hands-on 
198                                                                                                 EASTM 34 (2011) 
 
obstetrical practice, but that they were nonetheless deeply concerned with 
postpartum care. Childbirth itself, she takes care to demonstrate, was not 
necessarily viewed as pathological. Rather the postpartum period as a 
whole was seen as a time when the mother might be especially vulnerable 
to imbalances and (in some cases) to the well-meaning but misguided 
ministrations of midwives and family-members. This chapter functions to a 
certain extent comparatively: Wu draws connections between the Chinese 
practices and certain more familiar non-Chinese diagnostic conventions 
and medical traditions, suggesting for instance that “the signs of post-
partum illness described in Chinese texts would have signaled danger in 
any language,” while at the same time carefully avoiding gratuitous 
cognates (193). Wu observes for example that what were described in 
Chinese as “deadly convulsions” likely corresponded to “the modern 
disease of maternal tetanus infections” (194). “Tetanus,” she adds, “was 
undoubtedly prominent among the various ailments classified as [the 
Chinese medical diagnosis of] postpartum windstrike” (196). Similarly, this 
chapter also suggests a contrast between non-pathologizing views of the 
postpartum period and “ritual and popular practices that treated childbirth 
as an unavoidably polluting event” (203).  
Wu’s investigation concludes with a discussion of the evolution of 
various explanations of Chinese medical approaches to gender and body 
difference. Outlining theories such as Charlotte Furth’s explanation of a 
movement in the Song from “homology to difference” and the idea that 
“androgyny and difference were two points on a spectrum of gender along 
which Chinese medical thought could position itself differently at different 
points of time,” Wu seizes upon an analogy from linguistics to explain 
what she sees as the most helpful way of describing understandings of 
gender in “the Chinese doctrinal body.” This body, Wu elaborates, is best 
thought of—like the root of a verb—as “infinitive”: one that “serves as the 
basis for all human bodies, to be conjugated into male and female, young 
and old, robust and delicate, Southern and Northern, depending on 
circumstance” (231). Wu’s inauguration of this notion of the “infinitive 
body”—in its rhetorical precision—should prove very useful in ongoing 
discussions about the construction of gender in Chinese medical corpo-
reality. (For that matter, the analogy has the potential to be useful in any 
debate that touches on questions of essentialism and the Chinese medical 
body.) 
In addition to its detailed textual analysis and articulation of intellectual 
trends in late imperial “medicine for women,” Medicine, Metaphor, and 
Childbirth in Late Imperial China is well-written and accessible. Wu’s use of 
case-studies to frame each chapter makes potentially dense material easy to 
follow while bringing the historical figures and texts vividly to life. Yi-Li 
Wu’s volume is essential reading for students and researchers alike. 


Wu Yi-Li, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China

Witthöft, Harald

Jürgen Renn and Matthias Schemmel, Waagen und Wissen in China: Bericht einer Forschungsreise

Huff, Toby H.

222                                                                                                 EASTM 34 (2011) 
 
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of 
Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900, London: Palgrave 
MacMillan, 2007, 285 pp. 
Toby E. Huff 
[Toby Huff is Chancellor Professor Emeritus at UMass Dartmouth and Research 
Associate in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University. He is the 
author of The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West (2nd 
ed. Cambridge 2003), and co-editor with Wolfgang Schluchter of Max Weber and 
Islam (Transaction Books, 1999). Recently he published Intellectual Curiosity 
and the Scientific Revolution. A Global Perspective (Cambridge University 
Press, 2010). He has lectured in Europe, given talks across the Muslim world and 
lived in Malaysia. Contact: thuff@fas.harvard.edu] 
 
This is an unchanged paperback release of a book published several years 
ago. The focus of the book is on the “contact area” between Europeans and 
non-Europeans in India and south Asia mainly in the eighteenth century. 
Although the author raises big questions about the history of modern 
science and its origins, the materials dealt with are far from adequate to the 
task. He seeks an “alternative vision” of the generally understood view that 
modern science was almost completely a Western creation. He mentions 
mathematical reasoning but does not mention the Hindu-Arabic numeral 
issue according to which important benefits allegedly accrued to the 
pioneers of modern science. 
While setting the stage for this foray, Kapil Raj introduces a number of 
straw men such as the idea of “immutable” scientific rules of procedure, 
solely “logical step-by-step reasoning” along with the notion that the major 
discoveries leading to modern science took place in “enclosed” places such 
as laboratories, observatories, or possibly museums. These are juxtaposed 
to other spaces, such as coffee houses, pubs, breweries, or trading compa-
nies in south Asia. These caricatures miss the fact that Galileo and others 
used telescopes at home but mostly en plein air as the instrument was in fact 
a portable laboratory. Likewise, pioneers of microscopy in the middle of 
the seventeenth studied insects, plants, animals, and human specimens in a 
great variety of places, many of them on location. 
These unhelpful allusions to putative scientific methods distract the 
author so that he does not ask just which scientific advances really do mark 
the rise of modern science. I should think that anyone who gave this 
question serious attention would have to consider that the revolution in 
astronomy starting with Copernicus lies at the heart of the great advance of 
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modern science. That path leads through Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, 
perhaps Descartes and some others but culminates in Newton’s new 
science of mechanics. That nonpareil achievement unified celestial and 
terrestrial physics, governed by universal gravitation, and gave us modern 
physics. It would be exceedingly difficult to find Arab, Indian, or Chinese 
scholars who contributed directly to that revolution. The telescope was 
available especially in India by 1615, slightly later in China and the Middle 
East, but no indigenous scholars sought to use it to advance astronomy in 
the seventeenth century. Likewise the science of motion was neglected 
outside of Europe. 
Further thought about this would reveal the extraordinary advances in 
human, plant and animal anatomy, as well as the discovery of bacteria 
made possible by the invention of the microscope, all absent outside 
Europe in the seventeenth century. To this we can add the advances in 
pneumatics and hydraulics leading to the discovery that air has weight, an 
indispensable discovery on the way to the invention of the atmospheric 
steam engine. Nor can we overlook the discovery of electric charge by 
William Gilbert in 1600 which gave birth to the whole area of electrical 
studies, the laboratory demonstration of electric lighting in 1706, and 
eventually the invention of electric motors, the telegraph, telephone, and 
radio waves. 
Instead of acknowledging those paths of discovery that made possible 
microbiology and modern medicine as well as the modern mechanical 
world and the electronic society, Kapil Raj looks at studies of natural 
history, surveying, map-making, legal inquiries, and linguistics mainly in 
the Indian subcontinent. Unfortunately, Raj focuses mainly on Western 
sources and the European writers who were able to extract from indige-
nous sources useful information once it was recast in the framework then 
well-established in various European sciences. Microscopes had been in 
use in Europe since the 1620s but this book contains no hint of such use in 
the following century in India. 
For example, the author discusses a major work by the French writer, 
Nicholas L’Empereur (known as L’Empereur). He is credited with a major 
botanical volume called Jardin de Lorixa, apparently completed on site in 
Chandernagore, India in 1725, but neglected thereafter. Raj points out that 
L’Empereur’s project (a wholly European initiative) was based on 
interviews with native medicinal workers and the “translation” of an 
indigenous materia medica text. However, it was not a strict translation and 
the result was a hybrid botanical work, “recognizably European” (p. 44). Raj 
points out that L’Empereur was highly versed in European conventions of 
botanical research, and that his descriptions were put into “standard 
format starting with physical descriptions of each plant, its roots, its flower, 
fruit, and seed, its habit, and finally it properties and uses.” In other words, 
224                                                                                                 EASTM 34 (2011) 
 
this was based on European, not Indian conventions. Furthermore, the 
Indian materia medica, Raj points out, “do not describe the plants, but 
enumerate their properties and uses and, above all, had no illustrations [my 
italics]” (p. 43). All of this suggests that from beginning to end, this 
potentially useful knowledge was first organized and illustrated by 
European draftsmen, although in some cases it appears that native painters 
were trained up to the task. In other words, L’Empereur’s product is his 
invention based on reading some native accounts and then interviewing 
fakhirs and other medicinal workers to flesh out the account. There were 
many similar European works prior to this. Instead of providing examples 
of indigenous advances, Raj tells us how Europeans needed to conduct 
additional research and thus to reorganize otherwise incomplete native 
accounts in order to contribute to the ongoing work outside India. 
The vast difference in artistic skills between Europeans and natives in 
the seventeenth century is illustrated by the native-authored frontispiece 
(p. 33) and the later botanical illustrations on p. 47f. Anyone who compares 
European artistic realism from the thirteenth century forward with seven-
teenth century Mughal and/or Persian miniatures would see that even 
seventeenth and eighteenth century Indian works are not on the same level 
of detailed realistic representation and perspective as the European pain-
ters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There is need for a major look 
at how and when Indian painters or illustrators were trained in the Euro-
pean style. 
It is most unfortunate that this book has been so strikingly mistitled, 
turning it into an ideological wedge rather than an interesting account of 
mutually beneficial encounters between European naturalists and those of 
India in the eighteenth century. Indeed, had the book been titled something 
like, Interesting Encounters Between European Naturalists and Indigenous 
Indian Populations in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, the reader would 
be prepared to benefit from Raj’s research and discussions. In addition to 
the subjects mentioned above they would include the difficulties of “insti-
tutionnalizing European learning in India,” the difficulties of communi-
cation between Western religionists and natives, as well as the introduction 
of “modern science” to India (pp. 171 and 175). Raj gives the reader a 
copious list of all sorts of scientific instruments and lab devices presented 
to a Calcutta School, shipped and paid for by the East India Company in 
1823 (pp. 176-78). An attentive reader would also notice that all sorts of 
new scientific perspectives and devices were being introduced into India in 
every chapter of the book. Nevertheless, the author is completely wedded 
to his unworkable scheme as his concluding chapter on “Relocations” 
makes clear. 


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