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

Elvin, Mark

G. E. R. Lloyd, The Delusions of Invulnerability: Wisdom and Morality in Ancient Greece, China and Today

Mittler, Barbara

Reviews                                                                                                               124 
 
Luciana Galliano (ed.), Power, Beauty and Meaning: Eight Studies on Chinese 
Music. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2005, XXXVIII, 256 pp. 
Barbara Mittler 
[Barbara Mittler is Chair at and Director of the Institute of Chinese Studies at 
the University of Heidelberg. She is also Speaker of Research Area B “Public 
Spheres” at the Cluster of Excellence “Europe and Asia in a Global Context-
Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows” at the University of Heidelberg. She 
received her M.A. from Oxford in 1990 and her PhD from Heidelberg Universi-
ty in 1994. She has published on Chinese avantgarde music (Dangerous Tunes: 
The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the People‘s 
Republic of China since 1949, Harrassowitz 1997) and the early Chinese press 
(A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity and Change in China‘s News-
Media, 1872-1912, Harvard University Press, 2004). Her book on cultural and 
artistic production during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-
1976), which approaches this complex period by making use of methods from 
cultural studies and oral history will be released by Harvard University Press in 
2011. She is now completing a manuscript on tropes of new men and new wom-
en in women‟s journals from China‟s long twentieth century.] 
 
This volume, which brings together papers presented at the Seventh In-
ternational Conference of the European Foundation for Chinese Music 
Research (CHIME) and additional papers by invited authors, deals with 
the question of whether, how and why music makes meaning. The book 
contains a long introduction by Luciana Galliano with an overview of the 
many different philosophical and theoretical takes on this as yet unre-
solved question. The bulk of the book is separated into two parts, one 
introducing theories of musical aesthetics and ―meaning-making‖ in 
China, the other introducing ―meanings‖ of ritual music. 
Each part offers a rich array of materials and views. These range, in 
the first part of the book, from Xi Kang‗s 嵇 康 (223-262) ideas of musical 
aesthetics and Su Shi‗s 蘇 軾 (1037-1101) conceptions of music to those by 
German music critic Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904); from court music to 
(popular) Cantonese opera; from musical philosophy to politics. The 
second part of the book focuses on questions of the interchangeability of 
secular and religious or Daoist and Buddhist ritual music and the chang-
es in musical meaning that this may entail. 
The introductory chapter by Luciana Galliano ―Musical Beauty and 
Meaning from an Intercultural Perspective‖ offers an array of useful 
thoughts and ideas around the question of musical meaning in many 
different cultures and disciplines. But in its attempt to be all-inclusive, it 
simply tries to do too much. It jumps from ―enigmatic‖ (IX) musical 
meaning to lengthy discussions of the meanings of ―culture‖, to the fact 
Reviews                                                                                                               125 
 
that Chinese music is studied but only within ―ethnomusicology‖, to 
deliberations on the question of music as power, to music as imaginary, 
from Lacan to Nettle to Blacking, from Jackendoff to Eco, Needham and 
back. Somewhere in the middle of the text Galliano summarizes the for-
mation of musical meaning as: ―a. complex relations between experience 
of time associated in sounds and representation in the interaction with 
memory, environment and a prescribed emotional content; b. in a dia-
cronical (sic) ‗becoming‘ arising from the progressive interactions be-
tween performer and listener; c. in the further process of textualisation of 
the musical object.‖ (XXIV) Yet, the interesting ideas that form part of this 
summary, and that account for the complexities of musical meaning, are 
nowhere clearly deliberated on: Is it possible to ―make meaning‖ of mu-
sic only with the help of a text? Can one speak of ―musical meaning‖ as 
only metaphorical? What if we consider ―musical meaning‖ a social con-
struction, dependent on particular formal conditions? This makes it pos-
sible, for example, to ―understand‖ the ―meaning‖ of an augmented 
fourth as a ―diabolus in musica‖, or of a falling minor second as a ―sigh 
motif‖ an ―understanding‖ which, in another historical and social context 
following other formal conventions and understandings, would be lost. 
And how do the many different theoretical and analytical takes on this 
question enumerated in this piece build on and differ from each other? In 
short, the introduction leaves all options open, but does not offer the 
reader a single supporting argument. 
Part 1 begins with Lam Ching-Wah‘s ―The Concept of Beauty and Vir-
tue in Chinese Music in the Song and Ming dynasties.‖ Lam discusses 
music‘s didactic function in Chinese tradition: music is said to possess 
the qualities of beauty and virtue and accordingly, it is assumed that it 
can be used to cultivate the human character to benefit the state (p. 3). 
The performance of yayue 雅 樂, then, was meaningful in so far as it 
would lead to harmony between Heaven and Earth, among spirits and 
between human beings and the myriad things (p.  5). Lam‗s essay dis-
cusses the legacy of interpretations on how best to regulate music in the 
Song and Ming dynasties, beginning with Zhu Xi 朱 熹 (1130-1200), and 
covering the thoughts of Li Wencha 李 文 察 (fl. 1538-45), the sceptic Liu 
Lian 劉 濂 (fl. 1550), and Zhu Zaiyu 朱 載 堉 (1536-1611). Going through 
each of these scholars‘ writings, she studies their attempts to re-create the 
meaning of ancient music (for uses of the state), something which later 
was to be further developed by the Qianlong 乾 隆 emperor (r. 1735-95) 
of the Qing, who supervised the publication of an imperially commis-
sioned collection of complete musical settings of the three hundred or so 
poems of the ancient Book of Poetry. 
Ulrike Middendorf in her ―Music without Emotion: Xi Kang meets 
Hanslick‖ compares two views on music and emotion: that of Austrian 
126                                                                                               EASTM 32 (2010) 
 
musicologist and music critic Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904), on the one 
hand, and that of Chinese scholar and philosopher Xi Kang, on the other. 
Both scholars were doubtful that there should be a straightforward rela-
tion between emotions and music. If Xi Kang states that musical sounds 
and the human mind have no intrinsically constant relations (p. 47), and 
that the same music allows for emotional responses as varied as the indi-
viduals listening to it (p. 49), Hanslick goes even further to deny that 
emotion is contained in music at all. Both thinkers would have agreed 
that instrumental music must be separated from emotions on intrinsic 
grounds, that it can represent only the dynamic properties of emotion, 
and that in vocal music emotive language but not the music itself be-
comes the carrier of emotions (p. 56). The performer has the privilege of 
expressing directly through his instruments the feeling by which he is 
swayed at the time and may thus indeed arouse the listener‘s emotion 
(p. 27). However, both agree that the essence of musical sound typically 
transcends words (p. 58) and thus cannot be captured as semantic mean-
ing: Music is a language untranslatable. 
Stuart H. Sargent‘s essay on ―‘Music‘ in the World of Su Shi (1037-
1101): The Question of yue‖ discusses the meanings and uses of the char-
acter yue 樂 (music) in Song dynasty poet and statesmen Su Shi‗s 蘇 軾 
poetry. In a number of illuminating close intertextual readings, he finds 
that the ―meaning‖ of yue (i.e. ―music‖) in Su Shi is not just any music, 
analogous to what we would consider music ―between Telemann and 
Techno,‖ but that the term is used very specifically by Su Shi for music 
out of the reach of the common man, music that partakes in some pro-
found way in the fundamental order of the universe, or, music ―that real-
ly mattered‖ (p. 92-93): i.e. the music played at court, the music of na-
ture/or of the ancient sages. 
Francois Picard‘s ―Sound and Meaning: The Case of Martial Pieces‖ 
takes one of the most emblematic historical moments, the battle between 
Xiang Yu 項 羽 (King of Chu) and Liu Bang 劉 邦 (founder of the Han 
dynasty in 202 BC) as his point of departure in collecting its musical co-
vers, searching for the semantics of musical meaning in them. He finds 
retakes of the event (all of which are listed in the extremely useful Ap-
pendix, pp. 118-126) in puppet theatre, ballads, songs and opera, and in 
instrumental music for guqin 古 琷, pipa 琵 琶 and xun 塤. The focus of his 
analysis is on instrumental music. His basic contention is that instrumen-
tal music, i.e. pure or absolute music, is meaningless in and of itself, that 
a fourth does not mean anything in and of itself, for example. He argues 
that even in traditions which assign programs to music, such as the Chi-
nese, ―the alleged meaning of the piece changes with times and contexts‖ 
(p. 101), i.e. once a new text/title/description or even function is as-
signed to the musical score. What he notes is that particular instrumental 
Reviews                                                                                                               127 
 
idiosyncrasies prescribe particular iconographic uses: the pipa, for exam-
ple, with its peculiar fingering and double-stopping techniques is fre-
quently used to depict martial scenes, while the guqin is not, and 
throughout, particular modes are chosen to depict the ―strangeness‖ of 
the ―songs of Chu‖ which play such a crucial role in misleading Xiang Yu. 
Such elements of musical iconography notwithstanding, Picard still holds 
that the instrumental pieces he examines ―can not bear by themselves 
‗the meaning‘‖ (p. 116) and he is correct in so far as ―musical meaning‖ in 
all of these circumstances (except perhaps in the bruitist sounds created 
by the pipa which clearly sound like clashing swords to anybody who has 
ever heard those) is dependent on particular socio-historical circum-
stances which are preconditions for the ability to ―understand‖ a particu-
lar music‘s ―meaning‖ in the first place. 
Part I concludes with Chan Sau Yan‘s ―The Meaning of Theorization 
in Cantonese Operatic Music: A Study of Music Publications of the Early 
Twentieth Century.‖ According to the author Cantonese operatic music 
should be considered ―one of the chief channels for people around the 
world to come into contact with Chinese traditional performing arts‘‖ 
today (p. 145). In studying how it has been theorized, how ―meaning‖ 
has been ―made‖ out of Cantonese opera in the early twentieth century, 
this essay uncovers how the juxtaposition of different forms of musical 
notation (gongchepu 工  尺  譜 , numerical notation (jianpu 簡  譜) and 
Western-Five-Staff-Notation) reflected predominant contemporary 
intellectual and political ideologies (p. 157). The May Fourth Movement 
with its emphasis on ―scientific accuracy‖, for example, created new 
dimensions in the performance as well as the ―correct understanding‖ of 
the meaning and interpretation of Cantonese operatic musical scores, 
which, according to their ideology, now needed to be translated into 
Western-Five-Staff-Notation, as only this notation was considered 
―modern‖ and ―accurate‖ (p. 161). 
Part 2 of the volume on the meanings of ritual music begins with 
Francesca Tarocco‘s ―Buddhist and Daoist Rituals and their Musical Di-
mensions.‖ In this essay, Tarocco emphasizes the standardization of reli-
gious ritual across different religious borders (especially those between 
Buddhism and Daoism). She finds a long tradition of musical perfor-
mance to be an integral part of the Daoist liturgical framework (p. 184). 
She also finds that the music performed as part of these liturgies is inter-
changeable in different ritual contexts (p. 188), and thus questions their 
claim to one and only one particular ―musical meaning‖. 
Tsao Penyeh in his ―Fixity and Variability in Daoist Ritual Music: 
Case Study of the shishi Ritual (Ritual of Salvation for the Dead) at the 
Baiyun Temple in Shanghai‖ focuses on the soundscape that completes 
the meaning and efficacy of this particular ritual: Daoist music is an out-
128                                                                                               EASTM 32 (2010) 
 
ward expression of the Daoist belief system. His essay discusses the 
composite identity of Daoist ritual music in terms of its regionally and 
trans-regionally fixed and variable structural elements (p. 199). To the 
insider, ritual music communicates to the gods and is meditative in na-
ture. Ideal music should achieve the state of tianren heyi 天 人 合 一 (the 
oneness of heaven and humans). Yet again, as in Tarocco‘s contribution, 
Tsao shows the exchangeability and variability of musical uses of one 
musical ―text‖ (p. 206): some scripture passages can be sung in normal or 
in slow tempo, depending upon particular ritual needs. Indeed, music is 
supposed to regulate the energy flow within the human body, which is 
why tempo is so important. Yet, within the fixed framework of musical 
tunes and possible tempi given in this particular ritual music, there ap-
pears to be quite some flexibility and variability (pp. 208-209). 
The volume ends with Tan Hwee-San‘s ―Journey through the Under-
world: Music and Meaning in a Folk Buddhist Ritual for the Dead‖, 
which shows that in religious rituals the power of music often lies in its 
associative meanings rather than its apparent and inherent structural 
meanings (p. 223). Even if of secular origins, she argues, a musical text 
need not be less efficient in the ritual. Re-contextualization is key here: 
the music, while changing little structurally, takes on different sonic di-
mensions and confers entirely different meanings for many of the partic-
ipants. In order to understand the meaning of music in ritual, she argues, 
it is ―important to examine a variety of factors, including the perfor-
mance context, the extent of participation and the levels of intensity gen-
erated by the ritual performance‖ (p. 242). Clearly, music has (or acquires) 
meanings beyond pure sounds. It becomes a tool to tap into something: 
In the Chinese mind set, establishing a connection with their departed 
ancestors is a far more rewarding event than merely appreciating music. 
What does music mean, then? Music is not of no importance, she says. 
Indeed, a ritual is not complete without its music. While she agrees with 
Tarocco and Tsao that the meanings of ritual music are (always already) 
multiple, she concludes that it is the circumstances within which music is 
experienced that eventually give it meaning (pp. 242-243). 
While each of the essays has its own strengths and much useful mate-
rial is collected and analyzed in this book, as a joint publication it has 
flaws common to such volumes. There is little interaction or interconnec-
tion in terms of the arguments between these essays, and instead of 
pointing out such connections, the introduction adds just too many new 
layers that are not picked up in any of the essays that follow. Part II of the 
volume is in itself a little more coherent, due to the nature of the topics 
chosen. However, (more) cross-referencing would have been useful, as 
would an attempt to build a larger argument that might explain whether 
it is part of the ―indetermined‖ nature of ―musical meaning‖ that makes 
Reviews                                                                                                               129 
 
it so easy for musical texts to move between Buddhism and Daoism, and 
from religious to secular contexts, for example. It would have been ap-
preciated, too, if characters had been added directly in the text and not as 
a glossary (especially in the discussion of lyrics and notation styles this 
would have facilitated reading greatly). Last, but not least, the book is 
rather sloppily edited. There are numerous typos, and many of the essays 
teem with English mistakes. Nevertheless, there is much that is useful 
and illuminating in this book, and considered as whole, is definitely 
worth the read. 
 
 


Luciana Galliano (ed.), Power, Beauty and Meaning: Eight Studies on Chinese Music

Flitsch, Mareile

130                                                                                               EASTM 32 (2010) 
 
Hartmut Walravens (ed.), David Crockett Graham (1884-1961) as Zoological 
Collector and Anthropologist in China. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz (Opera 
Sinologica Documenta; 1), 2006, 251 pp., incl. index, 6 maps. 
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 resp. in 2001. Specialising 
in Chinese anthropology as well as in anthropology of technology, she published 
extensively on issues of skilled practice in everyday China, for example the mon-
ograph “Der Kang. Eine Studie zur materiellen Alltagskultur bäuerlicher 
Gehöfte in der Manjurei” (2004).] 
—„Killed two birds. Light rain.― 
In recent years, the issue of ―missionary scientists‖ (Charles McKhann) in 
China and their contributions to scholarly knowledge, to museum collec-
tions as well as their role in political movements has attracted western 
scholarly attention. Furthermore, Chinese scholars have rediscovered the 
collections and publications of former missionaries in China and have 
started to republish and re-evaluate them. Indeed, in Chinese anthropo-
logy we observe the occasional transforming of western missionaries into 
forefathers of local ethnological heritage in China. 
The American missionary, scholar of religious studies, China scholar, 
doctor, zoological collector and amateur taxidermist, excavator archaeol-
ogist, hunter and early ethnographer of China, David Crockett Graham 
was a key figure in the China collection history of the Smithsonian Insti-
tution as well as in West China border anthropology of the first half of 
the twentieth century. In the volume under review here, Hartmut Walra-
vens has edited parts of Graham‘s diaries (1924, 1927/1928, 1928, 1929, 
1930) in a non-redacted version. In addition, the volume contains some of 
the letters Graham received from the US American ornithologist and 
palaeontologist Alexander Wetmore (1886-1978, from 1925 onwards as-
sistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution), and three travel reports 
by Graham on collection trips he carried out in Southwest China. With 
this publication Walravens brings to our attention a side of David Crock-
ett Graham often overlooked when appreciating him as an anthropolo-
gist. 
In this age of increasing digitisation of archives, one rarely lacks mate-
rials, but rather one is more in need of background information and con-
textual presentations of people and materials. Thus, when opening the 
book one would have hoped to find an introductory—perhaps guest 
Reviews                                                                                                               131 
 
authored—article contextualising Graham‘s diaries in the history of the 
China missionary enterprise of his time. But this is not what these mate-
rials, published as the first volume of the Opera sinologica documenta 
series of the Harrassowitz publishing house, are meant to be about. With 
regard to Graham, it provides us with only a little more background in-
formation than the digitized ―Finding Aids to Personal Papers and Spe-
cial Collections in the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7148, 
David Crockett Graham Papers, 1923-1936‖ accessible online.1 What de-
serves special mention and gratitude though is the detailed bibliography 
of Graham‘s publications (pp. 12-27, 178 entries) compiled by Walravens. 
This is spoiled somewhat by a slightly irritating slip-box style listing of 
publications on Graham on page 28 that entirely ignores research on him 
since the end of the twentieth century, as well as many other interesting 
issues such as, for example, the oral history materials on Graham in the 
Smithsonian Oral History Collection. Throughout the book Walravens‘ 
footnotes on a number of western as well as some Chinese scholars with 
whom Graham came into contact during his stay in China provide help-
ful supplementary information to the diary texts. At the end of the book 
an index as well as maps drawn by Graham himself can be found. The 
book thus provides us with all that is needed to arouse our curiosity 
about the anthropologist, missionary and scientist David Crockett Gra-
ham. 
 
Graham‘s vita is remarkable: He was born in the last decades of the Qing 
empire, then was active in China as a missionary of the protestant Amer-
ican Baptist Foreign Mission Society from the first year of the Chinese 
Republic in 1911 on. In the historically complex times of the 1920s to 
1930s, he undertook, as a kind of part-time collector, field trips for the 
Smithsonian Institution in the Sichuan-Tibetan and the Sichuan-Yunnan 
areas. Throughout his years as a collector between 1924 and 1932, Gra-
ham became increasingly professional in collecting specimens, collaborat-
ing with Han Chinese and ―aborigine‖ hunters, collectors and skinners 
whom he paid with money from the Smithsonian Institute and ended up 
training himself. Graham was thus able to provide the US National Mu-
seum with numerous specimens (mammals, insects, birds, reptiles) and 
even discovered some new species, which were named after him. The 
butterfly dryonastes grahami is but one example. It is slightly irritating that 
the Smithsonian archive in the above mentioned online service gives the 
number of specimens collected by Graham as about 4,000, while Walra-
vens mentions 400,000 (p. 8). Part of his activities consisted of taking an-
                                                          
1  See URL: http://siarchives.si.edu/findingaids/faru7148.htm#FARU7148i 
(07.06.2010). 
132                                                                                               EASTM 32 (2010) 
 
thropometric measurements of members of non Han ethnic groups he 
encountered. In his diaries one reads, for instance, ―Measured two full-
blooded Lolos and one half-breed.‖ One wonders what has become of 
these materials. Graham also acquired a substantial number of ethno-
graphic artefacts mainly from minority peoples like the Miao, Qiang and 
Lolo (Yi).2 Furthermore the diaries testify to Graham‘s gradually becom-
ing a photographer, serving as a technical history of the genesis of the 
remarkable collection of Graham‘s pictorial heritage. 
Further anthropological data collection is only mentioned occasionally, 
even though his output of scholarly articles on the issue was remarkable. 
Lastly, Graham, in the service of the US National Museum, collected an-
tiques sold on Chinese markets and archaeological artefacts he himself or 
Chinese collectors working for him excavated and collected from tombs 
and monuments. (Graham, by the way, was the first excavator of 
Sanxingdui 三 星 堆 jades in Sichuan). All this was shipped through 
postal services to the US. In 1932, he gradually abandoned his collecting 
and was transferred to Chengdu, where he taught archaeology and an-
thropology at the West China Union University. He became curator at the 
West China Union University Museum of Archaeology, Art, and Ethnol-
ogy, a chapter in his life that is not touched on by this book, but of course 
remains highly interesting. Graham left China to return to the US in 1948, 
where he was honoured in many ways and taught about China until he 
passed away in 1961. 
The great enterprise of documenting the nature and 
archaeology/anthropology of Southwest China and its western 
borders—including its populations with their physical and cultural 
particularities—is part of a globally entangled history into which 
―missionary scientists‖ as well as western and Japanese scholarly 
institutions, well-established western museums and emergent museums 
in China were all involved. Only recently have young academics, such as 
Andres Rodriguez and Jeff McClain, addressed this missionary 
enterprise with regard to its political impacts, and one can only look 
                                                          
2 Ethnographic artefacts collected by Graham were part of an exhibition at 
Whitman college Walla Walla, where Graham had pursued his studies at the end 
of nineteenth century, in 1997 under the title ―South of the Clouds: Ethnic Groups 
of the Sino-Tibetan Frontier (Objects and Photographs from the Collections of 
David Crockett Graham and Charles Fremont McKhann).‖ The exhibition was 
curated by Charles Fremont McKhann and co-curated with David Deal; Maxey 
Museum, Whitman College. See http://www.whitman.edu/anthropology/ 
mckhann.html (26.6.2010). 
Reviews                                                                                                               133 
 
forward to their and hopefully more scholars‘ publications. Graham 
rightfully stands in the centre of their research.3 
Written at the request of the Smithsonian Institution funding his col-
lection activities, Graham‘s diaries are not the confessions of a missionary, 
but the result of his attempts to respond to their demands for accurate 
day to day reports on his work. Such diaries created ―on demand‖ of 
course raise questions about what Graham—always worried about suffi-
cient funding to carry out his work—wrote or neglected to mention to 
keep the funders happy. When reading through the diaries one returns 
again and again to this issue, and also to the fact that the missionary-self 
only emerges when he mentions Christians helping him in his work or 
sermons he has given. The diaries describe the chronologies of his collec-
tion activities, and include detailed geographical information, as well as 
information on the acquisition and preparation of specimens, including 
the personnel involved or the numbers of the shipping boxes. Through-
out the period of the diaries, it is evident that Graham trained himself as 
a taxidermist and in the documentation of finds, accurately accounting 
for costs for Chinese collaborators, postage and nutrition fees, packaging 
or preservation materials. A frequent issue he notes is troubles with mail-
ing boxes containing specimens. In addition, the diaries contain reports 
on the physical conditions of the collectors, on the availability or lack of 
medical care (to the extent of being a kind of running self-appraisal of his 
own health), comments on security issues (especially banditry) and col-
laboration with and support by local magistrates. Descriptions of political 
settings, personal observations and comments round up the list of topics, 
occasionally making the diaries exciting to read. They clearly show that 
his endeavours were anything but ordinary travel expeditions; they were 
hard, dangerous and tiring, with Graham constantly travelling by foot. 
Thus, we may retrieve a relatively complete picture of the circumstances 
of Graham‘s life and collection activities from the diaries, and thus of the 
concrete genesis of a collection. 
                                                          
3 See Andres Rodriguez, ―Minguo shiqi de jianguo he renleixue: Sichuan xibu 
de chuanjiao renleixue shiye‖ (1922-1945)‖ (Nation-Building and Anthropology 
during the Republican Period: The Missionary Anthropological Enterprise in 
Western Sichuan (1922-1945)), in Temule (ed.), Duoyuan zuqun yu Zhongxi wenhua 
jiaoliu (Cultural Encounters between Multiethnic China and the West), Shanghai: 
Renmin chubanshe, 2010, pp.105-33; Andres Rodriguez, ―Building the Nation, 
Serving the Frontier: Mobilising and Reconstructing China‘s Borderlands during 
the War of Resistance (1937-1945),‖ Modern Asian Studies, Special Issue: China in 
World War II, 1937-1945: Experience, Memory, and Legacy (forthcoming spring 
2011); Jeff Kyong-McClain, ―Barbarian Caves or Han Tombs? Republican-Era 
Archaeology and the Reassertion of Han Presence in Ancient Sichuan,‖ Twentieth-
Century China, 35.2 (2010): 4-24. 
134                                                                                               EASTM 32 (2010) 
 
One of the persistent meta-narratives of Christian missions in the first 
half of twentieth century is that of benevolent men and women strug-
gling in a highly complex and conflict-saturated Republican China for the 
sake of converts and against a rising communist movement that is perse-
cuting them. Graham‘s diaries can be read as confirming this narrative. 
We read about the physical and mental hardship and worries of a China 
connoisseur, observer and religious man acting within a mission network 
to save souls, heritage and objects from a China that he sees as heading 
for its doom. 
Through careful reading of the diaries, however, different stories 
emerge as well. We can detect a hardworking, self-disciplined man, who 
was simultaneously a missionary, hunter, taxidermist, photographer, 
informant on political events and Han-minority conflict relations, and 
scout looking for plants and animals that seemed to him suitable for the 
US market (p. 99 e.a.). While cooperating with and even working for the 
Republican government, in a way Graham also profited from the political 
turmoil of the time. 
He was a contemporary of numerous other eager collector-scholars in 
Southwest China, amongst them the botanist, sinologist and Naxi re-
searcher Joseph Franz Rock (1884-1962), about whose oeuvre Walravens 
also published a book in 2002.4 Again, the question of why the interest in 
documenting China through collecting was so important seems to be a 
relevant research topic. Towards the end of his collection activities in the 
late 1920‘s, Graham competed with other collection institutions and col-
lectors (pp. 104, 189, 205, 211). Meanwhile he had—to his own astonish-
ment—been appointed a F. R. G. S. (Fellow of the Royal Geographical 
Society): ―This seems strange in a way. All my collections have gone to 
our own National Museum, but this recognition came from the British 
Geographical Society.‖ (p. 182). It becomes clear from the diaries that this 
was a time of change for a man who had become intimately acquainted 
with local anthropological, archaeological and many other affairs 
through travels into remote hunting grounds, through anthropometric 
measurements, and through observing religious ceremonies and inter-
ethnic conflicts. He had, apparently, also by then mastered Chinese and 
Tibetan, if not also a local dialect. The next chapter of his life, his career as 
a China anthropologist and archaeologist, only partly shows up in this 
publication through three travel accounts from 1923, 1924 and 1929. The 
history of West China Border anthropology of the 1930s, West China 
Union University and especially the West China Union University Muse-
                                                          
4 Hartmut Walravens, Joseph Franz Rock (1884-1962): Berichte, Briefe und Doku-
mente des Botanikers, Sinologen und Nakhi-Forschers; mit einem Schriftenverzeichnis, 
Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag (VOHD Supplement; 36), 2001. 
Reviews                                                                                                               135 
 
um of Archaeology, Art, and Ethnology is only indirectly the topic of the 
publication under review here. 
With regard to collection and museum history, Graham‘s diaries pro-
vide us with especially rich evidence on collaboration with local skinners 
and collectors, and conditions of technical and material constraints, such 
as the different levels of technical skills in skinning and preservation, the 
shortage of arsenic, the delayed arrival of post, misfortunes in hunting, 
and poor shooting as detrimental to preserving specimen hides. The his-
tory of collections, we read, depends not only on financing. This story is 
rarely taken into account and makes reading the diaries particularly in-
teresting. One should like to read them against a contemporary technical 
history of taxidermy in China and the West to better understand the de-
tails reported by him. Sometimes the details are shocking. One example is 
how Graham and his fellow collectors and coolies by mere chance sur-
vived a meal. Due to a lack of salt, the cook had seasoned it with what he 
had taken for salt: arsenic (p. 105). Here as in many other instances Gra-
ham shows a very particular humour: ―Well? I have long realized that a 
foreigner in China need not suffer from lack of a variety of interesting 
experiences.‖ 
Reading this edition of a part of Graham‘s diaries leaves the reader 
asking many questions, and hoping for the edition of a second volume of 
the diaries missing from this one. 
 
 


Hartmut Walravens (ed.), David Crockett Graham (1884-1961) as Zoological Collector and Anthropologist in China

Vogel, Hans Ulrich

 7 
Note from the Editor-in-Chief 
 
The reader will notice from a glance at the cover sheet that some organ-
isational changes have taken place in the editorship of EASTM. While I 
remain Editor-in-Chief, it is both an honour and pleasure for me to an-
nounce that I have been joined by two co-editors, namely, Mark Elvin, 
well-known historian and sinologist from Oxford, and Robert Horres, my 
colleague in Japanese Studies at Tübingen University. Now, and in the 
future, we will share the pleasures and toils of the editorship of EASTM, 
thus inaugurating an exciting new phase in the journal’s life.  Fortunately, 
as before, John Moffett from the Needham Research Institute will remain 
as the English Language Editor, thus continuing our seasoned and long-
standing collaboration. The task of Managing and Production Editor has 
now been taken over from Vanessa Dahlmann by Katharina Markgraf, 
though not for long, as she, too, will soon finish her MA thesis. For the 
next issue of EASTM we will also re-organize the journal’s Local Advi-
sory Board as well as the composition of the International Editorial 
Committee. 
This issue of EASTM also marks the beginning of another innovation, 
namely the transformation of the journal into one that is partly open-
access, including electronic publication, a content management system, 
and permanent archival storage. “Partly open-access” means that imme-
diate electronic access will be available to ISHEASTM members and thus 
EASTM subscribers. It will then become openly available to the public 
two years after publication. Moreover, since it is still considered good 
practice in the humanities, we will continue to produce a paper version, 
so that contributors and readers will still have a tangible, physical object 
in their hands. 
The main aim of this transformation of the journal is to expand its 
readership, especially in those parts of the world where the subscription 
price, though modest, still constitutes a major investment for private and 
institutional customers. Another advantage of electronic publication is 
that authors can attach a number of additional textual, iconographic or 
even audiovisual materials to their contributions, which previously could 
not be included due to the journal’s limited space or the non-textual na-
ture of the data. The Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage 
(Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz) is undertaking the 
necessary steps to bring about this electronic metamorphosis. An outline 
of the planned measures, as devised and to be implemented by Dr. Mat-
thias Kaun, head of the State Library’s East Asian section, will be pub-
lished in the journal’s next issue. 
  
8 
Besides a number of book reviews, in this number of EASTM we pub-
lish some of the plenary lectures presented at the “12th International 
Conference on the History of Science in East Asia” at John Hopkins Uni-
versity, Baltimore, July 14-18, 2008. These begin with the plenary lecture 
on “When Health was Freed from Fate: Some Thoughts on the Liberal 
Potential of Early Chinese Medicine” by Paul U. Unschuld, President of 
the ISHEASTM. By exploring a number of key concepts found in early 
Chinese medical texts, such as “fate” (ming 命), “heaven” (tian 天), and 
“law” (fa 法), the author shows that early Chinese medical texts were 
freed from the moral imperatives of various social ideologies, and were 
not interested in social goals. Instead, they promoted purely individual 
ends, that is, the adoption of the best methods to attain the longest possi-
ble duration of individual life by proper eating and drinking, regulating 
rest and activity, redirecting the flow of qi and blood in cases of blockage, 
etc. Similar to ancient Greek medicine, early Chinese medicine based 
itself on the assumptions that laws of nature exist, that humans were able 
to recognize them, and that these laws were sufficient to explain all the 
dynamics within the universe. However, a distinguishing feature was 
that early Chinese medicine did not link achievements in individual 
health care with a larger quest for liberation in society, as was the case in 
ancient Greece. 
In his contribution on “How to Join the Scientific Mainstream: East 
Asian Scientists and Nobel Prizes”, James R. Bartholomew states that, to 
date, nine Japanese scientists have received a Nobel prize in science or 
medicine, all but one for work actually done in Japan. This he contrasts 
with the five Chinese scientists and one American scientist of Chinese 
descent that have received a Nobel award in science, though in every 
case this is not for work done in China itself, and with the fact that no 
Korean has received this prize in science so far. Two main questions are 
the focus of Bartholomew’s article: What historical or even recent exam-
ples of separation from the scientific mainstream can be identified in East 
Asia, and what have successful scientists done to transcend or overcome 
this separation. His conclusions are that there is certainly evidence that 
the domestic environment for science was, until recently, more favour-
able in Japan than in Korea, Taiwan or China. However, one has also to 
consider purely historical factors, such as when invitations to nominate 
were first extended to scientist in each of these countries. Thus, by taking 
this and also other phenomena into account, he remains not totally con-
vinced that Japanese scientists are any closer to the scientific mainstream 
than their colleagues from the rest of East Asia. 
  
9 
The third plenary lecture published in this issue is “Art, Anatomy and 
Eroticism: The Human Body in Japanese Illustrated Books of the Edo 
Period, 1615-1868” by Ellis Tinios. Here he mainly deals with questions 
such as in which contexts the unclothed body is encountered, which 
modes of representation were used by Japanese artists when depicting it, 
and if there was any impact on them from imported, illustrated European 
anatomical works. One of the conclusions in this appealing article is that, 
in contrast to the Western academic tradition of drawing the human body 
from life in order to gain a clear understanding of human anatomy and to 
grasp, on the background of casts of classical sculpture, an idea of the 
‘ideal body’, anatomical exactitude was not a primary focus of Japanese 
art during the Edo period. There we may find ‘nudity’ but never ‘The 
Nude’. In spite of the publication of European-style anatomical works, 
anatomical approximation remained the norm for Japanese artists, who 
wanted to capture the ‘essence’ of the subjects they represented, but not 
to reveal their ‘invisible’ inner structures. But while they may not have 
depicted human bodies as ‘lifelike’, the drawing techniques nonetheless 
allowed them to show them ‘full of life’. 
In his article “A Philosophy of Machines and Mechanics in the Seven-
teenth-Century China: Wang Zheng's Characterization and Justification 
of the Study of Machines and Mechanics in the Qiqi tushuo”, Kim Yung 
Sik discusses the famous [Yuanxi] qiqi tushuo [luzui] [遠 西] 奇 器 圖 說 [錄 
最 ] or “[Selected Records of the] Diagrams and Explanations of the 
Strange Machines [from the Far West]”, a book illustrating, in words and 
diagrams, many Western machines and the mechanical knowledge on 
which they were based. This work was composed by Wang Zheng 王 徵 
(1571-1644) in 1627, based on Johann Terrenz Schreck’s (鄧 玉 函, 1576-
1630) translations of various European texts into Chinese. By concentrat-
ing on the prefatory materials and statements elsewhere in the text, the 
author outlines Wang Zheng’s ideas and philosophy concerning ma-
chines and mechanics. Investigating such key concepts as ‘learning’ (xue 
學), ‘art’ (yi 藝), ‘force’ (li 力), ‘weight’ (zhong 重) and ‘motion’ (dong 動), 
Kim argues that some of the sixteenth-century rhetoric and spirit of early 
modern Europe appears to have been transmitted to China, and that 
many terms were direct translations from the Latin expressions. More-
over, he underlines that the Qiqi tushuo was not simply a book for practi-
cal use, discussing machines and techniques, but that it embodied a 
strong intention to connect the learning of the ’art of force’ (liyi 力 藝) 
with Chinese learned tradition. 
As a preview let me announce here that the next issue of EASTM will 
be unthemed. More or less ready for printing are “The Rong Cheng shi 
version of the ‘Nine Provinces’: Some Parallels with Transmitted Texts” 
  
10 
by Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, and “A Korean Reading of Newtonian 
Mechanics in the Nineteenth Century” by Jun Yong Hoon. Moreover, we 
will publish Lee Jen-der’s “’Laughing Disorders’ and Medical Discourses 
of Joy in Early Imperial China”, that is, the English translation of the 
work that won a Zhu Kezhen Award in 2005 in Munich during the IS-
HEASTM’s “11th International Conference on the History of Science in 
East Asia”. For the translation of this long article, thus making it available 
to Western readers, we owe great thanks to the expertise and effort of 
Marta E. Hanson. 
As usual, I would like to take the opportunity here to thank to all my 
collaborators, friends, colleagues, contributors, reviewers and especially 
the numerous anonymous referees from all parts of the world for their 
unflinching support of EASTM. Readers will also notice that we have 
changed somewhat the appearance of the journal, making it more aes-
thetic, and thus also in this respect more in conformity with its cross-
cultural content. This change is also reflected in the new EASTM home 
page, which you can find under the webpage address indicated in the 
editorial part of the journal. All those who gave advice about this new 
presentation will hopefully find some part of their ideas and suggestions 
realized. 
 
 
 
Hans Ulrich Vogel 
Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen  
Institute for Asian and Oriental Studies 
Department of Chinese and Korean Studies 
 


Note from the Editor-in-Chief 

Low, Morris

136                                                                                               EASTM 32 (2010) 
 
Alan K. L. Chan, Gregory K. Clancey, and Hui-Chieh Loy (eds.), 
Historical Perspectives on East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine. 
Singapore: Singapore University Press and World Scientific, 2002, xxi, 
585 pp. 
Morris Low 
[Dr. Morris Low is senior lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Queens-
land in Brisbane Australia. He completed his PhD in history at the University of 
Sydney and has previously taught at Monash University in Melbourne, the 
Australian National University in Canberra, and Johns Hopkins University in 
Baltimore. Books include: Urban Modernity: Cultural Innovation in the Se-
cond Industrial Revolution (2010); Japan on Display: Photography and the 
Emperor (2006); Science and the Building of a New Japan (2005); and Science, 
Technology and Society in Contemporary Japan (1999).] 
 
As co-organizer of the twelfth International Conference on the History of 
Science in East Asia held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, 14-18 
July 2008, it was with a sense of relief that a decision was made not to 
produce conference proceedings. Instead, some of the plenary lectures 
given at that conference will be published in the pages of East Asian Sci-
ence, Technology, and Medicine, and others elsewhere in a variety of forms.  
The Baltimore conference was subtitled ‗Tribute to a Generation‘. 
Whereas Joseph Needham is seen as part of the pioneering first genera-
tion of historians of East Asian science, scholars such as Li Di, Xi Zezong, 
Nakayama Shigeru, Nathan Sivin, and Ho Peng-Yoke are regarded as the 
second generation. The conference paid tribute to these scholars. 
This begs the question, how useful are conference proceedings? The 
proceedings of two earlier conferences, both of which I attended, resulted 
in memorable volumes that still sit on many historians‘ bookshelves.1 
Although I did not attend the ninth International Conference held in 
Singapore in August 1999, it was, from all accounts, a special conference. 
The book under review consists of the proceedings of that conference. 
Revised versions of approximately half of the papers presented at the 
conference are included in this compact book.  
What is particularly significant about the publication is that it pro-
vides readers with an overview of research in the field. For example, Kim 
Yung Sik deals with historiographical issues such as the difficulties asso-
ciated with evaluating East Asian scientific achievements from the view-
                                                          
1 Keizō Hashimoto, Catherine Jami and Lowell Skar (eds.), East Asian Science: 
Tradition and Beyond, Osaka: Kansai University Press, 1995; Yung Sik Kim and 
Francesca Bray (eds.), Current Perspectives in the History of East Asian Science, 
Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 1999. 
Reviews                                                                                                               137 
 
point of Western science. He chooses the examples of the idea of fossils, 
the ‗organic‘ world view, the motion of the earth, and the roundness of 
the earth to illustrate this dilemma. He advocates careful contextual stud-
ies of what are claimed as forerunners of Western scientific ideas.  
Gregory Clancey acknowledges how the label of ‗East Asian science‘ 
now means not only science in East Asia, but can also be used to refer to 
science between sites in East Asia and science outside of the region but 
with links to East Asia or which somehow signify East Asia. One exam-
ple of this is the history of colonial science in East Asia. Sometimes ‗colo-
nial science in East Asia‘ refers to the introduction of Western science in 
territories in East Asia dominated by Western powers, but it can also be 
usefully referred to Japanese science within Japanese colonies and territo-
ries within its sphere of influence. In this book, Tsukahara Togo provides 
a useful, schematic overview of the historiography of science from the 
viewpoint of colonial science in non-Western cultures. 
In a way, this volume seeks to overcome the linguistic imperialism of 
English by including the work of Chinese scholars who seldom publish 
in English. A paper by the late Li Di on ‗The Late Qing Government‘s 
Policy Towards Science and Technology: The Case of Jiangnan Manufac-
tory‘ is but one example of this. The Baltimore conference paid tribute to 
Li Di, one of the most prolific scholars in the history of Chinese science. 
And it noted the achievements of Xi Zezong. 
Xi Zezong‘s paper ‗On the Mistakes of Emperor Kangxi‘s Scientific 
Policy‘ is also included in the volume. As the title suggests, he criticizes 
Emperor Kangxi for not having done more in terms of promoting science. 
There was a form of scientific exchange through French Jesuit missionar-
ies, but it was instigated more by them than Kangxi. In this way, Western 
audiences can gain valuable insight into Chinese scholarship in the histo-
ry of science. 
To me, one of the most valuable parts of the book is the Foreword by 
Ho Peng Yoke who was Director of the Needham Research Institute at 
the time. The Foreword is closer to being reminiscences and reflections 
on his own career and ties with Singapore. It makes for fascinating read-
ing. It shows how our field has evolved, and how necessary it is to ensure 
that we write the history of our own profession. 
Nakayama Shigeru, another scholar we paid tribute to in Baltimore, is 
included in the book with a paper entitled ‗The Digital Revolution and 
East Asian Science‘. Nakayama thinks back to the Society‘s first confer-
ence held in 1982 in Leuven. He recounts how a young Chinese scholar 
made the bold claim that if we extrapolate back from the computer age, 
the Chinese algebraic tradition rather than the Western geometrical tradi-
tion may constitute the mainstream of the history of mathematics. After a 
discussion of the Chinese numerical tradition and mention of the work of 
138                                                                                               EASTM 32 (2010) 
the Yuan dynasty astronomer and mathematician Kuo Shou-ching‘s 
Shou-shi system of 1279, he jumps to 1950 when Japan was under Allied 
Occupation. He relates how he was working on his dissertation in math-
ematical astronomy and learnt about the advent of a punch card system 
(a forerunner of computers) through an issue of an American journal. 
After an interval of almost 700 years, numericism was reborn! Nakayama 
then reminisces about how he and Nathan Sivin used the MIT mainframe 
computer back in 1972 to help them in their translation of Season Grant-
ing Astronomical Treatise of the Yuan dynasty (Shou-shi li).2 While it 
makes for rather an eclectic paper, the paper is invaluable in terms of the 
insights it provides into a collaborative relationship between two senior 
scholars in the field. Although a paper by Nathan Sivin is not included in 
the book, he features in both Ho Peng Yoke‘s Foreword and Nakayama‘s 
essay. 
Conferences provide a snapshot in time of scholarship and some of 
the major players. The concise papers mean that we can only get a taste 
of people‘s work but the advantage is that the editors have managed to 
squeeze some 53 papers (22 of which are by scholars working in the Peo-
ple‘s Republic of China) into an accessible, compact, albeit thick volume 
that provides a pot-pourri of work in the history of East Asian science, 
technology and medicine. The emphasis is, not surprisingly, on China (40 
papers), but also with papers on Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan and the 
Philippines.  
The editors have divided the volume into eight sections and have suc-
ceeded in giving it a semblance of order. There are sections on: philoso-
phy and the cultural study of science and technology; science and tech-
nology policy; medicine and the life sciences; and Western scientific in-
fluence. In addition, there are individual sections devoted to mathematics, 
astronomy, technology and techniques, and finally scientific literature. It 
is not possible to mention all the papers in the volume but I would like to 
devote the remainder of this review to mentioning some of the highlights 
for me. 
It was a treat to read two papers on the Philippines in this volume, 
thanks to the conference being held in Singapore. In her paper on ‗Tradi-
tional Medicine and Pharmacopoeia in the Philippines, 16th and 17th 
Centuries‘, Mercedes G. Planta points to how Muslims were responsible 
for the transmission of humoral pathology to Spain during the period 
from the 8th to 11 centuries, and then later to Southeast Asia. She draws 
our attention to how herbs, baths and massage formed part of the medi-
cal repertoire of Filipinos during the period covered by her paper. The 
                                                          
2 See Nathan Sivin, Granting the Seasons: The Chinese Astronomical Reform of 
1280, with a Study of its Many Dimensions and an Annotated Translation of its Records, 
New York: Springer, 2009. 
Reviews                                                                                                               139 
 
use of herbs was helped by the abundance of medicinal drugs and herbs 
(such as the betel nut and leaves) in the country. She argues that by the 
17th century, Filipinos had a recognizable medical tradition.  
The second paper dealing with the Philippines is by José Antonio 
Cervara. Despite all the attention given to Jesuit missionaries in China, he 
points out that they, of course, were not the only missionaries to help 
spread Western scientific knowledge in East Asia. He focuses on the 
Spanish Augustinian friars and cosmographers Andrés de Urdaneta 
(1508-1568) and Martín de Rada (1533-1578). We can apparently attribute 
the identification of Marco Polo‘s Cathay with China to Rada. 
The traffic in ideas between East Asia and Europe was not all one way. 
There is a fascinating paper by Mau Chuan-Hui that attempts to use 
French patents from 1791 to 1860 to examine the appropriation of Chi-
nese silk techniques by the French silk industry.  
A further highlight for me were the papers that dealt with the history 
of twentieth century Chinese science and medicine. Zhang Li provides a 
useful history of advanced chemistry education in China before 1937. 
This builds on James Reardon-Anderson‘s book The Study of Change: 
Chemistry in China, 1840-1949 (1991). Chen Shiwei contributes a substan-
tial paper on the largely untold story of the 1948 Sino-American scientific 
expedition to Mount Amne Machin in northwest China. A feature of the 
story is the role of Academia Sinica and international scientific coopera-
tion at this critical turning point in Chinese history. Kim Taylor looks at 
the years that follow, specifically the role of traditional medicine in newly 
Communist China. She argues that the years 1949-1953 marked a shift to 
a general policy of wholesale support of Chinese medicine. She notes the 
pivotal role of He Cheng who was a physician trained in Western medi-
cine who originally hailed from Sichuan province. Taylor‘s study com-
plements Ye Xiaoqing‘s paper on the health policies of the nationalist 
government. Ye draws our attention to how the government issued 44 
regulations on medical administration over the period 1929-1940. She 
argues that these regulations reflect how health policies were seen as a 
vital part of nation building, reflecting not only the aspirations of the 
government but also an indication of what was done. 
There is much to like about this volume. Readers will delve into it, 
picking and choosing what meets their interests. It is, in many ways, a 
compendium, a resource that provides a window to a world of scholar-
ship that is sometimes difficult to access. We should be grateful to the 
editors for making this available. 


Alan K. L. Chan, Gregory K. Clancey, and Hui-Chieh Loy (eds.), Historical Perspectives on East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine

"A Flock of Ghosts Bursting Forth and Scattering": Healing Narratives in a Sixth-Century Chinese Buddhist Hagiograph

Salguero, Pierce C.

"A Flock of Ghosts Bursting Forth and Scattering": Healing Narratives in a Sixth-Century Chinese Buddhist Hagiography

 7 
Note from the Editor-in-Chief 
 
Issue 32 of EASTM includes, apart from a number of book reviews, three 
articles that represent the diversity of our research field. Dealing with 
spatial concepts in ancient China, the reception and dramatic reworking 
and re-interpretation of Newtonian mechanics in nineteenth-century 
Korea, and the narratives of Buddhist healing practices in medieaval 
China, they exemplify the continued vibrancy of research on East Asian 
science, technology and medicine. I have no doubt that readers will enjoy 
this issue of individual articles as much as they have the more theme-
orientated last two numbers of our journal. 
In her paper on the Rong Cheng shi 容 成 氏, a bamboo slip manuscript 
from the late fourth century AD of Chu 楚 provenance, Vera Dorofeeva-
Lichtmann investigates the passage on the ‗Nine Provinces‘ (Jiu zhou 
九 州), which has aroused substantial scholarly interest since the text was 
published in 2002. After an elucidation of the title of the manuscript (―Mr. 
Rong Cheng‖, a mythical sage ruler of antiquity mentioned in ancient 
Chinese texts), using fine-tuned philological analysis she investigates the 
concept of the ‗Nine Provinces‘, comparing it to descriptions of this spa-
tial system in transmitted texts, that is the Shu jing 書 經 (Book of Docu-
ments), Lü shi chun qiu 呂 氏 春 秋 (Mister Lü‘s Spring and Autumn [An-
nals]), Er ya 爾 雅 (Erya dictionary), Zhou li 周 禮 (Zhou Rituals), and the 
Huainan zi 淮 南 子 (Masters from Huainan). Her particular approach is 
to consider the Rong Cheng shi version as a certain kind of terrestrial rep-
resentation so as to determine what are the spatial concepts conveyed 
through the bamboo slip manuscript, and whether, typologically, similar 
patterns can be found in the transmitted texts. After a detailed investiga-
tion of the structure of the description of the ‗Nine Provinces‘, their 
names and landmarks (especially rivers), and the three interrelated spa-
tial and civilising concepts (draining floodwater for tillage, paving river 
routes, creating habitable land admist the floodwaters) in the Rong Cheng 
shi, and also differences to and between the transmitted texts, the author 
arrives at the following conclusions: The Rong Cheng shi version of the 
‗Nine Provinces‘ represents a compressed, eclectic fusion of at least three 
spatial concepts distinguished to differing degrees in transmitted texts. It 
shows apparent similarities especially with the relevant descriptions in 
the Shu jing and the Zhou li, but differs markedly from both texts in the 
names of the ‗provinces‘, the types of their locations, and the structure of 
their descriptions. In the author‘s view, the transmitted accounts are, in 
effect, different versions of the same conception of the ‗Nine Provinces‘ 
established by the mythical emperor Yu the Great. Moreover, the associa-
8 
tion of these accounts in Chinese historiographical and commentarial 
tradition with different periods of Chinese history represents nothing 
more than an attempt at avoiding the contradictions between them. An-
other conclusion of this important article is that the Rong Cheng shi ver-
sion, as a source coming from a southern region practicing rice agricul-
ture highly dependant on irrigation and drainage systems, emphasizes 
the draining aspect, contrasting sharply with the marginalisation of this 
concept in the officially recognised version in the Shu jing.  
The second contribution to this issue is the article by Jun Yong Hoon 
on ―A Korean Reading of Newtonian Mechanics in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury‖. It shows how a Korean Confucian scholar, Ch‘oe Han-gi崔 漢 綺 
(1803-1877), perceived and reinterpretated Newtonian mechanics in the 
context of his own cultural environment. In his paper, the author pro-
vides us with a detailed intellectual biography of his historical protago-
nist, who based his prolific writings both on traditional Confucian phi-
losophy and Western science. He succinctly traces the origins of Ch‘oe‘s 
knowledge of Western agricultural, hydrological, mechanical, mathemat-
ical, astronomical, metrological, and medical knowledge back to Chinese 
translations. In the field of Newtonian mechanics Ch‘oe‘s primary source 
was the Tantian 談 天 (Conversations about the Sky), which was a Chi-
nese translation of the fourth edition of John Herschel‘s (1792-1871) Out-
lines of Astronomy (1851), published in 1859 by Li Shanlan 李 善 蘭 (1811-
1882), a Chinese mathematician, and Alexander Wylie (1815-1887), an 
English missionary. It seems that Ch‘oe was the first and only Korean 
reader of the book before the end of the nineteenth century. Ch‘oe Han-gi 
was of the opinion that his own theory of qi 氣 was superior to Newtoni-
an explanations. Although the latter were well advanced in mathematical 
descriptions and provided useful facts and theories, they were not able, 
in his view, to explain the true, causal nature of qi. According to Ch‘oe‘s 
theory of natural philosophy, his qi was manifest in two aspects, that is, a 
tangible, airy ―physical substratum‖ (hyŏngjil 形 質) and a kind of mo-
tional, inherent ―vital activity‖ (hwaldong 活 動), both of which could be 
demonstrated by experiments with the help of Western instruments. 
Another important concept was his ―qi globes‖ (kiryun 氣 輪). These qua-
si-physical forms were endowed with innate forces of attraction and re-
pulsion, and thus meant to replace Newton‘s concept of gravity. Moreo-
ver, the cosmos, i.e. Heaven, Men (including their ethical conduct), and 
Earth, was explained as consisting of endless intersections of—sometimes 
hardly visible—qi globes of different sizes, their interactions giving rise to 
movement and change. 
9 
 
As is made evident by Jun Yong Hoon‘s thorough and engaging re-
search, Ch‘oe Han-gi—like a number of other scholars in China and Ja-
pan—was a product of the intellectual milieu of East Asia at that time, 
where foreign knowledge was interpreted and reformulated in terms of 
the Confucian cosmology of qi more than once. His concept of the physi-
cal workings in both the micro- and macro cosmos was of holistic nature 
and characterized by analogical thinking, while at the same time it re-
vealed scientific misconceptions and misunderstandings. The latter were 
caused by Ch‘oe‘s inability to fully understand the more complex princi-
ples of modern Western astronomical and mathematical theories, and his 
eclectic and dogmatic approach to the range of theories and concepts of 
Western science available to him. Doubtless, this problem was further 
compounded by the terminological ambiguities inherent in the transla-
tions to hand. As emphasized by Jun Yong Hoon, Ch‘oe never recognized 
science as a practice in a laboratory or an observatory, but only as written 
knowledge similar to that in Confucian and other texts. His main aim 
was to establish a perfect Confucian philosophy, for which Western sci-
ence was no more than a vehicle for manifesting the unity of qi. From a 
modern point of view Ch‘oe‘s hybridization of Eastern philosophy and 
Western science appears to be defective, but it is less so if it is understood 
as an inevitable and first necessary intellectual step in integrating these 
two different types of knowledge within a pre-modern Korean context.  
In his article ―‘A Flock of Ghosts Bursting Forth and Scattering‘: 
Healing Narratives in a Sixth-Century Chinese Buddhist Hagiography‖, 
C. Pierce Salguero analyses the short, never more than ten lines long, 
stories of miraculous healings by Buddhist monks in the Gaoseng zhuan 高 
僧 傳 (Traditions of Eminent Monks), composed by the monk Huijiao 慧 
皎 (497-554) in the early sixth century. Salguero discusses aspects of the 
wondrous bodies of these eminent monks, including such corporeal 
mirabilia as incorruptibility, appearance of light, fragrances, spontaneous 
combustion, disappearance and reappearance, and the washing out of 
intestines. Monks, however, also acted as miraculous healers, by 
appropriating classical Chinese medicine, invoking divine assistance 
from the Buddha himself, making use of objects endowed with magical 
power, such as personal items (alms-bowls, willow-branch toothbrushes, 
etc.), consecrated water or numinous Buddhist sutras, or by incanting 
spells and the performance of repentance rituals or exorcistic practices. 
The author underlines that Buddhist healers were eager to offer methods 
superior to contemporary alternatives by emphasizing Buddhist 
healing‘s exoticism, esotericism, authenticity, and accessability. Exoticism 
refers to Buddhists as foreign men coming from far away India or 
―Western regions‖, with extraordinary bodies and possessing secret, 
esoteric arts. Authenticity means that these miraculous cures were not 
10 
presented as fiction, but were claimed to have been historical, that is, as 
having taken place at a certain time and place, involving real people and 
witnessed and testified to by others. Accessibility concerned the fact that 
Buddhist healing practices were available to a wide range of people, not 
only rulers, the elite, and members of the Buddhist communities, but also 
to commoners—provided that they supported the sangha. Competition 
with Daoists existed in this and other fields, which made the 
establishment of demarcation lines vis-à-vis the concepts of other 
teachings important. The Gaoseng zhuan, says Salguero, is a particularly 
successful example of a work in which Indian and indigenous 
cosmological elements are woven together in order to appeal to and 
persuade the Chinese audience, and this at a time beset by man-made 
and natural disasters. Huijiao presented his protagonists as beacons of 
light in such dark times, as bearers of effective knowledge and practices 
bringing solutions to all kinds of contemporary problems. Among them 
the power of Buddhist monks to heal, fight epidemics, and even to 
overcome death remained one of the most pervasive and persuasive 
aspects in the social positioning of Chinese Buddhism up to the late 
imperial period. All in all, the Gaoseng zhuan is a further example of how, 
through a sustained and conscious project of literary and cultural 
translation, Indian models were reconceptualised and recreated for 
Chinese audiences in an effort to promote proselytization and win official 
favour. 
Looking forward, I would like to give our readership a preliminary 
glimse into the content of the next issue of EASTM, which will appear 
just before the Hefei conference in late July 2011. No. 33 will contain Lee 
Jen-der‘s ―‘Laughing Disorders‘ and Medical Discourses of Joy in Early 
Imperial China‖, that is, the English translation of the work that won a 
Zhu Kezhen Award in 2005 during ISHEASTM‘s ―11th International 
Conference on the History of Science in East Asia‖ in Munich. This article 
has been translated by Marta E. Hanson from Johns Hopkins University 
in Baltimore, to whom we owe great thanks for making it available to 
Western readers. The second essay to be published will deal with ―Need-
ham‘s Grand Question Revisited: On the Meaning and Justification of 
Causal Claims in the History of Chinese Science‖, a contribution au-
thored by David De Saeger and Erik Weber from Ghent University in 
Belgium. Besides a fair number of book reviews, the issue will also in-
clude a review article by Joseph W. Dauben, City University of New York, 
of Jean-Claude Martzloff‘s recently published book Le calendrier chinois.  
11 
 
As usual, I would like to end by thanking all the contributors, anony-
mous referees and EASTM collaborators, my Co-editors, our English 
Language Editor and our Managing and Production Editors, for their 
help in the realisation of this issue. There is to be a change in the editorial 
team, as Katharina Markgraf will leave us after having assisted us with 
the last two issues. Her work will be taken over by Alexander Jost, soon 
to be a PhD candidate at our institute, whom we expect to be as efficient 
and excellent a team worker as was his predecessor. Together with Mar-
tina Siebert from the East Asia Department, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer 
Kulturbesitz Berlin, he is also responsible for making our journal availa-
ble online, a project briefly described elsewhere in this issue. 
 
 
Hans Ulrich Vogel 
Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen 
Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies 
Department of Chinese and Korean Studies 
 


Note from the Editor-in-Chief

How to Join the Scientific Mainstream: East Asian Scientists and Nobel Priz

Bartholomew, James R.

How to Join the Scientific Mainstream: East Asian Scientists and Nobel Prize

Otsubo, Sumiko

103 Reviews 
Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-
Japanese Contexts, 1896-1945. New York, London: Routledge, 2002, xii, 
193 pp. 
 
Otsubo Sumiko 
 
[Otsubo Sumiko is Associate Professor of History at Metropolitan State Univer-
sity in St. Paul, Minnesota.  She received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University. 
Her publications include “Engendering Eugenics: Feminists and Marriage Re-
striction Legislation in the 1920s,” in Gendering Modern Japanese History, 
edited by Barbara Molony and Kathleen S. Uno (Cambridge, MA and London: 
Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2005), 225-256 and “Between Two 
Worlds: Yamanouchi Shigeo and Eugenics in Early Twentieth Century Japan,” 
Annals of Science, 62.2 (April 2005): 205-231. She is currently working on her 
book manuscript on eugenics in Japan.] 
 
This book compares and analyzes ideas and movements related to eugen-
ics in China and Japan in the turbulent half-century leading up to 1945. In 
her study, Yuehtsen Juliette Chung (National Tsing Hua University in 
Taiwan) emphasizes that the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) marked 
“a turning point” in the power dynamics between the two countries. Ja-
pan, which for centuries had borrowed many ideas and institutions from 
the great Chinese civilization, defeated China, which was struggling to 
modernize its industry and military, and became the object of emulation 
for the younger generation of Chinese intellectuals, including eugenicists. 
Since then, for its own survival and prosperity, Japan embarked on its 
quest for colonial expansion in East Asia in order to compete with the 
imperialist West. Japan’s colonial project forced China to engage in cam-
paigns to resist incorporation into the Japanese empire. Their conflict 
culminated in the second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). By situating the 
circulation of eugenics knowledge in the inseparable history of the two 
countries’ modern experiences, the author aims at complicating the sim-
ple mono-directional transfer of ideas from the West to Asia in typical 
national history narratives. Methodologically, the author defines her ver-
sion of “comparativism”, that is, an “approach to simultaneity which 
encompasses plural nonsynchronic consciousnesses and temporalities, in 
addition to the conventional use of comparativism as juxtaposition to 
locate parallels of similarity and difference” (p. 7). She employs this term 
“in order to locate intersubjectivity in both representations and reality, 
and better understand the conflictual development of Asian experiences 
of eugenics in particular and modernization in general” (pp. 7-8). The 
ambitious conceptual framework is a critique of existing studies, which 
104 EASTM 31 (2010) 
tend to reduce their examinations to such dichotomies as East versus 
West, representation versus reality, self versus other, etc. (p. 8). 
Chung presents three major thematic chapters after a short introduc-
tion and Chapter One. Chapter Two provides background information 
covering American and Nazi connections to the eugenics movement and 
the formation of scientific communities in Japan and China. Chapter 
Three, entitled “Lamarckism versus Mendelism: The Politics of Body and 
Heredity Symptoms: National Character and the Eugenicists’ Presenta-
tion,” explores the debates among Chinese scholars, including American-
trained zoologist/eugenicist Pan Guangdang (1899-1967), Japanese-
trained socialist eugenicist Zhou Jianren (1888-1984), and American-
trained sociologist Sun Benwen (1892-1979) in the mid 1920s. This chapter 
also examines Japanese legislative efforts to segregate and control lepers, 
the sufferers of non-hereditary disease, in the name of eugenics, together 
with arguments that were compatible with Lamarckism in the popular 
writings of the German-inspired journalist Ikeda Shigenori (1892-1966) 
and Japan’s leading eugenicist Nagai Hisomu (1876-1957). The author 
argues that Lamarckian ideas, in which acquired characteristics were 
considered heritable, did play a substantial role in the eugenics move-
ments in Japan and China (p. 62). Unlike biologically deterministic Men-
delism, Lamarckism offered a possibility of racial improvement through 
social reform and education even for the races deemed “inferior” in the 
eyes of Western Social Darwinists. 
Chapter Four, “Birth Control or Sex Control?: Politics of Knowledge 
and Reproduction” illuminates the entry of women as a subject in the 
eugenics debates around the time Margaret Sanger visited both Japan 
and China in 1922 as women began to be perceived as the preservers of 
the nation and race based on their role in reproducing and educating 
children. On the “performative” level, Chung compares two female gy-
naecologists: Yoshioka Yayoi (1871-1959), who founded a Japanese col-
lege for women doctors, and Marion Yang (1891-1983), who was instru-
mental in creating a program for training modern midwives. Interest-
ingly, Chung finds the marked contrast that while Yoshioka was opposed 
to it, Yang was supportive of birth control. 
Chapter Five highlights the differing social constructions of 
race/ethnicity in the second Sino-Japanese War, which was understood 
as a war of population by Japanese and Chinese eugenicists. Chung 
shows the Japanese dilemma of pushing the identity of Japan as a racial 
body of the pure-blooded Yamato minzoku while managing a multi-ethnic 
Japanese empire. Examining the 1941 Ministry of Health and Welfare 
document, the “Outlines of Establishment of Population Policy,” together 
105 Reviews 
with the Ministry’s key eugenicist Furuya 1  Yoshio’s (1890-1974) book 
entitled National Land, Population and Blood, Chung finds the Japanese 
vision of “a three-dimensional conical body in which the top center and 
core circle would be the emperor and his lineage, the inner circle the Ya-
mato race as a unilinear patriarchal nation, and the outer circle pan-
Asianism culturally and territorially binding together the Japanese colo-
nies and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (p. 151). Chung also 
points out a hierarchical emphasis: while in the metropolis both quality 
and quantity were stressed, in the overseas colonies the quality approach 
was conspicuously missing. Regarding China, Chung summarizes vari-
ous discussions relating to population, including that of the Population 
Policy Research Committee in the Social Ministry in the Executive Yuan 
in the early 1940s. In May 1945, the Nationalist Party adopted the plan 
drafted by this Committee as the Guideline of National Population Pol-
icy. It incorporated eugenic principles. To improve population quality, it 
listed such things as premarital examination, venereal-disease preven-
tion, and the separation or sterilization of hereditarily defective people. 
To ensure population growth, the policy prohibited abortion and infanti-
cide, and promoted 'reforms' at frontier areas. Contrary to the Japanese 
Ministry of Health and Welfare preference for 'pure-blooded' ethnic iden-
tity, Chinese officials encouraged interracial and inter-ethnic marriage in 
order to strengthen national unity and support future conscription. 
These three substantial chapters are followed by a brief Conclusion 
and a slightly longer Epilogue.  The conclusion stresses the disparity bet-
ween the good intentions and evil consequences of science in eugenic 
movements. 
The scope of this study is impressive in its originality, depth and 
scope. The author is comfortable doing research in not only her native 
Chinese but also in English and Japanese.  This linguistic competence has 
made it possible to produce a ground-breaking study comparing similar 
and inter-related issues in the two countries while situating the subject in 
a global context. The Chinese and Japanese adopted eugenic ideas that 
originated from Britain, Germany and the United States. East Asian 
advocates of eugenics shared certain translated terminology, reinter-
preted the ideas to fit or reject their local traditions and responded to 
changing historical conditions. Chung is particularly successful in shed-
ding light on their shared concerns, and such mediators of transnational 
eugenics as Chinese graduate of Tokyo University Zhou Jianren and 
Japanese physiologist Nagai Hisomu, who taught in Taiwan and China 
after his retirement. Chapter Five which deals with the two countries’ 
                                                 
1 Actually his last name is pronounced “Koya,” not “Furuya.” 
106 EASTM 31 (2010) 
intensified discussions of population policy, in which eugenics figured 
prominently, in the midst of the same war in which Japan was trying to 
take over China, offers a new cultural way of looking at Sino-Japanese 
relations dominated by political, military, and economic historical ap-
proaches. 
The study’s originality and scope create some challenges as well. Con-
cerning her ambitious conceptual approach, although the author explains 
her “comparativism,” she does not offer adequate definitions for other 
theoretical jargon, such as “simultaneity,” “nonsynchronism,” “tempo-
ralities,” “intersubjectivity,” and the “performative,” which, I believe, are 
essential for readers to appreciate fully the intellectual contributions of 
the book. In terms of the wide range of coverage, there is a problem of the 
target readership. This book may be difficult to follow for East Asianists 
who are unfamiliar with the history of science related to eugenics. For 
example, inspired by Nancy L. Stepan, Chung defines Lamarckism by 
locating it in the French/Latin American traditions of improving off-
spring through better prenatal and infant care, and public hygiene cam-
paigns against alcoholism, tuberculosis and venereal disease. In fact, this 
was often observable even in the Anglo-American eugenics movements. 
Indeed, historian Daniel Kevles calls the advocates of such movements, 
“reform eugenicists” as opposed to “mainline eugenicists.” Though 
Chung does not discuss the relationships between reform eugenics and 
mainline eugenics, it seems compatible with that of Chung’s Lamarckism 
and Mendelism.2 Additional explanations of differences and similarities 
among Latin Lamarckism and Anglo-American reform eugenics would 
have been helpful in better-situating, for instance, Margaret Sanger (1879-
1966), the American birth control activist who visited Japan and China in 
1922, and her impact on East Asian eugenic thinking in Chung’s study.  
Likewise, this study assumes prior knowledge in East Asian history. In 
Chapter Five, Chung discusses the population policies of Sun Yat-sen 
(1866-1925), Chiang Kai-shek (1877-1975) and Mao Zedong (1893-1976), 
together with the ideas of various population theorists. I wonder if non-
China specialists interested in global eugenics movements can differenti-
ate their ideological, political, and diplomatic contexts and different de-
grees of influences. This book would have benefitted from expanding the 
introduction and conclusion to offer definitions of the conceptual terms to 
support the author’s theoretical framework and meaningful analyses 
                                                 
2 See Chung, p. 98; Nancy L. Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and 
Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), and Daniel J. 
Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 1985), pp. 173-175. 
107 Reviews 
tightly linked to that framework. It would also have been desirable to 
expand Chapter Two in order to provide further historical and scientific 
background instead of burying the information in the subsequent narra-
tive. A glossary of terms and individuals as well as a chronological table 
would have been helpful to cater to the needs of the book’s audience, 
who come from disparate disciplines. 
I find another challenge in the author’s grand scheme. As the intro-
duction makes clear, this book is based on her dissertation, “Struggle for 
National Survival: Chinese Eugenics in a Transnational Context, 1896-
1945” (University of Chicago, 1999). The title change seems to suggest the 
author’s intention to make the book less Sino-centered than the original. 
However, I feel her book is still anchored in Chinese history. First, I find 
Yoshioka Yayoi to be insignificant in the history of eugenics movements 
in Japan, even though Marion Yang and Yoshioka make a good compari-
son as pioneer female gynaecologists, and a good contrast regarding their 
attitudes toward birth control. As acknowledged by Chung, Yoshioka 
was listed as a member of the Racial Hygiene Association in the 1930s (p. 
120), but beyond that token membership, she was never an active advo-
cate of eugenic ideas. That may be why Chung ends up discussing Yoshi-
oka’s motive to become a doctor and her opposition to birth control with-
out providing crucial information about her eugenic ideas. In Japan, 
many women, including birth-control activists, were more intensely in-
volved in eugenics activism. There could have been a better pairing than 
Yang and Yoshioka if the purpose of the book is to examine eugenic 
ideas. The second example of Chung’s Sino-centeredness is her conspicu-
ous omission of discussion of the Japanese National Eugenics Law, which 
was passed in 1940, in her chapter on wartime eugenics population policy 
discourse. At the very center of population policy-making in wartime 
Japan, there stood this law, which deserves more substantial discussion 
than a few mere mentions on pp. 139, 144 and 162. (The author’s calling 
of this law the “National Eugenics Bill” even after the 1940 enactment is 
puzzling. See p. 139, 162, 173.) In addition, there is also an issue of the-
matic compartmentalization. After reading her rich examples of Lar-
marckian and Mendelian interpretations of heredity in various eugenics 
theorists in Chapter Three, some readers will be eager to find Chung’s 
follow-up observations linking the two evolutionary views to the pure-
blooded and miscegenation eugenics arguments during the Second Sino-
Japanese War in Chapter Five. Nancy Stepan’s Lamarckian eugenics had 
much to do with the Brazilian anxiety about “mongrel” races perceived of 
as inferior to white pure-blooded races.3 Having illustrated a neat con-
                                                 
3 Stepan, pp. 162-170. 
108 EASTM 31 (2010) 
trast in each chapter, sometimes Chung seems reluctant to bridge related 
issues between chapters. All in all, these examples illustrate some chal-
lenging aspects of comparativism.  Finally, the conclusion seems somew-
hat detached from her earlier empirical discussion focusing on ideas and 
policies among intellectuals and policymakers, but not on the implemen-
tation of such ideas and policies per se. To illustrate the “evil” conse-
quences of the well-intended “science“, however, Chung abruptly refers 
to Japanese “fascist atrocities“ and eugenic racial exclusion (p. 171).  In 
addition, the conclusion could have highlighted her arguments and con-
tributions to scholarship, explaining the significance of her findings based 
on the concepts introduced in the introduction.  For example, Chung’s 
Chapter Five is more nuanced than the general assumption linking 
Japanese acts of violence and eugenics, shedding light on Japanese eu-
genicists’ ambivalence toward inclusiveness and exclusiveness during the 
war.  As Chung correctly observes, Japan had multiple and conflicting 
national identities: Japan was in, outside of and above Asia (p. 147). 
In sum, this book is a pioneering study complicating East Asian 
eugenics history by going beyond conventional single-nation studies. Her 
novel trans-national approach is promising, especially in offering a new 
cultural way of investigating Sino-Japanese relations. It also poses vari-
ous challenges in how to handle widely different readers, and how to 
manage the balance of comparativism and compartmentalization in the-
matic chapter organization. 
The book’s epilogue lists the author’s future research agendas, includ-
ing the fascinating topic of the postwar debates on Lysenkoism in China 
and Japan. I expect the author to further refine the important analytical 
framework developed in this book. 
 


Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-Japanese Contexts, 1896-1945

  Contents 
 
 
Special Issue 
 
Plenary Lectures of of the 12th International 
Conference on the History of Science in East Asia, 
July 14-18, 2008, Baltimore 
 
Note from the Editor-in-Chief  7 
 
When Health was Freed from Fate: Some Thoughts on the 
Liberating Potential of Early Chinese Medicine 
—PAUL U. UNSCHULD 11 
 
How to Join the Scientific Mainstream: East Asian Scientists 
and Nobel Prizes 
—JAMES R. BARTHOLOMEW 25 
 
Art, Anatomy and Eroticism: The Human Body in Japanese 
Illustrated Books of the Edo Period, 1615-1868 
—ELLIS TINIOS 44 
 
A Philosophy of Machines and Mechanics in Seventeenth-
Century China: Wang Zheng's Characterization and 
Justification of the Study of Machines and Mechanics in 
the Qiqi tushuo 
—KIM YUNG SIK 64 
 
 
Reviews 
Gregory Clancey, Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of 
Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930 
—reviewed by Alex Bates  96 
 
Maeyama Yasukatsu, Astronomy in Orient and Occident 
—reviewed by Changbom Park 100 
 
Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: 
Eugenics in Sino-Japanese Contexts, 1896-1945 
—reviewed by Otsubo Sumiko 103 
 
Cao Cong, China’s Scientific Elite 
—reviewed by Ulrich Theobald 109 
 
Mathieu Torck, Avoiding the Dire Straits: An Inquiry into 
Food Provisions and Scurvy in the Maritime and Military 
History of China and Wider East Asia 
—reviewed by Paul D. Buell 116 
 
 
Announcements 
The 13th International Conference on the History of Science 
in East Asia (13th ICHSEA) 118 
 
A Notice from the Board of the International Society for the 
History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 122 
 
Call for Nominations for Zhu Kezhen Awards 124 
 
Needham Research Institute, Soon-Young Kim Studentship 
in the History of East Asian Science and Technology 125 


Not a member yet

G. E. R. Lloyd, The Delusions of Invulnerability: Wisdom and Morality in Ancient Greece, China and Today

Luciana Galliano (ed.), Power, Beauty and Meaning: Eight Studies on Chinese Music

Hartmut Walravens (ed.), David Crockett Graham (1884-1961) as Zoological Collector and Anthropologist in China

Note from the Editor-in-Chief

Alan K. L. Chan, Gregory K. Clancey, and Hui-Chieh Loy (eds.), Historical Perspectives on East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine

"A Flock of Ghosts Bursting Forth and Scattering": Healing Narratives in a Sixth-Century Chinese Buddhist Hagiography

Note from the Editor-in-Chief

How to Join the Scientific Mainstream: East Asian Scientists and Nobel Prize

Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-Japanese Contexts, 1896-1945

Contents

370

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