East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)
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Focus Introduction: Displacing Jesuit Science in Qing China
No full textThis “Focus”, entitled “Displacing Jesuit Science in Qing China”, brings together three articles. It is the outcome of a collaboration among young scholars that began with a symposium at the 14th International Conference on the History of Science in East Asia (Paris, July 2015). Their contributions all start from the hypothesis that, by paying close attention to space, and in particular to locations that have hitherto been neglected, one can shed new light on the early modern circulation of knowledge between the two ends of Eurasia, in which the Jesuits were central actors.
Focus Introduction: Swarms, herds, and peoples—Examinations of Interspecies Dynamics in China
No full textAs its title suggests, this Focus draws our attention to the shift in perspective brought about by environmental history, compared to the more traditional approaches of history of science. Here human knowledge of and interaction with animals are understood as part of a historically variable system that encompasses both the human realm and its environment, a system in which the various components interact and shape each other dynamically.
Obituary – Jeon Sang-woon 全相運 (1932-2018)
No full textProf. Jeon Sang-woon 全相運, one of the great masters in the field of the history of Korean science, passed away on January 15, 2018. Born in Wonsan, currently in North Korea, in 1932, he was 86 years old at his passing
Blurring the Boundaries: Integrating Techniques of Land Surveying on the Qing’s Mongolian Frontier
Full text linkThis article focuses on the role of spatial dynamics in effectuating the integration of two different sets of land surveying techniques. During the later stages of the Qing-Zunghar wars of the 1690s, the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722) repeatedly asked French Jesuit missionaries, who had been sent to China in 1685 under the patronage of the French King Louis XIV, to join his imperial campaigns targeting the Khalkha-Mongolian borderlands. In the shadow of these imperial journeys, missionaries systematically determined latitudes with Paris-made instruments while Qing officials measured road distances all along the way with graduated ropes. A next step in the evolution of imperial cartographic practice came after the Qing-Zunghar wars had come to an end, when an all-out effort was launched by the emperor to integrate the newly conquered Khalkha Mongols and their lands into the Qing polity. As part of the effort, missionaries were asked to produce a map of the new frontier by integrating European and East Asian practices, which led to the discovery of a technical incompatibility. In 1702, the problem was solved by the precise measurement of the terrestrial degree and, immediately after, the restandardization of the Qing’s most basic unit of length, the chi 尺. Thus, the turn of the eighteenth century saw the crystallization of a new or hybrid Qing cartographic practice, driven by the need to explore the new Khalkha frontier. Selected techniques developed by the French Academy of Sciences were gradually absorbed into a pre-existing framework of Qing land surveying, a process that was shaped and facilitated by exchanges in via throughout the vast Mongolian frontier
Buddhism, Medicine and the Affairs of the Heart: yurvedic Potency Therapy (Vājīkarana) and the Reappraisal of Aphrodisiacs and Love Philters in Medieval Chinese Sources
Full text linkThis article examines how discursive frames modify forms of knowledge and practice. More precisely, it considers the problem of categories in early and medieval Chinese sources through the lens of recipes designed to facilitate intercourse. In pre-Buddhist Chinese sources, such prescriptions traditionally fell either under the rubric of ‘nourishing life’ (yangsheng 養生) longevity practices or spellbinding (zhuzu 祝詛). While recipes that appear in the former bracket—referred to in this study as ‘aphrodisiacs’—were couched in a discourse of healing and classified as a medical undertaking, those associated with spellbinding—referred to as ‘love philters’—were filed under the heading of mantic arts and divination in bibliographic treatises. With the arrival of Āyurvedic medicine in China via Buddhist sources, this partition grew increasingly blurred. Āyurvedic medical taxonomy in general, and its discipline of potency therapy (vājīkarana) in particular, did not distinguish between aphrodisiacs and love philters since both ultimately facilitate intercourse, albeit through different means. The imprint of Āyurvedic categories in China can be ascertained in Buddhist manuscript sources from Dunhuang, but also, more surprisingly, in widely circulated medieval non-Buddhist medical treatises. However, in contrast to the emblematic medical treatises of the middle period and surveyed manuscript Buddhist materials, canonical Buddhist texts appear to have shied away from the topic of aphrodisiacs and upheld the indigenous Chinese understanding of love philters as spellbinding and mantic art
