East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)
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Roderich Ptak and Baozhu Hu, The Earliest Extant Bird List of Hainan: An Annotated Translation of the Avian Section in Qiongtai zhi
Full text linkThe Planetary Visibility Tables in the Second-Century BC Manuscript Wu xing zhan 五星占
Full text linkThis article is a study of the planetary tables in the second century BC manuscript Wu xing zhan. Products of computation in this and later texts are compared to what we know about contemporary bodies ofplanetary knowledge to highlight discrepancies between theory and practice, as well as pluralities of tradition, within the early imperial astral sciences. In particular, this study focuses on such tables’ apparent use of a solar calendar (as distinct from the lunisolar civil calendar) for the purposes of planetary astronomy; it also attempts to explain anomalous features of the Wu xing zhan’s planetary tables in the context of early manuscript culture
Mapping Time in the Shiji and Hanshu Tables 表
Full text linkThis essay considers the achievements, contrasts, and puzzles that bind the Shiji and Hanshu Tables to one another, and to their respective authors’ historical views. Meanwhile, this essay queries the common wisdom that would reduce the Shiji and Hanshu tables to “mere sequence,” as opposed to creative historical writing, while deriding the tables as either “primitive” or “derivative.
Feng Jiren, Chinese Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual
Full text linkIan Jared Miller, The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo
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Special Issue on Numerical Tables and Tabular Layouts in Chinese Scholarly Documents—Part II: Synchronic and Diachronic Approaches to the Texts of Tables
Full text linkAntoine Thomas, SJ, and his Synopsis Mathematica: biography of a Jesuit mathematical textbook for the China mission
Full text linkThis article is an examination of a nearly forgotten massive two-volume octavo textbook of introductory (theoretical and practical) mathematics published in Douai in 1685, with a second issuing of it in 1729. The theme of mathematical training has been central to the understanding of the Jesuits in China in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and this discussion gives a detailed survey of the mathematical ‘baggage’ of the author, Antoine Thomas, SJ, (1644-1709). Here we consider his teaching at the Colégio das Artes in Coimbra, Portugal, in the late 1670s, when he synthesized basic mathematical knowledge. Most importantly, Thomas’s Synopsis was explicitly written for the use of Jesuit candidates for the China mission, and describes in detail the minimum level of mathematical, and especially astronomical, knowledge and skills that were expected from them. Despite its two issues and its well-targeted didactic program, the book’s reception—which spans a period from 1685 until at least 1756, when there is evidence that it was still being recommended—was actually quite limited; this reception can mainly be gauged from the twenty-six extant copies, and some references in auction catalogues. These data reveal a restricted geographic spread, with some notable exceptions, including some copies which made it to South America. Soon after its appearance, the Synopsis found a secondary use outside the context of the Jesuit mission to China as a textbook of mathematics. It later enjoyed a reception as a ‘collector’s item’, although it had no further scholarly impact
The Question of Pangxing 旁行 and Xieshang 邪上 in the “Sandai shibiao” 三代世表 (Genealogical Tables of the Three Dynasties) of the Shiji 史記 (The Grand Clerk’s Records)
No full textHan scholar Huan Tan 桓譚 (c. 40 BC-32 AD) has attached two characteristic features to “Sandai shibiao” type historical tables that Sima Qian (c. 145 or 135–86 BC) inserted in his Shiji (The Grand Clerk’s Records): according to him, they are pangxing 旁行 and xieshang 邪上. For many centuries, scholars have not made the meaning of these features clear. The author relies on a typological analysis of writing style of excavated sources from early imperial China to offer his own interpretation. He suggests that the expression xieshang has two meanings. Narrowly speaking, it designates a writing style where characters are written along oblique lines, whereas, more broadly, it refers to forms or methods of computation relying on tools for divination (diagrams in the form of a tortoise or human figure, shipan 式盤 divination board and so on). Accordingly, pangxing ‘sideways’ would designate the horizontal writing style of documents that recorded the results of computations obtained in this way, in a tabular “Sandai shibiao” layout