WANG HSI-SHAN

(b. 23 July 1628, registered at Wu-chiang,² Soochow prefecture, China; d. 18 October 1682), astronomy.

Wang was the son of Wang P’ei-chen³ and his wife, whose maiden name was Chuang.⁴ Wang Hsi-shan’s epitapher, who would have been expected to cite distinguished ancestors in the preceding few generations, was unable to do so. Wang was designated to continue the family line of a childless uncle, which suggests that he was not the eldest child. Nothing is known of his education except that he was self-taught in mathematics and astronomy. He had no son to arrange for posthumous publication of his writings. One of his few disciples sketched, in twenty-five Chinese characters, the impression Wang made; “emaciated face, protruding teeth, tattered clothes, and shoes burst through the heels. His character made him aloof, as though no one could suit him; but when some one inquired about a scholarly topic, he was forthcoming as a river in flood.”^a

The conventional road to social advancement for the son of an obscure gentry family was the civil service examinations, which required many years of special preparation. This path was clouded by the Manchu conquest. The invaders from the north overran Wang’s district in 1645. Whether to collaborate with the alien government was an issue for all Chinese. Wang was only sixteen, but he made it clear that he did not wish to live with the new order: “In a burst of passion, wanting to die, he jumped repeatedly into the river. It always happened that someone was there to save his life. He then refused to take food for seven days, but still did not die. His parents were persistent; he had no choice but to resume eating. Renouncing worldly ambition, he dedicated all of his powers to learning,” Hopes for a Ming restoration soon faded, but in letters and manuscripts he never acknowledged the new Ch’ing dynasty. His friends, who included the great transitional figure of neo-Confucianism, Ku Yen-wu⁵ (1613 – 1682), were Ming loyalists.

Wang was not widely traveled; he never met Mei Wen-ting⁶ (1633 – 1721) of Anhwei or the northerner Hsueh Feng-tso⁷ (d. 1680), now considered the other two great astronomical scholars of the time. Mei acknowledged Wang’s preeminence, however, and wrote commentaries (never published) on several of his books.^b

Wang apparently made an indifferent living by teaching a few disciples. He was supported for a time by a wealthy scholar of his district who was compiling a history of the Ming dynasty (another act of devotion to the lost cause). Wang’s career was short, impeded by isolation, and hampered by illness, including partial paralysis of the extremities in his later years. The year before he died, he wrote, in connection with the prediction of a solar eclipse: “Whenever there is a conjunction I have always checked the precision of my computations against that of my observations, despite sickness, cold, or heat, for thirty years and more.”^c.

Wang’s technical writings circulated in manuscript among astronomers after his death. Their preservation was not guaranteed until a major composition was included in the enormous imperial manuscript collection of rare texts, the Ssu K’u ch’iian shu⁸ (“Complete Library in Four Repositories,” compiled 1773 – 1785). The descriptive and critical catalog of this collection was printed and brought Wang’s contribution to general attention.

The Setting of Wang Hsi-Shan’S Career . From about 1600 until the papal suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, missionaries of that order were practically the sole source of Chinese knowledge about Western astronomy. The Astronomical Bureau was the one part of the Chinese court where groups of foreigners had been employed in positions of trust for some centuries. Indians since the eighth century and Muslims (mostly Central Asians) since the thirteenth century had applied geometrical and trigonometric methods, which the Chinese lacked, to critical computational tasks, especially the prediction of eclipses. Appointments in the Bureau provided the Jesuits with access to the ruling elite, whose conversion was their main object. Mathematical and astronomical treatises demonstrated high learning and proved that the missionaries were civilized and socially acceptable, although religion was not part of the conventional discourse of gentlemen and attempts to convert one’s friends were considered bad form. Science was of no direct concern to the missionaries of other orders, who gradually began to proselytize in China, since their clientele was predominantly the poor and forsaken.

The missionaries began publishing on astronomy in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Their earliest writings did not provide what was needed to predict the celestial motions, but merely demonstrated the usefulness of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology and astronomy as then practiced in Europe. It was mainly the series of treatises presented to the throne in 1631 – 1635, as part of the campaign to gain operational control of the Astronomical Bureau and institute a calendar reform based on Western techniques, that set out the mathematical rudiments of the calendrical art. The principles of calendar reform were accepted by the government only on the eve of defeat by the Manchus, but the alien dynasty promptly accepted the Jesuits’ offer of services. Compiling a new system of calendrical computation was one of many steps usually taken to assert ritually the legitimacy of a new regime. The astronomical treatises, earlier printed individually by the missionaries, were published together by imperial order as Hsi-yang hsin fa li shu⁹ (“Astronomical Treatises According to the New Methods of the West,” presented to the throne in 1646). The prestige of official sponsorship assured them fairly wide distribution, although, unlike other imperial publications, they were never privately reprinted as a set.

Once the Jesuits were established in a secure position to protect their religious activities, there was no need to continue reporting on European developments in astronomy and cosmology – until a series of attacks by their enemies temporarily deposed them from the Astronomical Bureau (1665 – 1669) and even closed their churches in the provinces. During that time of crisis, the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest wrote several important new books, comprising tables and accounts of instruments and of predictions. The Tychonic cosmology of most of the “New Methods” treatises was not modified until the Keplerian ellipse was quietly introduced—for the solar orbit only—in 1742. The heliostatic world system was not introduced until 1760, after Copernicus’ De revolutionibus had been removed from the Index (1757), and even then it was only described, without a new computational scheme.

In sum, Chinese astronomers had to form their impression of European astronomy and cosmology from writings that, about 1630, were not untypical of textbooks and handbooks current in the church’s educational institutions in Europe but that, as time passed, failed increasingly to reflect the emergence of modern astronomy. It was with this in mind that the distinguished historian of science, Hsi Tse-tsung, remarked, “We can imagine, if Wang Hsi-shan had only come upon [Copernicus’ De revolutions, Galileo’s Dialogo, and Kepler’s Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae, all of which the missionaries kept for their private use in Peking], how much greater his contribution to astronomy would have been.”^d

Wang, Mei Wen-ting, and Hsueh Feng-tso were the first scholars in China to respond to the new exact sciences and to shape their influence on their successors. They were, in short, responsible for a scientific revolution. They radically reoriented the sense of how one goes about comprehending the celestial motions. They shifted from using numerical procedures for generating successive angular orientations to using geometric models of successive locations in space. They changed the sense of which concepts, tools, and methods are centrally important, so that geometry and trigonometry largely replaced numerical algebra, and such issues as the absolute sense of rotation of a planet and its relative distance from the earth became important for the first time. They convinced Chinese astronomers that mathematical models can have the power to explain the phenomena as well as to predict them.

This revolution did not reach the same pitch of tension as the one going on in Europe at the same time. It did not burst forth in as fundamental a reorientation of thought about nature. The new ideas and techniques did not arouse in Wang and others a need to cast doubt on all the traditional ideas of what constitutes an astronomical problem and what significance astronomical prediction can have for the ultimate understanding of nature. The traditional idea persisted that explaining the astronomical phenomena could not by itself lead to a synthetic comprehension of the inherent pattern of the cosmos, the Tao.

The limited character of the seventeenth-century breakthrough is perhaps not surprising. The decree of the Congregation of the Index in 1616 denied Chinese access to the fruits of the Copernican revolution and its aftermath in Europe, at least as long as Catholic missionaries were the only foreigners who had reason to write on astronomy in Chinese. Still, the reorientation determined a new style for Chinese astronomy until finally, between 1870 and 1920, that science ceased to exist apart from modern astronomy as an international enterprise.

This train of events has drawn little sympathetic attention, largely because it confounds the widespread assumption that in the encounter between cultures, Western science must assert its dominance by a process so automatic that one need not trouble oneself with a critical examination of instances. On the contrary, in China the new tools were used to rediscover and recast the lost mathematical astronomy of the past and thus to perpetuate traditional values rather than to replace them.^e The “imperatives of modernization” appear universal to the uncritical merely because the encounter between traditional and modern science in one society after another has been resolved by social change and political fiat, in view of which the comparative appropriateness of each system of science to the cultural environment is beside the point. The same may even be said for early modern technology, which was clearly superior to that of traditional societies, but was superior mainly in applications that did not exist until it generated them.

In a word, there has seldom been a direct encounter between traditional and modern science in East or West. Seventeenth–century China was an exception of great interest because European civilization had no appreciable political or social impact, and astronomy had to make its way on its own merits. Not on its abstract intellectual merits alone, to be sure, for what constituted merit was largely defined by the use the court traditionally made of astronomy.

At the time there were no socially marginal students of astronomy alienated from traditional values and protected by association with privileged foreigners, as would be the case in late nineteenth–century China and elsewhere in the heyday of imperialism. The only astronomers who could respond to the Jesuits’ writings were members of the old intellectual elite, who were bound to evaluate innovations in the light of established ideals that they felt an individual responsibility to strengthen and perpetuate.

In order to assure acceptance of the Western methods among people of his own kind, Mei Wenting created the myth that European mathematics evolved out of certain techniques that had originated in China and had been transplanted to the extreme fringes of civilization (Europe and Islam) before losing vitality in their original home.^f This myth, an appeal to the Chinese tendency to see perfection in high antiquity, connected Western science with certain ambiguous references in ancient historical writing; since it was not intrinsically foreign, it could be taken as more than a curiosity. Mei launched what anthropologists call a “foundation myth” for the institutions (small private groups of masters and disciples) that taught the new astronomy and reorganized themselves around it. There is nothing inherently Chinese about the use of such myths. An analogy that comes to mind is the remarkable European myth that non–European societies could be “discovered,” a change of status that authorized their economic despoliation and the systematic destruction of their religious and other customs during the Age of Discovery.

Mei, Wang, and others were aware that, whatever the lost grandeur of archaic times may have been, from about 100 B.C. through the thirteenth century computational astronomy in China had actually continued to grow in power and range within its stylistic limits. Very gradually from the Yüan period (1279 – 1368), it came to be little practiced outside the Astronomical Bureau, which was dominated by foreign technicians. By 1600 no one was able fully to comprehend the old numerical equations of higher-order, prototrigonometric approximations, applications of the method of finite differences, and other sophisticated techniques. The promise of a renascence seemed to the greatest astronomical figures of the seventeenth century to define the proper field for application of Western knowledge.

Astronomical Work . Wang and his contemporaries were motivated by two central problems. The first was how Western knowledge might be used to revive the lost Chinese exact sciences. Traditional knowledge was recorded, and the perennial problems were set, in the easily accessible standard histories of the various dynasties. Each incorporated a variety of technical treatises, which, among other matters, recorded many of the complete systems of ephemerides computation that had been proposed or accepted for official use since about 100 B.C. Wang was familar with the chief writings of this sort and, although there is no reason to believe that he met any foreign missionary, with the Jesuit treatises of the early 1630’s.

The second problem was how to resolve the internal contradictions of European astronomy. Since circumstances had ruled out a closely unified set of treatises, some discrepancies were due to divergences of approach and varying choices of constants, and some to the missionaries’ limitations of skill. The most important source of inconsistency was the different cosmological viewpoints through which European writers tried to convey the best knowledge of their time, before and after the limits of contention about the system of the world were drawn by the decree against the teaching of heliocentricism. Matteo Ricci, writing before 1616, was conventionally “Ptolemaic” (that is, he reflected the doctrines of Aristotle and Ptolemy as understood by the Scholastics of his youth). The writers of about 1630 were Tychonists, except for Johann Schreck (1576-1630). Later Jesuit writers never accounted for the shift to Tychonism—nor for the introduction of Copernicanism in the mid-eighteenth century. Chines could perceive only the lack of conviction and of unanimity. Misleading statements about Copernicus’ contributions, contextless references to alternative systems (for instance, a confusing and unexplained allusion by Schreck to the cosmology of Heraclides Ponticus), and additional isolated innovations in Verbiest’s later series of writings muddied even more the question of what should be considered the state of the foreign art. The spotty character of publication made it impossible to take the latest as best; in the missionary writings the latest usually presupposed the earlier without criticizing it.

Wang’s response belies the occasional assertions of historians that Chinese were incapable of responding creatively to geometrical models, or that a bias against abstraction would have prevented them from taking up Copernican cosmology had it been available. In adapting the missionaries’ version of Tycho Brahe’s scheme of the cosmos to his own uses. Wang made considerable adaptations and criticized contradictions in its presentation. He noted, for instance, that a secular diminution in the length of the tropical year had been mentioned, but was ignored in a discussion of the precessional constant (which, by implication, should increase). This was not the modern variation in the length of the year, but one of much greater magnitude that was obsolete in Europe by the time Wang wrote.

Wang’s H siao-an hsin fa¹⁰ (“New Method,” completed in 1663) was cast in traditional form, with tables that made only the elementary logistic operations necessary for calculating the ephemerides. It provided, for the first time, methods for predicting planetary occultations and solar transits. Some of Wang’s techniques were included along with post-Newtonian data in the Li hsiang k’ao ch’eng¹¹ (“Compendium of Observational and Computational Astronomy,” printed 1724), part of a great survey of the mathematical arts sponsored by the K’ang-hsi emperor.

Wang’s Wu hsing hsing tu chieh¹² (“On the Angular Motions of the Five Planets,”; completed by the autumn of 1673). Both were first printed in the Shou shan ko ts’ung-s/m collection (1838) and reprinted in the was a critically overhauled Tychonic model of the planetary motions, substituting eccentrics for major epicycles and opposing the rotational senses of the superior and inferior planets. This work displays a general familiarity with modern trigonometry. Wang’s arguments, unlike those of his Chinese predecessors, were clearly concerned with bodies in motion.

The most original idea in “On the Angular Motions” was Wang’s proposal that the planetary anomalies be explained by a force radiating from the outermost moving sphere (tsung tung t’ ien,¹³ or primum mobile) and attracting each planet to an extent maximal at apogee. Explanation of celestial motions by forces, instead of the assumption in the old kinematics of compounded circles that the celestial motions were eternal, entered the European debate only through Kepler. There had been no such discussion in China, except for a vague statement by Giacomo Rho (1592 – 1638) that “The motions of [the sun, Mercury, and Venus] are all due to one potential moving force …located in the body of the sun.” This assertion was not connected with the remainder of Rho’s planetary theory, and no extension to the superior planets was hinted at. Wang’s force, although it was not universal like Newtonian gravitation, applied to all the planets known to him and was exerted from the periphery rather than from inside the planetary orbits.^g

Wang’s notion of synthesis went deeper than reconciling ancient schemes of calculation with foreign techniques. The power of Western models not only to predict phenomena but also to exhibit their inherent patterns was what attracted many Chinese. Wang sought to establish metaphysical links for further exploration into celestial reality. This motive lay behind his suggestion that the circle be divided into 384 degrees. The traditional division made each degree (tu)¹⁴ equal to one tropical day’s mean solar travel (so that in Wang’s system there would be 365.2422 degrees). He was aware of the convenience offered by the European system of angular division, especially in manufacturing graduated instruments. He chose the number 384 (3 X 2⁷) in addition to 360 (2³ X 3² X 5) because, as the number of lines (6 X 64) in the sixty-four hexagrams of the “Book of Changes,” it related astronomical quantities to the fountainhead of conventional speculation about cosmic change and thus uncovered another layer of significance.^h

Despite his dedication and critical intelligence, it cannot be said that Wang, any more than his contemporaries, succeeded in a mature synthesis of traditional and modern science. They did provide tools and methods as well as a goal. Information from the West was inadequate in many respects, and several generations more were needed to reclaim the traditional corpus of Chinese mathematics and astronomy as part of the astronomer’s repertoire.

For many decades students began with the Western writing and went on to study the Chinese technical classics. The latter, as they were successively mastered, increasingly defined the style of research in the exact sciences, even when this research began to be concerned with new problems. By the early nineteenth century, Western mathematics and astronomy were no longer novelties; they had been studied continuously for two hundred years. The basic training in the decades before the Opium Wars (ca. 1840) was in the native writings. They served as excellent preparation for up-to-date Western treatises that gradually began to appear as part of a new confrontation—this time a total confrontation—between China and the West.

General Significance for Chinese Thought . Wang Hsi-shan’s lifetime was a critical epoch in the evolution of Chinese philosophy. What Western historians call neo-Confuncianism was, like the earlier trends it built upon, a search for doctrines of education, self-cultivation, and moral life in society. Its successive new departures depended upon reexamination of antiquity to identify and interpret (differently for each age) the authentic core of Confucian teachings. Well before the late Ming period, expanded scope for self-consciousness, increased blurring of social barriers, and the more penetrating influence of Buddhism and Taoism had depended religious and moral awareness. This trend affected both the Chu Hsi¹⁵ tradition, which explored the phenomenal world (including the mind and experiece recorded in books) to grasp the single coherent pattern inherent in all change, and that of Wang Yang-ming,¹⁶ which strongly emphasized enlightenment through self-awareness, particualry of the mind engaged in conscientious social activity.

The great intellectuals of the dynastic transition were, on the whole, Ming loyalists. That is, they were among the minority who did resist, in the main passively and after the transfer of power had taken place. They were convinced that to plumb the failure of their intellectual predecessors would be to uncover the conditions for philosophical and spiritual reinvigoration, and for responsible engagement in the world of affairs. Among the most influential was Wang Hsi-shan’s friend Ku Yenwu, who saw his late Ming predecessors as distracrted from moral commitment and public responsibility by sectarianism, by pedantry and triviality in the Chu tradition, and , in the tradition of Wang, by a subjectivity and individualism ignorant of the authoritarian and hierarchic requirements of social order. Above all, in the view of Ku and other Ch’ing survivors, it was the rivalry of schools—a manifestation of blinding selfishness and pride—that corrupted the neo-Confucian teaching, leaving it unable to rise above the political futility that preceded the debacle at the end of the Ming.ⁱ

The prescription for the ills of thought was to purge postclassical influences that hid the original principles of Confucius and his orthodox followers. A critical method for the examination of texts was the crucial safeguard; the broad study that printing had made feasible revealed to people of Wang’s generation how easily the understanding of their predecessors had been led astray. Some now endeavored to recover the earliest—the uncorrupted—versions and interpretations of the classics, and others studied the working out of canonical moral patterns in the events of history. This work was not intended to replace the quest for a livingphilosophy, to which the fortunes of the empire had given a new poignancy.

By the mid-eighteenth century, narrowly defined scholarly methodology had become an end in itself, narrow in interpretation and intolerant of the urge to generalize. The call for “Social utility, concrete practicality, and tangible evidence,” which had promised philosophic regeneration a century earlier, outlived the openness to the unexpected that was implied in its original motivation.^j Classicism flourished, despite the atrophy of metaphysics, because of the cumulative accomplishments it yielded and because it posed no threat to a state which insisted that collective intellectual activity be apolitical.

This final evolution of disciplinary specialization out of a philosophic renaissance is not of further concern here, but how the Ch’ing style of critical neo-Confucian thought began to take shape in Wang Hsi-shan’s lifetime bears examination.

It has often been noticed that certain important neo-Confucians of the early Ch’ing era, especially among those close to the Chu tradition, wrote on mathematics and astronomy. That the extent of this scientific interest has been seriously underestimated becomes clear in an unpublished survey of thirty-six people generally considered major neo-Confucian figures, from the beginning of the Ch’ing period (1644) to Wang Yin-chih¹⁷ (1766 – 1834). Of the thirty-six, eighteen left a total of seventy-two books on mathematics and astronomy. A large group of these treatises reconstituted early computational techniques, and about the same number were chronological or other mathematical studies of canonical writings before about 200 B.C.^k

That overlap of intellectual activity is part of a more general pattern that also connects those known only for philosophy with those known only for science. In the mid-seventeenth century the leaders in both fields were people who eschewed politics and public service. This is perhaps not remarkable, since one expects reevaluation and syncretism to begin with talented and ambitious people who, for one reason or another, remain on the margins of the elite. But in addition to obvious consequences of this social overlap, philosophers and scientists shared important convictions.

To sum up the argument so far, certain critical motifs recurred in neo-Confucianism just after the Manchu conquest, pointing the way toward new departures: emphatic rejection of what were seen as decadent and destructive tendencies at the end of the Ming (Ku Yen-wu located them mainly in the Wang Yang-ming school, but other thinkers were more evenhanded in their apportionment of blame); the belief that those tendencies arose partly because of inadequate study and partly because of Buddhist and other heterodox ideas—as well as a variety of misunderstandings and corruptions—that had insinuated themselves into texts and undisciplined scholarly writings; and the conviction that a sound approach to understanding the inherent patterns of cosmic and human activity (li)¹⁸ and the moral imperatives they imply required critical reexamination of classical literature and history.

All of these ideas also motivated Wang Hsishan. We are told by his biographer that after he renounced worldly ambition, “He excoriated heterodoxy [this usually refers to Buddhism, sometimes to Christianity as well], attacked ’innate moral consciousness’¹⁹ [the characteristic doctrine of the Wang Yang-ming school], and accepted the orthodox Confucian tradition of the Chu Hsi line²⁰ as his personal mission.” The preface to his “New Method,” instead of conventionally affirming the high antiquity of astronomy, began by taking up questions that had been raised about the authenticity of seven calendars that the historians dated prior to the Han period (206 B.C.), and stated flatly, “There is no doubt that they were forgeries of the Han.“Wang emphasized that astronomers of the recent past comprehended less than their predecessors and that the lost meaning of the technical classics had to be rediscovered.

Earlier scientists had argued, with some consistency, that although mathematical astronomy could provide useful knowledge and advance understanding, the subtle texture of the natural order could ultimately be penetrated only by illumination.^l Wang did not reject this view, but he saw number as a means toward that penetration: “One who seeks rigor must reach it through computation. Numbers are not themselves the inherent pattern [li] but because the pattern gives rise to number, through number one may reach enlightenment as to the pattern.”^m This conviction was almost certainly influenced by the argument of Matteo Ricci, in his preface to the Chinese translation of Euclid’s Elements (Chi-ho yuan pen, 1607),²¹ that geometry is a unique means to knowledge of the inherent pattern, knowledge that does not depend upon individual belief and thus can overcome individual doubts.

These parallels, and others in the writings of Wang’s scientific contemporaries, suggest a closer connection than has hitherto been imagined between the scientific revolution of seventeenth-century China and the evolution from philosophy to exact scholarship that took much longer to run its course. In particular, they suggest that Western influence on main currents of early Ch’ing philosophy—on the frontiers of Chinese self-awareness—should not casually be ruled out. Historians have usually ruled it out because they have not studied the scientific literature and because they rely on crude and narrowly defined tests for intellectual influence that ignore the mathematical dimension of human thought.

It is a matter of paramount importance that the first substantial encournter between Chinese traditions and European culture was in mathematical astronomy. Medicine and religion provoked no such response, and confrontations of political ideas were negligible. The style of the response to Western astronomy—how it was assimilated so that it could be understood, how the primacy of traditional values was asserted and the study of the new methods justified in terms of them, how teaching and practice were adapted to existing institutions—set the style of less abstract encounters later, as may be seen in the response to Western military technology in the second half of the nineteenth century. (The broad pattern of response—misconception, ambiguity, interpretation, and piecemeal adaptatin—is not utterly unlike that of Americans to Chinese acupuncture in the 1970’s).

This mathematical challenge to values coincided with an even more traumatic challenge, the Manchu invasion. Some shade of ambiguity toward Western science must have come from the Jesuits’ prompt tender of services to the Manchus and the immediate official adoption of their astronomical system (although some missionaries accompanied the refugee Ming court south to cover the eventuality of a restoration). It was not, however, characteristic of Chinese to reject what was foreign merely because it was foreign; nationalism had barely been conceived. A willingness to adopt the forms of Chinese culture gave Manchus and Jesuits a right to be where they were—although nothing compelled loyalists to collaborate with either. But Wang Hsi-shan’s type of loyalism was only a memory for the following generation, and served as no deterrent to the study of new ideas.

It is merely reasonable to suggest that philosophers were influenced by the early success of astronomers in applying the foreign tools (in eclectic combination with old ones) to the reexamination of classical learning. Reexamination of ancient observations and predictions was an established part of the astronomer’s work. Not long after Wang Hsishan’s lifetime, technical examination of the philosophic classics to fix dates and test authenticity became the explicit end of most astronomical exploration, with the revival of traditional science as an intermediate means that happened to fully occupy many scholars.

Even more important in assessing this channel of European influence is the fact that as time passed, leading neo-Confucian scholars also became mathematicians used to working with Western techniques and concepts. Because these scholars grouped in schools and maintained close relations, even those who never applied European science in their writings were aware of it through discussions with their associates and through reading their monographs.

None of this suggests a simple causal relation between European astronomy as described in the Chinese language in the early seventeenth century and the forms of Chiness thought that became dominant by the middle of the eighteenth. Certainly the relation between astronomy and philosophy was reciprocal as long as philosophy remained vital, despite its moral and social cast and its focus on self-realization. At the begining the new scienence offered what were seen as powerful tools toward a reformation of thought. Wang His-shan’s belief that number could bring ultimate insight into the universal pattern was pregnant in precisely this way; but the consensus formed in more conventional quarters, and was ultimately barren for a new understanding of nature, society, and man. Still, the new techniques could never be mere tools. To use them, as so many thinkers did, was to form habits that reinforced long-held convictions about the usefulness of scholarship in exploring reality. Seventeenth-century European science was not, after all, modern science, least of all as it was artificially perpetuated in China for two centuries by the lack of sources alternative to the missionaries’ writings. Chinese philosophers, whose sense of man and the cosmos was in part formed by study of canonic books, responded to the universal explanatory character that this foreign science derived from its Scholastic framework much more than to the grip on direct experience of nature that Wang valuedⁿ Astronomy, as it was understood and used by neo-Confucian thinkers, converged with philology, gave it added weight, and obviously played a part in tipping the scale.

It would be premature to suggest any particular line of development between the recourse to Western astronomy among philosophers at the beginning of the Ch’ing period and the eventual swamping of earlier philosophical concerns by exact scholarship—exact scholarship of a kind in which mathematical astronomy finally could be perfectly integrated as one specialty among many. The career of Wang Hsi-shan suggests a range of possible patterns that, tested against many other careers, can throw light on the central enigmas which shroud the failure of imperial China.

NOTES

a. This and the following quotation are from the funerary inscription by Wang Chi in Sung-ling wen lu²² (“Literary Records of Wu-chaing,” 1874), 16 la– lb.

b. Described in the Wu-an li sun shup-mu²³ (“Bibliography of Mei’s Writings on Astronomy and Mathematics” ; Pai-pu ts’ung-shu chi-ch’eng ed.), 34b – 35a. On the relations of Mei and Wang. see the biographical study by Hsi Tse-tsung, “Shihlun Wang Hsi-shan te t’ien-wen kung-tso”³³ (in bibliography). Reliable short biographies of Mei and many other figures mentioned in this article are in Hummel, Eminent Chinese.

c. Cited by Hsi Tse-tsung (p. 63) from the MS “Wang Hsiao-an hsien-sheng i-shu pu-pien”²⁴ (“Supplement to the Posthumous Works of Wang Hsi-shan”) in the Peking University Library.

d. Hsi Tse-Tsung, log, cit

e. This point was made by Mikami Yoshion in “’Chūjin den’ ron”²⁵ (“A Study of the Ch’ ou jen chuan”). in Tōyō gakuhō16 (1927), 185 – 222, 287 – 333, and was repeated in “Chinese Mathematics,” in Isis, 11 (1928), 125, It has been developed considerably by Wang P’ing.

f. Wang Hsi-shan accepted this notion. See his Tsa chu²⁶ (“Miscellaneous Essays”), in Hsiao-an i shu,³¹ XXXV, 1a-2a, 10b-11a. The best discussion of the Chinese origin theory is in Wang p’ing, Hsi-fang li-suan-hsueh chih shu-ju,³⁶ 77 – 79, 97 – 103. I see no reason to doubt that Mei, Wang Hsi-shan, and others sincerely believed it.

g.Shou shan ko ts’ung-shu²⁷ ed., 7b, discussed in sivin, “Copernicus in China,” 74 – 75.

h.Hsiao-an hsin fa¹⁰ (in Hsiao-an i shu),³¹ 2a.

i. I am grateful for this formulation, and for a number of helpful critisms, to Lynn Struve. I am also thankful for suggestions by Judy Berman, Dianna Gregory, and Yü Ying-shih.

j. William T. de Bary, “Neo-Confucian Cultivation and the Seventeenth-Century ‘Enlightenment.’” in The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, 193.

k. N. Sivin. “What Can the Study of Chinese science Contribute to Our Understanding of Neo-Confucianism, and How?” working paper for Planning Conference on Early Ch’ing Thought. Berkeley, Calif., 28-31 Aug. 1975.

l. See DSB article on Shen Kua.

m.Tsa chu, 4a.

n. Wilard J. Peterson, in his perceptive “Fang I-chih: Western Learning and the ‘Investigation of Things.’” has shown how Fang⁵¹ (1611 – 1671) used his knowledge of Western sciences to argue for greater emphasis in philosophy upon accumulating knowledge of “physical objects, technology, and natural phenomena.” Because Fang’s understanding of the exact sciences was mediocre, he responded more enthusiastically than most of his contemporaries to the Scholastic sciences of the body, the earth, weather, and so on that were then becoming obsolete in the West. His influence on scientific thought was negligible, but Peterson suggests (correctly, I believe) an indirect formative influence on early Ch’ing humanists’ taste for “building knowledge item, by item” He asserts that the tendencies Fang encouraged were “parallel to the secularization of natural philosophy in seventeenth-century Europe” (p. 401); but they were more closely parallel to the antiquated approach of Fang’s sources, products, of the Counter-Reformation attempt to overcome secularization. Although Fang was no more reluctant than the European Schoolmen to provide an occasional “experiment” to demonstrate a point, he depended as heavily as they upon hearsay and literature, and as little upon personal experience; in his dream of what would now be called a research institute, the only source of knowledge mentioned was “ancient and modern books” (p. 383). In short, the scientific revolution in seventeenth-century China was in the main a response to outmoded knowledge that gave little attention to, and consistently misrepresented, the significance of developements in the direction of modern science. This thesis is fully documented in Sivin, “Copernicus in China.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Wang Hsi-shan’s extant writings are listed in an article by N. Sivin inL. Carrington Goodrich, ed., Ming Biographical Dictionary (New York, 1976), 1379 – 1382. The two most important treatises were Hsiao-an hsin fa¹⁰ (“New Methods of Wang Hsishan” ; completed 1663) and Wu hsing hsing tu chieh¹² (“On the Angular Motions of the Five Plants” ; completed by the autumn of 1673). Both were first printed in the Shou shan ko ts’shu²² collection (1838) and reprinted in the Chung-hsi suan-hsueh ts’ung-shu,²⁸ 1st ser. (1896) and the Ts’ung-shu chi ch’eng²⁹ collection, 1st ser. (1926). About 1890 the two treatises were combined with Ta-t’ung li fa ch’i-meng,³⁰ an elementary introduction to the Great Concordance system (Ta-t’ung li), which had been used throughout the Ming period (1368 – 1644) for computing the ephemerides, and an assortment of short essays, to form the Hsiao-an i shu³¹ (“Posthumous Works”), vols. XXXI-XXXV in the Mu hsi hsuan ts’ung-shu.³²

II. Secondary Literature. The most thorough study of Wang’s life and astronomical work, based on unpublished as well as published sources, is Hsi Tsetsung, “Shih lun Wang Hsi-shan te t’ien-wen kung-tso”³³ “(“An Essay on the Astronomical Work of Wang Hsi-shan”), in K’o-hsueh-shih chi-k’an,³⁴6 (1963), 53 – 65. Its references provide an excellent starting point for further study. The article by Sivin cited above, in a reference book invaluable for the study of Want’s immediate predecessors, is more concerned with biographical and bibliographical matters than is the present essay. The first detailed account of Wang’s work, based mainly on excerpts from his writings before they had been printed separately, was in Ch’ou jen chuan³⁵ (“Biographies of Mathematical Astronomers,” 1799; Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1935), II , 421–446. This programmatic compendium, which included European as well as Chinese figures, was a major influence on the style of eighteenth-century investigations in the exact sciences.

Although no more than isolated sentences from Wang have been published in translation, N. Sivin has drafted a translation of Wu hsing hsing tu chieh¹² for circulation and eventual publication in a source book of Chinese science.

III. European Science In Seventeenth Century China. Little attention has been paid by Western sinologists to the early mathematical encounter of East and West. For instance, Ssu-yu Teng and John K. Fairbank, China’s Response to the West. A Documentary Survey 1839 – 1923 (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), notes the immediate influence only of “items of practical interest,” among which the authors include the calendar. Useful and well-known studies, such as Wolfgang Franke, China and the West. The Cultural Encounter, 13th to 20th Centuries, R. A. Wilson, trans. (Oxford, 1967); and Joseph R. Levenson, “The Abortiveness of Empiricism in Early Ch’ing Thought,” in Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (London-Berkeley, 1958), 3-14, do not reflect knowledge of or curiosity about the technical literature.

The only general history of the Chinese response to European exact sciences is in Wang P’ing, Hsi-fang li-suan-hsueh chih shu-ju³⁶ (“The Introduction of Western Astronomy and Mathematics”), Monographs of the Institute of Modern History, Academica Sinica, 17 (Nankang, Taiwan, 1966), summarized in Journal of Asian Studies, 29 (1970), 914 – 917. This book draws heavily on the biographical articles in Ch’ou jen chuan for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A very useful tool for further study of both Jesuit and Chinese mathematical activities is Li Yen, “Ming-ch’ing chih chi Hsi suan shu-ju chung-kuo nien-piao”³⁷ (“A Chronology of the Introduction of Western Mathematics Into China in the Transition Between the Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties”), in Chung suan shih lun-ts’ung,³⁸ vol. III of Gesammelte Abhandlungen über die Geschichte der chinesischen Mathematik, rev. ed. (Peking, 1955); 10 – 68. Jesuit activity has been ably surveyed in Yabuuchi Kiyoshi, Chūgoku no temmon rekihō³⁹ (“Chinese Astronomy” ; Tokyo, 1969), 148 – 174.

There is an important group of studies in Yabuuchi Kiyoshi and Yoshida Mitsukuni,⁴⁰ eds., Min Shin jidai no kaguku gijutsu shi⁴¹ (“History of Science and Technology in the Ming and Ch’ing Periods”). Research Report. Research Institute of Humanistic Studies, Kyo-to University (1970), 1 – 146. Joseph Needham, in Science and Civilisation in China, III (Cambridge, 1959), 437 – 458, was the first to suggest that the limitations as well as the strengths of the Jesuit missionaries greatly affected the character of the Chinese response. His short and incidental discussion of Wang Hsi-shan (p. 454) includes several errors of fact.

The lives of the Jesuit missionaries and their publications in Chinese have been well-documented by historians of that order. See Henri Bernard, “Les adaptations chinoises d’ouvrages européens. Bibliographie chronologique depuis la venue des Portugais à Canton jusqu’à la Mission francaise de Pékin, 1514 – 1688,” in Monumenta serica, 10 (1945), 1 – 57, 309 – 388; Joseph Dehergne, Répertoire des Jésuites de Chine de 1552 à 1800 (Rome-Paris, 1973); and Louis Pfister, Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les Jésuites de l’ancienne mission de Chine, 1552 – 1773, 2 vols. (Shanghai, 1932 – 1934, completed before Pfister’s death in 1891). Dehergne is a comprehensive guide to the extensive literature on missionaries, including archival sources: the last part includes aids to research. See also Henri Cordier, Essai d’une bibliographie des ouvrages publiés en Chine par les Européens au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1883), based on the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale. For writings in Chinese, see Hsu Tsung-tse, Ming Ch’ing chien Ye-su-hui-shih i chu t’i yao⁴² (“Annotated Bibliography of Jesuit Translations and writings in the Ming and Ch’ing Periods” ; Taipei, 1958), with indexes of authors, titles, and subjects.

On European scientific works available to the Jesuits in Peking—and still extant as one of the world’s greatest collections of scientific writings of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries—see H. Verhaeren, Catalogue of the Pei-t’ang Library, 3 vols. (Peking, 1944 – 1948). A list of 251 astronomical books has been excerpted in Henri Bernard-Maitre, “La science européene au tribunal astronomique de Pékin (XVIIe-XIXe siècles),” in Conferences du Palais de la découvertge, ser. D, 9 (Paris, 1951). See also Boleslaw Szczesniak, “Note on Kepler’s Tabulae Rudolphinae in the Library of Pei-t’ang in Pekin,” in lsis, 40 (1949), 344 – 347.

For studies of Chinese responses, the book of Wang P’ing is especially helpful because of its index, still unusual in Chinese scholarly books. For systematic annotated bibliographies, see Ting Fu-pao and Chou Yunch’ing. Ssu pu tsung lu suan-fa pien⁴³ (“General Register of the Quadripartite Library, Section on Mathematics” Shanghai, 1957) and Ssu pu tsung lu t’ien-wen pien⁴⁴ (“General Register …Section on Astronomy” Shanghai. 1956). supplemented by Li Yen, “Chin-tai Chung suan chu-shu chi”⁴⁵ (“Notes on Books About Chinese Mathematics in Modern Times”), in Chung suan shih lun-ts’ung,³⁸II (1954), 103 – 308: and “Ch’ing-tai wenchi suan-hsueh lei lun-wen”⁴⁶ (“Articles That Can Be Classified as Mathematical in Collected Literary Works of Individuals in the Ch’ing Period”), ibid., V (1955), 76 – 92.

The first resort for biographies of the most prominent Chinese scientific figures is Arthur W. Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1943 – 1944); Ming Biographical History (see above) will provide similar information about those who reached maturity before the mid-seventeenth century and about a few later people (such as Wang Hsi-shan) not accorded biographies by Hummel. Ch’ou jen chuan³⁵ is composed mostly of long excerpts from technical writings and does not provide a great deal in the way of biography or overview.

A few topical studies throw light on fundamental issues. The genesis, content, and distribution of major Jesuit scientific writings are described in Pasquale d’Elia, “Presentazione della prima traduzione chinese di Euclide,” in Monumenta serica, 15 (1956), 161 – 202, with English summary; and Henri Bernard-Maître, “L’encyclopédie astronomique du Père Schall,” ibid., 3 (1938), 35 – 77, 441 – 527. Early European writings in Chinese on the qualitative sciences are described in Willard J. Peterson, “Western Natural Philosophy Published in Late Ming China,” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 117 (1973), 295 – 322.

The life associations, and work of Wang Hsi-shan’s contemporary Mei Wen-ting have been treated at length in Li Yen, “Mei Wen-ting nien-p’u”⁴⁷ (“A Chronological Biography of Mei Wen-ting”), in Chung suan shih lunts’ung,III , 544 – 576; and in Hashimoto Keizō⁴⁸ “Bai Buntei no rekisangaku—Kōki nenkan no temmon rekisangadu”⁴⁹ (“The Mathematical Astronomy of Mei Wen-ting—Mthematical Astronomy in the K’ang-hsi Period”), in Tōhō gakuhō (Kyoto), 41 (1970), 491 – 518; and “Bai Buntei no sugaku kenkyū”⁵⁰ (“The Mathematical Researches of Mei Wen-ting”), ibid., 44 (1973), 233 – 279. The thought of Fang I-chin,⁵¹ probably the first Chinese to acquaint himself with the full spectrum of European sciences, has been examined by Sakade Yoshinobu. “Hō Ichi no shisō”⁵² (“The Thought of Fang I-chin”), in Yabuuchi Kiyoshi and Yoshida Mitsukuni (see above), 93 – 134; and by W. J. Peterson, “Fang I-chin: Western Learning and the ‘Investigation of Things,’” in W. T. de Bary and the Conference on serventeenth-Century Chinese Thought, The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, studies in Oriental Culture, 10 (New York, 1975), 369 – 411, an important volume for seventeenth-century thought. Sakade and Peterson should be read together, since Sakade pays comparatively little attention to Fang’s treatment of European ideas and techniques; and Peterson, although more concerned with this aspect, is not familiar with the Chinese scientific tradition or with the development of European science.

The introduction of cosmology into China is narrated by Pasquale d’Elia in Galileo in China, Relations Through the Roman College Between Galileo and the Jesuit Scientist-Missionaries (1610 – 1640), Rufus Suter and Matthew Sciascia, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), but the emphasis on demonstrating Jesuit accomplishments obscures a number of basic issues. The ambiguities and historic ironies of the Jesuit effort, and the Chinese response after the church’s injunction of 1616 limited discussion of the earth’s motion, have been examined in detail by N. Sivin in “Copernicus in China.” in Studia Copernicana, 6 (1973), 63 – 122, with bibliographical essay, 113 – 114. A more black-and-white analysis of the same topic, with some important additional information, is Hsi Tse-tsung et at., “Heliocentric Theory in China,” in Scientia sinica16 (1973), 364 – 376. More limited in scope is Yen Tun-chieh, “ch’ieh-li-lueh ti kung-tso tsao-ch’i tsai Chung-kuo ti ch’uan-pu”⁵³ (“The Early Dissemination of Galileo’s Work in China”), in K’o-hsueh-shih chi-k’an,³⁴7 (1964), 8 – 27. On the notion that Western mathematics originated in China, see Ch’üan Han-sheng, “Ch’ing-mo ti Hsi-hsueh yuan ch’u Chung-kuo shuo”⁵⁴ (“On the Late Ch’ing Theory That Western Science Originated in China”), in Ling-nan hsüeh pao,⁵⁵4 (1935), 57 – 102; and N. Sivin, “On ‘China’s Opposition to Western Science During Late Ming and Early Ch’ing,’” in Isis, 56 (1965), 201 – 205. Ch’üan, overlooking the early literature, attributes the Chinese origin theory to Mei Wen-ting’s grandson Mei Ku-ch’eng⁵⁶ (ca. 1681-1763); but his account of the theory’s vogue around the turn of the twentieth century deserves attention.

N. Sivin