The Crafting of the 10,000 Things

Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China

Dagmar Schäfer

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780226272801, 9780226735849
• eBook ISBN: 9780226735856
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Biological Sciences

The last decades of the Ming dynasty, though plagued by chaos and destruction, saw a significant increase of publications that examined advances in knowledge and technology. Among the numerous guides and reference books that appeared during this period was a series of texts by Song Yingxing (1587–1666?), a minor local official living in southern China. His Tiangong kaiwu, the longest and most prominent of these works, documents the extraction and processing of raw materials and the manufacture of goods essential to everyday life, from yeast and wine to paper and ink to boats, carts, and firearms.

            
In The Crafting of the 10,000 Things, Dagmar Schäfer probes this fascinating text and the legacy of its author to shed new light on the development of scientific thinking in China, the purpose of technical writing, and its role in and effects on Chinese history. Meticulously unfolding the layers of Song's personal and cultural life, Schäfer chronicles the factors that motivated Song to transform practical knowledge into written culture. She then examines how Song gained, assessed, and ultimately presented knowledge, and in doing so articulates this era's approaches to rationality, truth, and belief in the study of nature and culture alike.  Finally, Schäfer places Song's efforts in conjunction with the work of other Chinese philosophers and writers, before, during, and after his time, and argues that these writings demonstrate collectively a uniquely Chinese way of authorizing technology as a legitimate field of scholarly concern and philosophical knowledge.

Offering an overview of a thousand years of scholarship, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things explains the role of technology and crafts in a culture that had an outstandingly successful tradition in this field and was a crucial influence on the technical development of Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

CHAPTER 1

Private Affairs

The end of Spring is approaching. I am going to have a break and travel in the Qian mountains.

An Oppositionist’s Deliberations, Preface, 3

In the introduction to his essay, An Oppositionist’s Deliberations, Song Yingxing described a picnic with his friend and senior peer Cao Guoqi (n.d.) on a balmy late spring day in 1636. Equipped with a generous supply of wine, they set out to find a shady spot, intending to while away the day with nothing more arduous than rhyming games. They had just reached the outskirts of the Fenyi County seat, where Song held an appointment as a teacher, when an out-of-breath errand boy caught up with them. He handed over an “imperial bulletin” (dibao), rudely interrupting a rare private moment for two assiduous officials of the late Ming who had, for a moment, laid aside their duties of administering the people and managing the state. This was how Song Yingxing learned that a minor military official named Chen Qixin had succeeded in obtaining a high capital appointment merely by “establishing a discussion” (litan) about the ills of the state. Song took the news personally and hard, describing Chen’s elevation as “a freak event (qishi) that could happen only once in a thousand autumn seasons.”¹ His lifelong ambition to pass the metropolitan exam and his efforts to establish an honorable career now looked meaningless; his ideals had been rendered ridiculous. At the age of fifty-one, Song felt truly humiliated or, worse, dishonored. He aired his grievances in an essay written in the style of a memorandum to the throne. The title of his treatise, An Oppositionist’s Deliberations, imparts its prime agenda: a sociopolitical reflection on the demise of the late Ming reign.

Published on May 8, 1636, An Oppositionist’s Deliberations is a typical report from a late seventeenth-century minor official, a man with no political influence bemoaning the ills of his time: apathetic officials and a corrupt state, impoverished farmers and immoral scholars in a profligate society suffering from profusion ad nauseam. Voicing the widespread frustration of this period, Song’s treatise illustrates a world consumed by the chaos “made by man.” Also true to type, it was not the only expression of Song’s dissatisfaction and was shortly joined by several other publications. From our modern perspective, it is the publication following Song’s political diatribe that appears to fall so decidedly outside the frame of seventeenth-century Chinese literary conventions: The Works of Heaven, a text dealing with crafts and technologies in an exceptionally comprehensive manner.

Broadly speaking, in the seventeenth-century Chinese world, scholars and craftsmen practiced two distinct forms of gaining and making knowledge. Making things and settling affairs, craftsmen gained their knowledge through experience and tested it by trial and error. Much of what craftsmen did remained embodied or tacit knowledge and was not verbalized or written down. Chinese scholars pursued textual research, deduced meanings, developed theorems, and compiled commentaries about problems of philosophy, philology, or politics. Scholars could attain high social status and political influence; those who got their hands dirty usually belonged to the lower echelons. Engagement with issues such as the hazards of candle production or the muddy business of molding clay bricks was not beneficial to one’s social standing or career, and consequently it had no place in elite literati pursuits.

This high contrast black-and-white image of Chinese knowledge culture featuring scholars sitting aloof in their study rooms physically and socially detached from craftsmen working in their bleak workshops is torn apart by Song’s writings. His work connects the scholar to the craftsmen’s world, proving that, just as many studies have shown for seventeenth-century Europe, distinctions between practice and theory in premodern China were never quite as clear-cut as this caricature implies.² Song’s approach is particular to its time and place, a radical and comprehensive attempt to situate technologies and crafts within Chinese written culture. To determine exactly what is particular about Song’s efforts requires careful analysis of its original temporal and cultural context. This chapter proceeds from the perspective of Yingxing’s life. It examines the social, cultural, and physical conditions that Song inhabited and introduces the work he produced in those conditions. Questions to keep in mind as we proceed are: What influenced Song in his view of knowledge? What circumstances informed and formed his interests, this man who embodied the ideal of a dutiful and morally upright literati-scholar in An Oppositionist’s Deliberations and who wrote sagaciously and extensively about crafts and technology in the Works of Heaven?

This chapter examines Song’s childhood and family background. It searches Song’s education to determine how it prepared him for his future efforts and observes the concerns that characterized his adult years. In this realm I question whether poverty or people in his social circle raised his interest in matters lacking status in Chinese culture. I also ask if Song’s endeavor could have been affected by external influences, in particular by information on the West imparted through Jesuits or their works. Delving into the Chen Qixin affair that motivated Song to write An Oppositionist’s Deliberations, I speculate on Song’s state of mind on the eve of publishing his works and reveal his ideals and ideas.

The description of the picnic and his dramatic response to the court appointment launched Song’s writing campaign in 1636. The almost novelistic tone used to introduce this fiercely critical political tract may surprise the modern reader just as much as Song’s emphatic reaction to the appointment of a military official: Why did Song relate the details of his picnic and why was he, a minor official, so concerned about an event at court? What made this appointment so freakish when the dynastic state was suffering attacks by northern barbarians, harassment by pirates, and social unrest embodied by farmers’ uprisings? Examining his use of stylistic devices and placing them against their historical backdrop unfolds the layers of motives and ideals that packaged Song’s engagement with crafts and technologies. It shows Song’s interest was intricately tied into a wider approach to knowledge encompassing issues such as sound production and meteorological phenomena, putrefaction processes, social responsibility and economic politics.

Short narratives, like the one used by Song to open An Oppositionist’s Deliberations, were common overtures to early seventeenth-century literary outpourings. Typically, a libation of wine would make the author tired and emotional. In the ensuing state of catharsis he would compose a number of rapturous poems, a memorandum to the emperor, a novel or some sort of essay.³ Any or all of these writings could become part of the scholar’s literary life work: a comprehensive testimony to the individual mind belonging to the genre of miscellaneous private jottings called biji, literally “brush notes.” By the end of the Ming period widespread education augmented the number of literati and these writings multiplied. More and more literati were discontented with their fate and the tone of their writing became increasingly critical. Major or minor, employed or unemployed, scholars related their desperate efforts to carry on their duties in spite of the decay of state and society. Those in service often announced their abdication or withdrawal from government service, while those with no appointment praised their reclusion because it allowed them to maintain ethical ideals in what they called a depraved and corrupt society. And while some won inner peace through literary dalliance or indulged in their hobbies, others made pointed comments on moral behavior and righteous statecraft or pronounced the values they thought should be pursued.

Song epitomizes the minor official searching for his social and intellectual identity in the seventeenth-century Ming world. He belonged to the group of men who identified themselves as “scholars” (shi), reflecting the values of a world in which social distinction and political power were grounded in academic training. The term “scholar” in seventeenth-century China did not designate a profession or an occupation as it did in medieval Germany and the emerging academia of seventeenth-century Britain and France. In the seventeenth-century Chinese intellectual world, “scholar” meant individuals who shared an educational background and personal commitment. It was a self-identifier as well as an indicator of social status for men (and a few women) who worked in or outside state or private institutions and frameworks of knowledge production. A Chinese scholar, Song had mastered a defined canon of texts and pursued extensive literary studies to best serve the state: by passing the official exams at the highest possible level and entering public service. By the sixteenth century, the number of aspirants, however, far exceeded the needs of the state. If their higher-level exam results were insufficient, some scholars, like Song, only achieved the lowest level of service, and that long past middle age. Some kept trying to pass the highest metropolitan exam until the end of their lives. Victims of the ambiguities of social insecurity and economic prosperity, the huge surplus of educated men were forced to find new occupations. They became ghostwriters, novelists, teachers, and doctors; the independently wealthy engaged in gardening, peony growing, fish or poultry farming; they explored foreign lands and seas and compiled travelogues. The rich assiduously collected arts and crafts, and others concerned themselves with the natural world, gathering knowledge about plants and minerals. Many of the Chinese scholars implemented and expressed surprisingly individual perspectives on the boundaries between the domains of knowledge such as natural philosophy or agriculture, banausic culture, trade, and the world of crafts. In sum, the diversity of interests and range of careers was equal to that of contemporary scholars in Europe, but the institutional and social framing was much less explicit.

Against this backdrop, the documenter of the nuts and bolts of eighteen selected crafts moved onto the scene in stereotypical costuming—a man in a full-sleeved round-collared cloud-pattern satin gown with a scholar’s cap on his head. So attired he published a sequence of six texts in a mere two years: A Return to Orthodoxy, a philological study; An Oppositionist’s Deliberations, a sociopolitical treatise, in 1636; Works of Heaven, on crafts; On Qi, a cosmological treatise with a discussion of sound and meteorology, the Talks about Heaven, in 1637; and Yearnings, a collection of poems, in 1638. Rendering material inventiveness and natural phenomena from an unrecognized perspective, Song thus made his mark on premodern Chinese literature and Chinese seventeenth-century approaches to nature, technology, and practical work.

THE MING DYNASTY AND THE SONG FAMILY

Since the inception of historical documentation and the standardization of carts (i.e., their axle widths) and characters, officials have kept order and preserved the peace.

An Oppositionist’s Deliberations, chap. shiyun yi, 5

The world in which Song lived was vibrant and challenging. In 1587, the year our protagonist was born, the Ming dynasty could look back on a long, stable phase of enlightened rule that had brought two hundred years of prosperity to most regions under its control. Established by a man of humble birth who had spent part of his life as a monk, the Ming state system was dedicated to material needs. A tax quota system regulated the demand and supply of agricultural goods and the state-owned manufacturing system within sectors such as silk and porcelain. The ancestor’s provisions brought stability to the Ming state, enabling its rulers to avert the negative effects of enormous population growth and to protect the country from outside invaders. Prosperity and peace also encouraged the growing commercialization of goods by the late sixteenth century; the stable environment nurtured literacy and stimulated the diversification of intellectual life on a large scale; in the year Song was born Chinese culture was blooming, materially and culturally.

The historiographers of the subsequent Qing dynasty would mark 1587 as the moment when prosperity went out of control and morals became lax, when indulgence and the lust for luxury goods debauched the Ming world. Ray Huang spotlights this particular year in his account of late Ming political history.⁴ Everything was blighted by a succession crisis provoked by the Emperor Shenzong (1563–1620, reign name Wanli 1572–1620), after he declined to designate his first-born son Zhu Changluo (1582–1620) the future emperor. The Wanli emperor’s noncooperation had been preceded by his gradual withdrawal from government. His move lay bare the conflict between himself and his highest officials, to whom the emperor reacted by not acting. This paralyzed the autocratically organized Ming state. As decision-making became more a matter of chance than a trustworthy political process, good men became hermits and left the political stage, while the demon puppets—eunuchs, corrupt officials, and scholars of low morals—took control and men of mere military training such as Chen Qixin achieved high rank.

The gradual loss of political control and an economic recession would accompany Song’s generation throughout their lives while the ambivalence of a society torn apart by material prosperity and social insecurity frustrated their ideals and encroached on their professional careers. Song may have been particularly sensitive to the atmosphere of decay, because his family’s micro-history seemed to follow the dynastic macro-political events: The family genealogy (zupu) reveals that the family prospered and declined alongside the Ming. Like the founder of the Ming, Song’s ancestors were of humble origin. The Song family lived in Beixiang village in Fengxin County, part of the Yuanzhou prefecture in the southern province of Jiangxi. Situated in a hilly landscape with a moderate monsoon climate, the family estate stood on fertile ground in a region that harbored excellent natural resources, both mineral and organic. Even a moderate-sized estate could yield a profit. Throughout the early Ming period the farmer forefathers of Song Yingxing had made good use of these resources. Their fortunes increased and, as the family advanced to the level of wealthy landowners, it began preparing some of its sons for careers in public service. This was standard practice for landed families of this period who hoped thereby to acquire social prestige and ensure their newly gained riches through political influence.⁵ The Song family proved to be among those who managed to climb up the slippery social ladder. By the mid-Ming period Song Yingxing’s great-grandfather Song Jing (1477–1547) had attained the position of chief censor to the imperial censorate (duchayuan zuodu yushi, rank 2a) at the court of Emperor Shizong. This was the heyday of the Song clan from Fengxin County.

But the Song family could not maintain these dizzy heights. Not one of Song Jing’s four sons achieved an official appointment. His grandson, Song’s father Guolin (1546–1629) did not display any scholarly talent whatsoever. Rather he indulged in military strategy and dedicated his life to his filial duty to secure the perpetuation of the clan. At least in the latter, he showed prowess, for he married three wives who gave birth to four sons. Apart from Yingxing, he fathered the elder Yingsheng (1578–1646) and two younger sons, Yingding (1582–1629) and Yingjing (1590–?). As far as we know, Song Guolin had daughters, too. The genealogy listed female descendants only when their marriage cemented social relationships. Several of Song’s aunts, cousins, sisters, and granddaughters were married to local worthies, some to the family of Song Yingxing’s boyhood teacher Deng Liangzhi (1558–1638), the retired administration vice commissioner (buzhengshi si canzheng) of Guangdong Province, ranked 3b).⁶

This was the family’s political and social standing on the eve of Song Yingxing’s life. The advancement of Song Jing, Yingxing’s great-grandfather, into a high court position had raised their hopes. They now expected continuous participation in state politics, fortune, and a superior social position. Two generations later the hopes turned out to be based on a bubble, as even Song Jing’s success had been a case of too little, too late. The official Ming annals, which tend to formalize the major career steps of high court and state officials, depict Song Jing as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Private Affairs
• 2. Affairs of Honor
• 3. Public Affairs
• 4. Written Affairs
• 5. Formulating the Transformation
• 6. Acoustics
• Conclusion. Leaving the Theater
• Epilogue: The Aftermath
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix 1: Chinese Dynasties and Various Rulers
• Appendix 2: Song Yingxing Curriculum Vitae
• Appendix 3: Editions of the Tiangong kaiwu
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index