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Reviewed by:
  • Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History ed. by Dagmar Schäfer
  • Hsien-Chung Wang (bio)
Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History. Edited by Dagmar Schäfer. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2011. Pp. viii+394. $182.

This book explores the broader context in which technology was brought about, transmitted, and stored in the "cultures of knowledge" in China from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries. Dagmar Schäfer divides the ten articles into four sections: communication, appropriation, aggregation, and documentation. Each theme is concluded by a historian of European technology who reflects on the similarities and differences between East and West. These reflections not only add a comparative dimension to the book, but also offer readers a chance to contemplate the universality of technological experiences.

Section 1 focuses on how technical knowledge was communicated through various agencies. While William Rowe demonstrates how, during the Qing dynasty, writings produced by guilds, merchants, and government officials played a role in transmitting technical knowledge, Schäfer stresses that sketches, samples, and models were used by artisans to transmit the knowledge of silk-making from the Song dynasty to the Qing. Pamela Long reflects on the two papers by arguing that although European guilds did play a key role in transmitting technical knowledge, the much closer relationship between guilds and the state in China rendered a different result from multistate Europe. [End Page 657]

Section 2 explores the role of the imperial court in instigating technology. Liu Heping examines how northern Song emperors pictured themselves as Great Yu, a legendary ancient ruler famed for his hydraulic engineering talent in a time when managing the floods of the Yellow River was key to the dynasty's survival. Luo Wenhua explores how the Qianlong emperor of the Qing tried to obtain a certain craft of high ritual connotation by inviting a group of Nepalese craftsmen to participate in a major Tibetan Buddhist temple-building project in Beijing in the eighteenth century. In comparison with the European experience, Wolfgang Lefèvre finds that Italian city-state rulers and Holy Roman emperors did try to obtain certain technologies for commercial or strategic purposes, but never presented themselves as master workmen as did the northern Song emperors.

The third theme discusses the process of collective knowledge-production by government officials. By the eighteenth century, Jindezhen's fine chinaware was highly demanded by the imperial court, the literati, rich merchants, and the international market. Anne Gerritsen's article demonstrates that such insatiable demand led local officials to be deeply involved in porcelain production, thus making the import of new materials and the invention of new skills possible. Similarly, temples, as public spaces where rituals were performed and festivals held, were the "agora" where technical skills and knowledge gathered and disseminated. Susan Naquin's study on temple-building in Shouzhou shows that a variety of crafts were involved, from carpentry and plastering to sculpting, that different materials were brought in, and that patronage from the local elite was required. Furthermore, Jozchim Kurtz's investigation of the promotion of Western learning by the Jesuits to the Chinese literati finds that they were not only fascinated by Western science and technology, but also found the new knowledge useful to state and society. To conclude, Matteo Valleriani contends that government officials and work organizations in Renaissance Venice and Florence also played a similar role in accumulating technical knowledge.

The final part of the book considers how the Chinese literati documented technology. Martina Siebert examines the genre of the origins of things, or wuyuan, arguing that China has a long scholarly tradition of documenting the history of technology. Yet, Martin Hofmann finds that although traditional Chinese biographers might have praised craftsmen's exceptional skills and good behaviors, they rarely recorded technical knowledge. Francesca Bray argues that agricultural treatises, or nongshu, by Chinese literati, officials, and private individuals were crucial in transmitting agricultural technological knowledge. To reflect on the three cases, Marcus Popplow reminds us that the premodern understanding of technical skills and instruments was very different from the modern meaning of technology, and hence calls for more research on East-West comparisons to see if the two cultures speak with the same...

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