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  • Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China: The Warp and the Weft
  • Jinbang Song
Francesca Bray, Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, and Georges Métailié (eds.), Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China: The Warp and the Weft Leiden: Brill, 2007. 785 pp. $199.

Although studies of graphics and visual representations in the history of science and technology appeared as early as 1939, with Alexandre Koyré’s Études galiléennes, it was only in the 1960s that the subject became an established field. Following advances in cognitive psychology, anthropology, and the sociology of scientific knowledge, many have written about the use of images in the history of science. This massive and engaging volume, edited by sinologists Francesca Bray, Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, and Georges Métailié, is an important addition to the literature. Devoted mainly to the study of Chinese graphic elements, the book examines their role in society, history, and culture. The volume’s significance lies as much in its methodology as in its broad coverage.

Most of the essays in Graphics and Text were originally presented during the Conference on European and North American Exchanges in East Asian Studies held in Paris in 2001. They range from the Shang dynasty to the early twentieth century, from metaphysical cosmograms to magical talismans, mathematical diagrams, and coroner’s charts. Following Bray’s “Introduction: The Powers of Tu,” eighteen essays appear under two rubrics: “The Power of Order: Tu as Symbolic Mediation,” which focuses on “transformative,” diagrammatic tu; and “Picturing Reality? Tu as Technical Illustration,” which focuses on representational, illustrative tu.

1. The Definition and Delimitation of Tu

The character tu 圖 has many meanings and usages. The earliest Chinese dictionary, Approaching Correctness (Er ya 爾雅), completed no later than the Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE), defined tu as mou 謀, or “to plan.” Another ancient dictionary, Explaining Simple and Analyzing Compound Characters (Shuo wen jie zi 說 文解字), [End Page 423] written by Xu Shen 許慎 in the Eastern Han (25–220 CE), defined tu as hua ji nan 畫計難, which means “picturing things that are difficult to plan.” The earliest Chinese encyclopedic dictionary, The Expanded Er Ya (Guang ya 廣雅), compiled by Zhang Yi 畫也 in the Three Kingdoms period (220–80 CE), defined tu as hua 畫也, that is, “picture” or “painting.” By and large, in modern Chinese, tu when used as a noun refers to images: pictures, paintings, maps, diagrams, charts, and drawings. It can also mean intention, plan, or attempt. As a verb, it usually means to plan, attempt, pursue, and hanker after.

In Graphics and Text, tu is mainly used as a noun meaning “image.” The authors investigate the shared characteristics of tu, seeking to learn what distinguished them from other Chinese visual categories such as hua (picture or painting) and xiang (image or icon). In her introduction, Francesca Bray informs us that tu “was a specialist term denoting only those graphic images or layouts which encoded technical knowledge: tu were templates for action” (2). This definition means that “tu was not a stylistic but a functional category: tu were instructive images conveying skilled, specialist knowledge” (2–3). So paintings that have an instructive purpose should be taken as tu, while diagrams, charts, and maps that have only aesthetic and decorative functions should not. This definition permitted the Bray and her collaborators to limit their research to the graphics of science and technology.

2. The Classification of Tu

Generally, tu can embrace pictures, diagrams, illustration, image, charts, tables, patterns, symbols, motifs, icons, plans, layouts, schemes, and textual diagrams. By ways of craft and medium, they can be divided into paintings, murals, woodblock prints, engravings on stone, inscriptions on bronze, and works on wooden blocks, wooden and bamboo strips, silk and other types of cloth, paper, and lacquerware. Tu can also refer to celestial and terrestrial maps, conceptual maps, mathematical diagrams, illustrations of skeletons, architectural plans, mechanical drawings, and farming and weaving illustrations.

Graphics and Text argues that tu fell into two broad categories representing distinctive principles of spatial representation: (i) diagrammatic or schematic tu, forms of symbolic mediation whose formal patternings of space created understanding or generated action by guiding the viewer through a strictly ordered...

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