Looking at It from Asia: The Processes That Shaped the Sources of History of Science ed. by Florence Bretelle-Establet (review)

Roy Porter, the historian of Western medicine, once wrote that “the historical record is like the night sky: we see a few stars and group them into mythic constellations. But what is chiefly visible is the darkness” (1997, 13). Florence Bretelle-Establet, the editor of this volume, offers a different metaphor, one that has primary sources flashing by like trout. “Upstream from the historians’ act of composing a corpus and dealing with sources,” she writes, “a great variety of actors imposed their goals and values on the material and social life of documents” (xxxiv). This ecological metaphor is even more apt than Porter’s. Both emphasize that what ends up in the historian’s constellation or bucket reflects the direction of her gaze and her own skill at observation and capture. But Bretelle-Establet’s imagery makes it clear that the specific fish darting by in her part of the creek are not random or natural, like the specific stars occupying one corner of the sky. Rather, their distribution reflects the damming, culling, and selective propagation that others have done before us. Some texts have been deliberately suppressed and destroyed through censorship, while others have been preferentially collected and preserved. Before a modern historian ever has the opportunity to impose his categories and biases on extant primary sources, a seventh-century commentator, a tenth-century compiler, and an eighteenth-century Western scholar may already have determined what was available.

Whether they prefer to think of primary sources as stars or fish, historians will find much to appreciate in this volume. It is eclectic but coherent. Its “Asia” includes Mesopotamia (three essays) and India (three) as well as China (six) and Vietnam (one), and the historical periods addressed range from the first millennium BCE through the nineteenth century CE. Despite this variety, the thirteen chapters here speak to one another as effectively as the chapters of edited volumes with a narrower geographical and temporal focus. In the present review, I focus on the chapters on China and Vietnam as those most likely to be of direct interest to readers of this journal. However, the sources on India and Mesopotamia also deserve the attention of East Asia historians, who can fruitfully compare the influence of Babylonian palace libraries with imperially sponsored collections in East Asia, and the Jesuits’ approach to Sanskrit scientific texts with their approach to texts in Chinese and Manchu.

These contributions make it clear that the main force shaping the sources of the history of science in Asia, and particularly in East Asia, has been the activity of the state. Almost all of the contributions on China and Vietnam give a key role to imperial government collections, none more influential than the eighteenth-century Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Si ku quan shu 四庫全書, hereafter Complete Library). Projects such as the Complete Library not only privileged some texts over others, ensuring the survival of certain kinds of knowledge, but also they influenced how later scholars have read those sources.

In the case of what Donald Harper calls “occult miscellanies,” for example—texts involving “knowledge or use of agencies of a secret and mysterious nature (as magic, alchemy, astrology, theosophy, and the like)” (38)—what has arrived in the present by way of woodblock prints included in imperial bibliographies is rather different from the manuscripts discovered in tombs and at Dunhuang containing much of the same content. The former, categorized in imperial collections as shushu 數術 “arts and calculations” texts, emphasize how these texts are useful in statecraft and explicitly reject elements that the compilers considered irrelevant to the purpose of “ordering the world” (71). But the latter—more fragmented, flexible, fungible texts written on wooden and bamboo slips and hand-copied on the backs of other documents—make it clear that literati valued occult techniques for personal use as well.

Chu Pingyi provides another example...