Seeing through Pictures and Poetry: A History of Lenses (1681)

Introduction

With the words, "appended below are the specifications for all of these types of lenses" (82), the early Qing author Li Yu (1611–80) rather awkwardly interrupts the second chapter of his vernacular short story (huaben) "A Tower for the Summer Heat" (Xiayi lou) with a long descriptive list of optical devices.¹ After developing the story for a full chapter, Li Yu reveals to the reader and the female protagonist that her suitor has been using a telescope to spy into her courtyard. This list of lenses that start fires, magnify insects, burn incense, and provide women with a portable mirror, are described as "of a type" with that telescope, the optical device on which the plot hinges. The list concludes with a clue to why the meticulous (and even obsessive) Li Yu assumes that this list will enhance the story: he encourages his readers to visit the shop of the Hangzhou-based painter and lens crafter, Zhu Sheng (Riru, style Xi'an, 1617–90), to buy what Li claims are locally made optical devices that rival Western imports. By interrupting a fictional narrative with this new technology, available for purchase in the reader's world, this story raises an important question: What was the status of optical devices in the early Qing, that they would be singled out, described, and advertised in this way in a fictional text? Were these optical devices so novel that even an advertisement for them needed to include extensive descriptive detail? Is the reference to a real acquaintance of the author an example of early modern advertising?

The list of optical devices and their lengthy descriptions originate neither in fiction, nor with Hangzhou-based Zhu Sheng, but with a one-time student of his, the Suzhou-based lens maker Sun Yunqiu (ca. 1650–after 1681), and his short illustrated catalogue A History of Lenses (Jingshi, 1681), the first Chinese-authored treatise on optical devices. Since Joseph Needham's provocative early attempt to determine whether Chinese lens making developed independently or was introduced by Jesuit missionaries, scholars in multiple fields have pored over scant records in gazetteers, export lists, and literary sources seeking even the most basic information about lens crafting technology and the market for optical devices during this period.² These scholars have consistently demonstrated that in cities across Jiangnan, new optical technologies were being produced and sold at a remove from both their Jesuit conveyers and the imperial court, whose mutual interest in the technology was driven by different concerns: respectively, Christian conversion and urgent calendric demand.

Yet these studies have needed to speculate based on very scant evidence of just how widespread the use of lenses was during this period, and what sorts of responses they elicited from contemporary users. Presumed lost since the mid-Qing, A History of Lenses promised to reveal how exactly lenses were used and how people evaluated them during this crucial early period. The catalogue, which presents an array of optical devices, was known only through scattered passages and synopses republished in other sources, such as Sun's gazetteer biography, and most famously in Li Yu's fictional story.³ In 2007, historian of science Sun Chengsheng discovered a single extant copy of A History of Lenses in the Shanghai Library and reproduced much of its written text in an award-winning article: four prefaces, a table of contents, eleven primary text passages, and two postfaces (about 1,300 characters in all).⁴ Following entries for three types of spectacles — for "dim eyes" or presbyopia (hunyan jing) and nearsightedness (jinshi jing), as well as "light of youth" lenses (tongguang jing) — the remaining eight devices include the telescope (yuan jing), burning lens (huo jing), hand mirror (duanrong jing), camera obscura (sheguang jing), incense-burning lens (fenxiang jing), sunset glasses (xiyang jing), magnifying lens or single-lens microscope (xianwei jing), and a "myriad flowers lens" (wanhua jing). However, apart from a brief comment that an illustration accompanies each device, and a single small, grainy image, Sun's discussion of these lenses neglects...