- The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China
Historians of Chinese technology know the Tiangong Kaiwu by Song Ying-xing as an encyclopedia of craftsmanship in late imperial China. The title literally means The Works of Heaven and the Inception of Things. In this text, Song describes in detail a wide variety of crafts, ranging from textiles to mining, bell casting, and agriculture. His work demonstrates the sophistication of the Chinese artisan tradition. Dagmar Schäfer, however, is the first to examine the philosophical foundations of Song’s work. In this book, she shows that Song had an unorthodox metaphysical perspective that motivated his technical description, and she analyzes Song’s connection to the confusing social and economic changes of late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth China. Her study is a brilliant and subtle investigation of the philosophy of technology in early modern China.
Scholars in imperial China usually denigrated craft knowledge, and Song was no different from the average scholar in this respect. He himself did not practice a craft, and he reaffirmed the proper role of the craftsman in society: inferior to the scholar and farmer, but superior to the merchant. Song’s goal was not to transform this established hierarchy, but to demonstrate how craft work supported a vast harmonious cosmic order that united nature and the social world. He based his metaphysics on the concept of a universal substance, or qi, that through diverse transformations produced natural and human phenomena. Qi divided into the two primary forces of yin (water) and yang (fire), which in turn generated the five elements designated as water, wood, fire, metal, and earth. The ideal craftsmen knew perfectly the appropriate transformations that created useful and beautiful objects out of natural material. By documenting their skill, Song proved that the cosmos could unify the human and natural realms. He “saw the revelation of universal principles within the performance of crafts and technology; it manifested a cosmological order that man had to comprehend in order to be able to quell the chaos that ruled his era” (p. 17). His text contained many illustrations showing how human labor created objects from natural elements like ores, salt, bamboo, and plants. Although he observed and documented this activity, he affirmed that only the scholar held the true knowledge of how crafts reflected the cosmic order.
The real society of late Ming China was hardly harmonious. It suffered from political corruption, military weakness, and a disturbing tendency for lower social orders to accumulate money in order to acquire the marks of high social status. Song himself, a minor official and country teacher who never succeeded in getting the highest degree or any scholarly recognition, [End Page 483] longed for a just order that would recognize true men of talent. His loving descriptions of different technologies indicated great respect for the work of craftsmen, if not for the workers themselves. He believed that the scholar who understood natural transformation based on empirical investigation had superior insight to the speculative philosopher.
Craft work, in highly valued objects like porcelain and silk, was also a major focus of the imperial state. The Ming state ran imperial workshops, where craftsmen (a heritable status) produced objects for the emperor’s court. These large enterprises grew to industrial scale when they found outlets to serve burgeoning private demand. Craftsmen traveled long distances to market their skills to consumers outside the state. Song linked his philosophy with the material support of the imperial order by focusing on crafts that had particular aesthetic, ritual, and moral significance. We do not learn much here about his attitudes toward popular and market demand for these products, but he did advocate consulting with merchants to improve official policy.
Song, however, avoided abstract philosophical speculation, so it takes especially close analysis to tease out his assumptions from his descriptions. Song’s approach reflected an empirical point of view comparable in many respects to that of empiricists in early modern Europe...