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The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China . By Dagmar Schäfer . Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2011. vii, 344 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
Book Reviews--China
Being able to distinguish between the government's tax boats, travelers' "wave-riding boats," and officials' luxurious "mizzen sailboats" was important pragmatic knowledge for those living along the Yangzi River. So was understanding whence pearls and jade, coal and charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur came, or how artisans made dyes and paints, processed salt, sesame oil, and gunpowder, and produced fine silks and elegant porcelains. These were among the numerous topics that the minor official Song Yingxing (1587-1666?) addressed in his famous The Works of Heaven and the Inception of Things (Tiangong kaiwu, pr. 1637), conventionally regarded as a landmark text in the history of Chinese technology.
However, Song himself did not consider Works of Heaven as a separate monograph on technology. Rather, he wrote it as the final part of a politically motivated magnum opus comprising six distinct titles. It was eighteenth-century scholars who first detached Works of Heaven from its five more explicitly political companion texts and celebrated its unique technical achievements. Nineteenth-century compilers later related Song's eighteen fields of practical knowledge to agriculture,...