Bréard, Andrea

East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)

107 Reviews 
Luís Saraiva (ed.), History of Mathematical Sciences: Portugal and East Asia II. 
Scientific Practices and the Portuguese Expansion in Asia, 1498-1759. Pa-
pers from the International Meeting Organized by the University of Macau 
and Centro de Matemática e Aplicações Fundamentais / Universidade de 
Lisboa. Macao, 10-12 October 1998. Lisbon: EMAF-UL, 2001. 182 pp. 
 
Andrea Bréard 
 
[Andrea Bréard is Assistant Professor for History of Mathematics at the De-
partment of Mathematics, University of Science and Technology, Lille, France. 
Her research currently focuses on the history of statistics and probability in late 
Imperial China.] 
 
 
This is a compilation of 12 of 15 papers presented at the conference ‘History of 
Mathematical Sciences: Portugal and East Asia II’ held at the Faculty of Science 
and Technology of the University of Macao in October 2001. Its aim was to 
analyze the interaction between Europe and East Asia between 1498, the arrival 
of Vasco da Gama in India, and 1759, the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from 
Portugal. Three main themes were addressed, which were neither restricted to 
mathematical sciences nor to a Portuguese connection as the title of the book 
might suggest: pacing and mapping the world; transmission, translation and 
teaching; science as a political tool and its impact on Asian societies.  
The opening talk by Luís Filipe Barreto portraits Macao as an intercultural 
frontier between Europe and East Asia in the Ming period. Based on its situation 
as a port city, Barreto shows how social and commercial networks made Macao 
a major center for intellectual, linguistic, technological and textual exchange. 
The following three papers by Li Xiaocong, Liu Dun, and Wang Qianjin focus 
on cartography. The first, surveying Chinese maps in overseas collections, reads 
more like a précis of Li Xiaocong’s own book A Descriptive Catalogue of Pre-
1900 Chinese Maps Seen in Europe.1 Liu Dun’s paper focuses on the case of the 
Spanish Dominican Fray Juan Cobo (1546?-1592) who wrote a catechism in 
Chinese, the Shilu 實 錄 (published in Manila in 1593). This book also contains 
some Western knowledge of geography and cosmology for which the author 
provides translations and the Chinese original text. Liu conjectures that by com-
bining religious, philosophic and scientific knowledge, the Shilu “may have been 
a harbinger of those missionary tactics applied shortly thereafter by the Jesuits, 
namely their strategies known as “accommodation” and “knowing,” which they 
pursued in hopes of convincing the Chinese to convert to the Christian religion” 
(p. 56). Wang Qianjin makes an interesting historiographic point by showing 
                                                 
1 Li Xiaocong, Ouzhou shoucang bufen zhongwen gu ditu xulu 歐 州 收 藏 部 分 中 
文 古 地 圖 續 錄. Beijing: Guoji wenhua chuban gongsi, 1996. 
108 EASTM 24 (2005) 
through the example of José Martins-Márquez’ New Interpretation of World 
Geography (Xinshi dili beikao quanshu 新 釋 地 理備 考 全 書, 1847) that the 
Portuguese influence extended beyond the Qianlong reign.  
Catherine Jami follows some Jesuits at work teaching mathematics and as-
tronomy to a variety of audiences and in various locations and social contexts 
between the 1580s and the 1710s. In contradistinction to those Chinese literati 
who had received direct teaching from the missionaries and translated Western 
mathematical books into Chinese under Jesuit guidance, there were many com-
mentaries written on the first Chinese translation of Euclid’s Elements (Jihe 
yuanben, 1607) by scholars who had studied Western mathematics by them-
selves.2 Rui Manuel Loureiro’s following paper on the positive image of China 
in Portuguese literature of the sixteenth century, analyzes the construction of 
European perceptions of “things Chinese.” Assigning Portugal an “extraordinary 
importance … in European access to knowledge about China” (p. 112), Loureiro 
bases his argument extensively (although poorly documented by precise refer-
ences) upon Portuguese descriptions and reports on Chinese everyday life and 
civilization, which were biased by the fact that they were mainly observations 
from the maritime and thus prosperous regions of China.  
For the same century, Juan Gil reflects upon orientalization by looking at the 
attraction that India exercised on the people of Spain through the wares exported 
by the Portuguese armadas. The main part of the article consists of a list of raw 
material citations in Spanish from dowries, wills and inventories conserved in 
the Archive Notarial Protocols at Seville, showing the type of wares that found 
prestige in Spain and were recognized as being of Indian origin. 
The three papers by Keizo Hashimoto, Han Qi and Yoshida Tadashi all 
tackle the difficult question of knowledge assimilation in East Asia in the field 
of astronomy and cosmology. Hashimoto examines the partial transmission of 
the knowledge of star mapping by Jesuits in Beijing. Strongly rooted in its tradi-
tion, the Chinese constellation system remained unaltered under foreign influ-
ence, whereas the coordinate system and the methods of projection were adopted 
from European astronomy. Based on some new Chinese and Western sources, 
Han Qi’s short paper gives an analysis of the textual and social background of 
the introduction of Newton’s lunar theory into China. It describes the context of 
the compilation of the Tables of the Compendium of Astronomy (Lixiang 
kaocheng houbian 曆 象 考 成 後 編, 1734) through the correspondence of the 
French astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle (1688-1768) with the Jesuits in China 
and points out that the very precise lunar tables compiled by an Italian Jesuit N. 
Grammatici on the basis of Newton’s lunar theory were used in the compilation 
of the Lixiang kaocheng houbian. Yoshida’s work on the Japanese reaction to 
Aristotelian cosmology is based upon a book that has gone through several 
                                                 
2 Jami’s contribution appeared elsewhere with nearly exactly the same wording. See: 
“Teachers of Mathematics in China: the Jesuits and their Textbooks (1580-1723),” Ar-
chives internationales d’histoire des sciences 52 (2002): 159-175.  
109 Reviews 
hands of translators and commentators before being printed as the Kenkon ben-
setsu 乾 坤 辯 說 (Discussions on the Heavens and the Earth with Critical 
Comments, preface 1650). Yoshida shows how the Japanese commentator, Mu-
kai Gensho 
向 井 元 升 (1609-1677), a Confucian scholar, criticizes Western ideas that 
Christovao Ferreira (1580-1650), an ex-Christian, had translated from a Western 
astronomical book. 
The two final papers by Park Seong-Rae and Joseph Velinkar complete geo-
graphically the picture of Portuguese connections to East Asia by looking at 
other lands. The first retraces Korean contacts with Portugal, where no Portu-
guese seems to have arrived until the nineteenth century. The last paper brings 
together many disparate details on translation between Portuguese and the Kon-
kani language spoken in Goa until the end of the seventeenth century in a first 
section and aspects of technology transferred to India by the Portuguese, such as 
the printing press, timepieces, architecture, planting techniques and shipbuilding. 
Although this collection of papers of diverse quality has not been prepared 
with editorial rigueur—some contributions do not even have a bibliography and 
many have not been revised for their English nor for their internal structure—it 
remains interesting for the light it sheds on the often neglected role of Portugal 
and Macao in the early cultural exchanges with China and other East Asian 
countries. There is a continuation of this valuable pursuit: the editor Luís Saraiva 
and Catherine Jami have organized a session on the ‘History of Mathematical 
Sciences: Portugal and East Asia III’ at The Sixth International Symposium on 
the History of Mathematics & Mathematical Education Using Chinese Charac-
ters (ISHME) in 2005.3
                                                 
3 August 4-7, 2005, Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences, The University of 
Tokyo, Komaba Campus. 


Luís Saraiva (ed.), History of Mathematical Sciences: Portugal and East Asia II. Scientific Practices and the Portuguese Expansion in Asia, 1498-1759

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Luís Saraiva (ed.), History of Mathematical Sciences: Portugal and East Asia II. Scientific Practices and the Portuguese Expansion in Asia, 1498-1759

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