Huff, Toby

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

Reviews                                                                                         185 
 
Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900, 
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005, 606 pp. 
Toby Huff 
[Toby Huff is a Research Associate in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard 
University and Chancellor Professor Emeritus at University of Massachusetts 
Dartmouth. He is the author of The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, 
China and the West (Second ed. Cambridge 2003), and Intellectual Curiosity 
and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective (Cambridge University 
Press, 2011). He has lectured in Europe, given talks across the Muslim world and 
lived in Malaysia. Contact: thuff@fas.harvard.edu] 
The heart of this book is about the development of native Chinese sciences 
from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century under the influence of the 
Jesuits and then the Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century. It 
has unusually long sections of prolegomena (sixteen pages of Preface and 
twenty-three of Prologue). In these sections the author takes up a wide set 
of smaller agendas that include the question of the appropriate theory of 
knowledge for the literati, elements of commercialization in the Ming 
dynasty, and the nature of print technology and publishing. “Chapter 1” is 
then devoted to Ming classification on the eve of the Jesuit mission to 
China. Nevertheless, Benjamin Elman thinks that the broad narrative about 
the place of science in Qing China that he offers is needed to understand 
how modern science eventually emerged in China.  
Despite this ungainly opening, when the book first appeared, now more 
than half a decade ago, it was an exciting addition to our knowledge of 
what happened to science in seventeenth-century China under the 
influence of the extraordinary mission established by Matteo Ricci. The two 
big questions were just how successful or not the Jesuits were, how 
comprehensive their efforts had been, and secondly, whether Chinese 
science really did get reformed enough so that Needham’s claims about the 
emergence of ecumenical science with Chinese science converging with 
western, global science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is true. 
The title of this book broadcasts the null result with regard to the potential 
seventeenth century reform of Chinese science. Likewise, that aborted 
reform process prevented serious merging of Chinese and ecumenical 
science. Yet Elman persists in believing that somehow the Chinese story is 
a “remarkable achievement” (p. 420), despite its failure on almost all 
accounts. 
Elman’s elucidation of the seventeenth-century Chinese-Jesuit en-
counter, surely the best part of the book, is very richly detailed. His 
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command of Chinese sources is broad and impressive while his efforts to 
understand the development of science in Europe are also exceptional 
among those who attempt comparisons. In the first four chapters Elman 
does a splendid job of explaining the background to the Jesuits’ arrival and 
identifying the dozen or so books especially written by the Jesuit scientist-
missionaries to explain virtually all aspects of the state-of-the-art 
astronomy as then practiced in Europe. Beyond Matteo Ricci’s efforts to 
translate both Euclid’s indispensable Elements (the first five books) and 
Sacroboso’s standard work on the spherical nature of our world, scholars 
such as Emanuel Diaz, Adam Schall von Bell, Johann Schreck (also known 
as Terrentius), Nicholas Trigault, James Rho and a number of others, along 
with Chinese collaborators, went to extra lengths to explain European 
astronomy, its models, assumptions, and instrumentation to the Chinese. 
This included bringing the telescope, writing books about how it was made 
and used, and most surprising of all, explaining Kepler’s cutting edge 
theory of optics that enabled astronomers to correct errors in observations 
that occurred under specific angular observational conditions. That the 
Jesuits were compelled not to discuss Copernicus’ hypothesis in this context 
has been greatly exaggerated by Sinologists, but not Joseph Needham. He 
understood that from a strictly observational point of view, it was 
impossible to determine which system, Ptolemaic, Tychonic, or Copernican 
best fit the facts. Furthermore, the geo-heliocentric system of Tycho Brahe, 
though flawed, nevertheless had embedded within it, a heliocentric 
orientation around which the five planets revolve. 
On the other hand, writers on the Jesuit influence on Chinese science 
have insufficiently emphasized the fact that the Jesuits made a special trip 
back to Europe in order to procure the most important books in science, 
mathematics and natural philosophy that could be translated into Chinese 
and thus give those aspiring scientists the ability to understand all the 
fundamental technical and metaphysical assumptions of western science. 
But the big bonus of the trip was the recruiting of twenty-two top notch 
scientists, and in particular Adam Schall von Bell and Johann Schreck, the 
latter being the seventh inductee after Galileo into the famous Academy of 
the Lincei. Upon their return to China with a telescope the translation 
project (of 7,000 books) was begun in earnest with the vast resources of the 
imperial throne. The project to reform Chinese astronomy was under the 
direction of the brilliant Xu Guangqi (“Dr Paul”, d. 1632), who was a 
Christian convert and many times a successful candidate on the civil 
service examinations. 
It is difficult to fault Elman's account of this episode which will be a 
major point of reference for future scholars looking into the Jesuit guided 
reforms. Nevertheless, he stopped short of explaining to the reader how 
Reviews                                                                                         187 
 
deeply the reform movement penetrated the thinking of all those attached 
to the Chinese Bureau of Mathematics and Astronomy, and that Xu 
Guangqi in fact engineered one of the most impressive cases of empirical 
astronomical testing ever undertaken up to that point. 
In the first instance, Xu impressed upon the Emperor that the trans-
lation project had to be comprehensively carried out because the Chinese 
mathematical astronomy system was indeed going to be replaced, and if 
some day, as had happened to the Chinese system, the “new” or “western” 
system met with failure, then the only way to correct it would be to go back 
to the fundamentals. Second, since the Chinese system had earlier (in 1612 
and 1629) met with failure in solar eclipse tests against the European 
system, Xu set about systematically testing new astronomical observations 
against the Chinese, Ptolemaic, and Tychonic systems. All of this was made 
possible by the arrival of the telescope which was correctly understood to 
be capable of making more accurate observations than ever before. Even 
without cross-hairs (a micrometer) this was possible, above all using 
Kepler’s technique of projecting light through a pinhole (or telescope) onto 
a sheet of paper with calibrated lines. In short, the Chinese astronomers of 
Xu Guangqi’s generation were very sophisticated and wisely used the 
cutting edge ideas brought to them above all by Schall, Terrentius, and 
James Rho. In a word, those Chinese scholars knew a great deal about 
astronomical systems, the nature and limits of observations with a 
telescope, and the difficulties of establishing one system over another. Yet 
in a short few years, they moved from the Chinese to the Ptolemaic, and 
then to the geo-heliocentric system of Tycho Brahe. That was no small feat. 
In this context it is downright churlish to blame the Jesuits for the 
subsequent failure of modern science to take hold in China. Elman, 
following Nathan Sivin, suggests that “European cosmology had been 
discredited by its own unexpected lack of internal coherence” (p. xxvi), 
when in point of fact (a) Europeans were still trying to determine which 
world system was correct, and (b) Xu Guangqi and his team (European and 
Chinese) of astronomers were themselves empirically trying to determine 
which system was best and were not especially muddled by the task. 
Evidence in favor of the Copernican system was building up, especially 
thanks to the observations of Galileo (confirmed by many others), and 
Kepler’s New Astronomy of 1609. It would be a stretch to claim that all or 
most European astronomers were committed Copernicans in, say 1610 or 
1618 when the Jesuits were gathering their new materials for transmission 
back to China. In short, Elman like others sells short the Jesuit efforts, 
flawed as they were, often wishing for the Chinese that the Europeans 
should just give them “all the rights answers.” This is not to say that Elman 
188                                                                                                  EASTM 35 (2012) 
 
is especially hard on the Jesuits; his account is probing and well balanced 
and does not actually attempt to apportion blame. 
Yet as Elman points out in On Their Own Terms, nativist Chinese 
rebelled against the “new system” (and not for the first time) during the so-
called “Rites Controversy” of the 1660s, approximately four decades after 
the telescope arrived. At that time Adam Schall von Bell, who had been a 
student in Rome and heard Galileo speak at the Roman College in 1611, 
was now at the helm of the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy and Mathe-
matics. Because of the clear predictive superiority of European astronomy, 
still based on the geo-heliocentric models of Tycho Brahe, the Chinese had 
been persuaded to adopt the new Western system. But being in charge of 
that Bureau meant that Schall had to make divinatory decisions within the 
traditional Chinese astrological system. In this case he had to choose an 
auspicious date and site for an Imperial burial. When Chinese scholars 
hostile to Schall and the new system repeatedly attacked Schall regarding 
this decision, he and his European and Chinese associates ended up under 
house arrest and were sentenced to death. Schall died of a stroke within a 
year while the Chinese convert-assistants were executed. The Jesuit mission 
(and the new astronomy) was finally rescued by the extraordinary and 
dangerous efforts of Ferdinand Verbiest who dared to make astronomical 
predictions that were to be tested in public right in front of the Emperor 
and his court. Verbiest’s success (in 1669) with his daring tests put him 
(and the Jesuits) back in charge of the Bureau of Mathematics and 
Astronomy, but the affair tainted Chinese-Jesuit relations ever after. 
According to Elman, those anti-Jesuit and anti-western sentiments peaked 
in the late eighteenth century, following the disbanding and later 
restoration of the Jesuit order. Of course there was internal bickering 
among the various Catholic Christian orders that did not help the situation.  
Consequently, even the presumed champion of western science, the 
Kangxi Emperor (d. 1722), began to put further restrictions on even the 
limited presence of “natural studies” in the Civil Service Examinations 
after 1713. As with several of his earlier works, Elman keeps his eye on 
“natural studies,” which he admits, is a problematic set of inquiries 
encompassing “things” broadly conceived, not particular disciplines, or 
general explanations, sometimes including “rational explanations” but also 
things “ineffable, fantastical and magical” (p. xxx). In other words, these 
investigations do not correspond to Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the 
subjects of his “natural books.” 
This brings us to another surprising omission in such a fulsome work: 
there is no extended discussion of Chinese educational practices that Elman 
knows so much about. Since no major reform or change in the system is 
discussed, the reader is left to believe that the ancient emphasis on moral, 
Reviews                                                                                         189 
 
ethical, poetic, and historical studies championed by neo-Confucianism, 
not natural science, remained the focus of study until the system's abolition 
in 1905. 
The issue of the need to reform Chinese educational practices was 
pointedly suggested to the Kangxi Emperor by Verbiest in the 1680s. He 
had grasped the fact that Chinese “natural studies” were a far cry from 
Aristotle’s natural philosophy, and though many of Aristotle’s works in 
natural philosophy had been translated into Chinese, a new curriculum 
with a systematic focus on them was required to reform Chinese education. 
Elman discusses this episode and Verbiest’s collection of the materials that 
he had studied at the University in Coimbra. Verbiest developed a 
proposal of 1683 that would entail a new curriculum but this was a bridge 
too far. The Emperor and scholars of the Hanlin Academy refused to allow 
the printing of the material under royal auspices (p. 146). Consequently, it 
is not surprising that no major reforms of Chinese education and 
examinations were instituted, making it nearly impossible for Chinese 
scholars to develop the scientific habits of mind necessary to advance 
modern science. Instead, Elman offers various allusions to the Jesuits 
withholding one or another small piece of western scientific knowledge 
instead of acknowledging that the Chinese simply were not trained 
(outside the astronomical bureau) to do modern science after the Rites 
Controversy. 
For example, Elman suggests that the Jesuits or others did not explain 
calculus or did not provide a full account of Newton’s Principia (1687) 
when it was mentioned in 1742; or that only the first five books of Euclid’s 
Elements were translated by the Jesuits. Yet Elman knows that Newton’s 
grand synthesis of terrestrial and celestial mechanics had nothing to do 
with calculus, it was all geometry. Understanding the geometric figures in 
Newton’s Principia does not require the complete mastery of Euclid; and if 
it did, surely Chinese scholars after 1605 could have translated the rest of it 
themselves if they had so desired. 
The problem is not the incomplete edition of Euclid or the withholding 
of knowledge of calculus, but the absence of an adequate science of motion 
in Chinese thought. This was what Joseph Needham pointed to when he 
wrote that Chinese science had no science of motion, neither dynamics nor 
kinematics. It was missing the work of Burdian, Bradwadine, Oremes and 
their successors. Elman is probably right in suggesting that European 
science, technology, and industry in the late eighteenth century benefitted 
from knowledge of calculus and this gave Europeans various industrial 
advantages. But the Chinese had not mastered the pre-industrial 
fundamentals of the science of motion. 
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Elman dwells a lot on Chinese mathematics, especially the work, 
influence and accomplishments of Mei Wending 梅文鼎 (d. 1721), who also 
did a great disservice to Chinese progress by claiming that Western science, 
and especially mathematics was really of Chinese origin. However, given 
the fact that the great Western pioneers in astronomy, i.e., Copernicus, 
Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton achieved their accomplishments 
using only geometry, not algebra or calculus, Elman’s focus on various 
aspects of Chinese mathematics seems misplaced. 
Surely the Jesuit attempt to suggest that somehow, deep down, ancient 
Chinese thought was compatible with western thinking was a misstep. But 
it was far more the nativist Chinese reaction that claimed all scientific 
knowledge originated with the Chinese which was the culprit. In the end, 
according to Elman’s account, those who finally saw through this canard 
were led to abandon Chinese science altogether in the late nineteenth 
century in favor of what they could learn from the Japanese. At the same 
time, Elman comes close to special pleading when he tries to suggest that 
China in the late nineteenth century was not as far behind Japan with 
regard to industrial development and related fields as many scholars have 
thought and which led to their defeat by the Japanese in the Sino-Japan war 
of 1894-95. 
Beyond all this, Elman does not sufficiently consider that Chinese 
science was deficient in a great number of areas. He does signal that 
Chinese study of anatomy was retarded but there is no mention of deficits 
regarding the use of microscopy in a broad range of human, animal and 
plant lifeforms. Likewise there were large deficits in hydraulics and 
pneumatics, and, not least of all, electric studies. Nor does he mention that 
despite their mastery of telescopes and their use, the Chinese made no 
modifications or improvements of it in the seventeenth or eighteenth 
centuries. All of this suggests that Elman’s claim that China’s assimilation 
of the rudiments of modern science from the sixteenth century to 1900 was 
a “remarkable” success rings hollow. In the realm of science, the Chinese 
neither kept up with the Arabs and Muslims in the 750-1350 period, nor 
with their Asian competitors in Japan who went on in the twentieth 
century to win far more Nobel prizes than the many-times-larger Chinese 
population. 
At the same time, it is surprising that Elman offers no analysis of the 
bringing of modern chemistry to China in the nineteenth century by the 
Protestants and other Westerners. Some have argued that, of all the 
sciences in the nineteenth century, chemistry had the greatest impact, on 
life, industrial development and the other sciences. Among the Chinese it 
seems that by the end of the nineteenth century there were more chemists, 
chemistry teachers, industrial chemists, publications, and so on than in any 
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other scientific field. 1  Of course, this was not a case of an indigenous 
science maturing; it was rather the result of a radically new import, which, 
one would think, was central to the story of the eventual transformation of 
China’s scientific establishment.  
Despite these problems with the book’s arguments, all scholars working 
on Chinese science should have this book on their reference shelf. 
 
                                                          
1 James Reardon-Anderson, The Study of Change, Chemistry in China, 1840-1949 
(New York: Cambridge University Press 1991), p. 4.  


Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1990

http://www.eastm.org/index.php/journal/article/download/592/523

Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1990

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