Reardon-Anderson, James

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

134 EASTM 19 (2002)
David Wright, Translating Science: The Transmission of Western Chemistry into
Late Imperial China, 1840-1900. Sinica Leidensia, 48. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
xxvi, 558 pp., 33 illus.
James Reardon-Anderson
[James Reardon-Anderson is Sun Yat-sen Professor of Chinese Studies and
Chair of the Faculty of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service of
Georgetown University. He is currently working on a book on the history of
China's northern frontier.]
David Wright has produced a one-volume encyclopedia on the introduction and
development of western science in China during the second half of the
nineteenth century. The book is composed of twelve chapters covering
translation, publication, education, manufacturing, institutions, biographies and
other topics related to the subject in question. It also includes a comprehensive
bibliography (66 pages) of primary sources and published works in Chinese and
English, plus a few in Japanese and French, and appendices (38 pages) listing
the Chinese and western names of important persons, schools, textbooks,
chemical elements, and the like. The book is handsomely published, with a large
number of illustrations that help bring the subject to life.
This book will be of interest to novices who seek an introduction to an
important topic in the history of science and of China and to specialists who
want to quick and readable reference to the literature and subject matter. It is a
summary and compendium of scholarship that has been produced in Chinese and
English during the past quarter century on the history of science in late-Qing
China. It is a good reference work.
Before rushing out to buy this book, which comes from a respected publisher
of scholarly works and carries an appropriately hefty price tag, the reader should
be aware of what it does not contain. First, the book does not contain previously
unpublished material. Rather, it summarizes or discusses topics and sources that
have been covered in English-language publications, and if not in English, then
in Chinese-language books and articles which have appeared in the past ten to
twenty years. There are no revelations based on new primary sources and
nothing that will surprise the reader already familiar with the history of science
in modern China. Second, the book does not put forward any thesis or
proposition. Each chapter ends with a "conclusion," and the final chapter revisits
several of the main points, but these appear as disjointed comments on various
topics or aspects more or less related to the principal subject. There is no
organizing idea.
In the absence of either new research or original theory, the reader is left
with a series of mini-essays or sketches that cut back and forth across the playing
field, without identifiable purpose or connection to the main subject. For
example, the chapter on John Fryer (pp. 100-127) deals almost exclusively with
135 Reviews
Fryer's personal history and his relationship to Europe and Europeans, makes
one assertion about his impact on the reformer Tan Sitong, but otherwise says
nothing about how Fryer did or did not affect the development of science in
China. Readers unfamiliar with the extensive literature on Fryer might not
understand why so much was being made of him. Similarly, the lengthy
discussion of the nature of translation (pp. 186-201) fails to show how this
esoteric branch of European scholarship might be applied to explain the
translation of western scientific writing into Chinese. The reader is presented
with separate treatments of translation theory and scientific translations in China
and left to figure out whether and how these two topics might be connected. As a
final example, the descriptions of "traditional
Chinese conceptions of nature" (pp. 2-23 and 66-71) are ripe with possibilities
for showing how traditional categories and theories of nature were or were not
linked to the introduction and development of modern science in China. Were
yinyang, wuxing, and gezhi precursors, sources, or obstacles to western science?
Some, all, or none of the above? And how? It is difficult to know what the
author thinks, or the reader should think, about these interesting questions.
Translating Science is a useful look back at scholarship on the history of
science in late-Qing China, but does little to carry the investigation forward.


David Wright, Translating Science: The Transmission of Western Chemistry into Late Imperial China, 1840-1900

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David Wright, Translating Science: The Transmission of Western Chemistry into Late Imperial China, 1840-1900

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