von Falkenhausen, Lothar

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

100                                                                                                  EASTM 40 (2014) 
 
 
Wenren Jun, Ancient Chinese Encyclopedia of Technology: Translation and 
Annotation of Kaogong ji (The Artificers’ Record), London and New York: 
Routledge (Routledge Studies in the Early History of Asia), 2013, 228 
pp. 
Lothar von Falkenhausen 
[Lothar von Falkenhausen is professor of Chinese Archaeology and Art History at 
UCLA. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University in 1988. 
He has published on the Chinese Bronze Age, Chinese epigraphy, and the history of 
archaeology in East Asia. His books include Suspended Music: Chime-Bells in 
the Culture of Bronze Age China (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), Chinese 
Society in the Age of Confucius (1000-250 BC): The Archaeological 
Evidence (Los Angeles, 2006), and a number of edited volumes. In 2012 President 
Obama appointed him a member of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee 
administered through the US Department of State. Contact: 
lothar@humnet.ucla.edu] 
Of the “Thirteen Classics” (Shisanjing 十三經) canonized by the Confucian 
tradition during imperial times, the Zhouli 周禮 (“Rituals of Zhou,” also—
perhaps more accurately—known as Zhouguan 周官, “Institutions of the 
Zhou”), is doubtless the most intractable. An idealized tableau of what its 
compilers during the fourth to third centuries BC imagined the 
administrative structure of the Zhou kingdom to have been at the time of 
its foundation in the eleventh century BC, the Zhouli is now generally 
regarded as historically unreliable; it contains no intellectual or philosophi-
cal argument and possesses no literary qualities to speak of. The main 
interest of the text lies in how intellectuals and politicians have repeatedly 
used it over the course of Chinese history as a blueprint for a perfect 
government. But its complex nomenclature of official titles would have 
become incomprehensible long ago were it not for the huge hermeneutical 
apparatus built up over centuries of philological study. In Sun Yirang’s 孫
詒讓  (1848-1908) multi-volume Zhouli zhengyi 周禮正義  (“Rectified 
Meanings of the Zhouli”), this later commentary comes to about forty times 
the length of the original text. 
Although the Zhouli was among the first Chinese texts to be rendered 
into a Western language in its entirety—Édouard Biot’s French translation, 
posthumously published in 1851, stands as one of the milestones in the 
history of Sinology—it is still, today, the only one of the Thirteen Classics 
to remain untranslated into English. In the book under review, Wenren Jun 
聞人軍 attempts to fill part of this lacuna by offering an English version of 
the Kaogong ji 考工記, an originally separate text that has been transmitted 
as part of the Zhou li. 
Reviews                                                                                                                  101 
 
The Kaogong ji (literally: “Notes for Examining the Artisans”; the author 
follows Joseph Needham in his somewhat problematic rendering as 
“Artificers’ Record”) was inserted into the Zhouli during the Han period 
(probably sometime during the first century BC) as a replacement for its 
lost sixth section, which purported to list the staff of the Zhou dynasty’s 
Ministry of Works. The text itself has been variously dated to the Late 
Warring States (c. 450-221 BC), Qin (221-206 BC), or early Western Han 
periods. It is considerably shorter than the other five sections of the Zhouli, 
amounting to less than one-eighth of the extant Zhouli text; of its originally 
31 chapters—less than half the number of chapters comprising each of the 
other sections—six are lost except for their titles (‘Duanshi’ 段氏 [plough 
makers], ‘Weishi’ 韋氏 [tanners], ‘Qiushi’ 裘氏 [furriers], ‘Kuangren’ 筐人 
[silk printers(?)], ‘Jieren’ 楖人 [comb makers], and ‘Diaoren’ 雕人 [carvers]). 
Aside from being incompletely preserved, the text is also marred by 
corruptions. For instance, two chapter titles were obviously inverted by 
mistake: ‘Zhongshi’ 鍾氏 (“Mr. Bell“) and ‘Fushi’ 鳧氏 (“Mr. Wild Duck”), 
which must originally have referred to the bell-makers and to artisans in 
charge of dyeing feathers, respectively; the texts following each of these 
two titles in the extant version of the Kaogong ji describes the tasks of the 
other. Elsewhere, as well, the text requires emendations in at least a dozen 
places to make any sense whatsoever. 
Now an engineer working in Silicon Valley, but formerly a History of 
Science professor at Hangzhou University, Wenren Jun is the author of 
several monographs and articles on the Kaogong ji. He is thus extremely 
well qualified for tackling this difficult text. Based on his previous 
publications in Chinese, the book under review is a digest of a lifetime’s 
reflections. It contains a preface (pp. xvi-xix), an introduction to the text (pp. 
xx-xxviii), followed by the translation (pp. 1-119) and three appendixes: the 
(uncommented-on) Chinese text (pp. 120-126), a chronological table (p. 127), 
and a table of Shang to Qin weights and measures (pp. 128-131). There 
follow a glossary of Chinese characters (pp. 132-140), the notes to the 
preface, introduction, and translation (pp. 141-188), a bibliography (pp. 
189-210), and an index (pp. 211-224). The English text is accompanied by 
numerous illustrations of the objects, techniques, and situations mentioned. 
It is obvious that the author has expended considerable effort.   
Even so, the book is at best a limited success. The separation of the 
Chinese text from the translation, and of the translation from the notes, 
make the book more difficult to use than, with the benefits of modern 
typography, it needed to be. Ironically, Chinese characters are embedded 
in the text of the introduction, figure captions, and notes, but they are 
absent where they are most needed—next to the translated text, where 
their presence would make it more convenient for the reader to compare it 
with the original Chinese. When one does start making such comparisons, 
102                                                                                                  EASTM 40 (2014) 
 
 
one finds much to quibble with.  Of course, as anyone who has ever done a 
translation knows, a translation is always an interpretation, and one must 
allow for some leeway in handling textual difficulties. In this case, however, 
the translator’s choices in renderings are often questionable. 
Let us look at just one sentence at random. In the ‘Zhouren’ 輈人 section, 
which deals with the makers of chariot-poles, there is the following 
sentence: Zhou you san li: yi zhe wei mei ye, er zhe wei jiu ye, san zhe wei li ye 軸
有三理：一者為嬍也，二者為久也，三者為利也. Unlike other phrases of 
the same length, which are often followed by page after page of 
commentary, Sun Yirang evidently considers this one straightforward and 
devotes only a few lines to it. Wenren translates it as follows (p. 26): “The 
three distinct requirements on which the axle is made are as follows: The 
number one is virtue (mei); the number two, strong and durable; the 
number three, to revolve freely.” Since Wenren is a non-native writer, it 
would be unfair to fault him for the shaky grammar of his rendering; but 
there are also, even in such a relatively minor sentence, issues of substance 
that invite comment. Wenren appends a footnote for the bracketed word 
mei 嬍 (p. 153) explaining that it is an archaic form of mei 美, and quoting 
Zheng Xuan’s 鄭玄 (127-200) commentary, which interprets it as “without a 
node or tubercle.” But this undermines Wenren’s own translation, 
suggesting that “virtue” here is an over-interpretation: what is meant is the 
beautiful visual appearance and quality of the wood. That this is the 
traditional understanding is confirmed by consulting Sun Yirang. Similarly 
problematic are Wenren’s renderings of “strong and durable” for jiu 久, 
where “durable” would be enough; and “to revolve freely” for li 利, which 
admittedly is here used slightly outside of its normal semantic range of 
“sharp; efficient”—but a glance at Sun Yirang will establish the intended 
meaning of “smooth yet tight[-fitting].” One cannot help finding that Biot’s 
rendering—”Pour la confection des fusées, il y a trois principes. Il faut qu’elles 
soient de belle apparence; il faut qu’elles soient de longue durée; il faut qu’elles 
soient effilées”—is not merely far more elegant than Wenren’s, but also more 
accurate. 
Further spot-checking confirms that the problems revealed with the 
translation of this seemingly innocuous sentence are pervasive. Strictly 
speaking, what Wenren provides is not a philologically-grounded trans-
lation, but a paraphrase informed by his own long experience with the text. 
In all fairness, philological details are far from being the author’s principal 
concern; his intention, as is programmatically apparent from the book’s 
title, is to make the Kaogong ji useable by readers unacquainted with 
classical Chinese as a source text for the history of science and technology 
in China. And it is certainly true that the Kaogong ji provides much 
interesting information in that regard. 
Reviews                                                                                                                  103 
 
However, what Wenren seemingly fails to realize is that the Kaogong ji is 
not, as a text, a technical manual; instead, it was apparently written for use 
by administrative supervisors of court artisans, deliberately reducing 
technical information to simple formulae for their benefit. In other words, 
the text represents handy second-hand knowledge that did not directly 
come from the artisans themselves. This probably explains why the 
technical information contained in the text is often vague, and matches but 
very incompletely the data one can extract from the material record of 
ancient China as revealed through recent archaeological discoveries. All 
the more urgently, therefore, distilling any science and technology-related 
evidence from such a text must come as a separate step following the 
establishment of its precise meaning. That step, unfortunately, largely gets 
skipped over in the book under review. 
As noted, in order to make the Kaogong ji translatable, a number of 
emendations and transpositions must be made. Wenren indicates these by 
inserting small characters into the Chinese text, but does not mention them, 
let alone discuss them, in either the translation or the comments. For 
purposes of presentation, moreover, Wenren arbitrarily subdivides the text 
into 23 numbered chapters instead of the traditional 32 (introduction plus 
31 offices), grouping together professions he considers related. This 
obviates the need to add numbers for the six above-mentioned lost sections, 
but it arguably obfuscates the extent to which the text is fragmentary and 
corrupted in its current state. 
Another unfortunate aspect of the author’s approach is that it is ahis-
torical. As a case in point, the illustrations accompanying the translation 
are a wild mix, showing archaeological artifacts from Neolithic down to 
Qing times, pictures taken from later traditional works (even from Biot’s 
translation), reconstruction drawings, and scientific diagrams. This detracts 
from the fact that the text is itself an artifact of a particular time, and should 
be related, first and foremost, to the material culture of its own period. 
Wenren’s presentation, by contrast, feeds into the Orientalist fantasy of an 
eternally unchanging China that modern Sinology has worked so hard to 
overcome. 
Given such weaknesses, the volume under review can only serve as a 
stand-in pending the publication of an up-to-standard scholarly translation 
of this important text. It may be recommended for preliminary reference, 
but the non-Sinologists for whom it is written should use it with the utmost 
caution. 
 
 


Wenren Jun, Ancient Chinese Encyclopedia of Technology: Translation and Annotation of Kaogong ji (The Artificers’ Record)

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Wenren Jun, Ancient Chinese Encyclopedia of Technology: Translation and Annotation of Kaogong ji (The Artificers’ Record)

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