Golas, Peter J.

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

Reviews                                                                                                  113 
 
Dagmar Schäfer (ed.), Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History, 
Leiden, Boston: Brill (Sinica Leidensia; 103), 2012, 394 pp. 
Peter J. Golas 
[Peter J. Golas is Professor Emeritus at the University of Denver. He is a specialist 
in premodern economic and social history of China and the history of Chinese 
technology, especially mining. In the latter respect, he contributed a volume to 
Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China series. His most recent 
book, Picturing Technology in China: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth 
Century, which examines the methods used by the Chinese throughout their 
history to portray technology, was published by Hong Kong University Press in 
2015. Contact: Peter.Golas@du.edu] 
Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History brings together articles 
by eleven scholars focusing on how technological knowledge was pro-
duced, accumulated and communicated in traditional China (especially 
from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries) with three contributions by 
European specialists who compare the Chinese and Western experiences in 
this area. 
One useful way to approach this volume might be to begin with Pamela 
Long’s masterly “Technological Transmission in China and Europe: A 
Comparative View.” Though serving to comment mainly on the first sec-
tion (‘Internode’) articles by William T. Rowe (“Political, Social and 
Economic Factors Affecting the Transmission of Technical Knowledge in 
Early Modern China”) and Dagmar Schäfer (“Silken Strands: Making Tech-
nology Work in China”), it also provides an excellent introduction to much 
of the best scholarship dealing with the European developments crucial for 
understanding the comparisons that play so important a role in this 
volume (even if there is no hint of this in its title).  
One might then turn to Francesca Bray’s “Chinese Literati and the 
Transmission of Technological Knowledge: The Case of Agriculture” and 
especially its final two sections which highlight many of the most im-
portant points made (or not made) in this volume by showing how agricul-
ture/agronomy occupied a unique position that made it in certain crucial 
ways unlike other “technologies.” At the same time, many of the questions 
one asks about writings on agriculture, such as “how far across the social 
spectrum the audience for or authorship of nongshu [agricultural books] 
might have stretched at different periods or in different regions” (p. 316, fn. 
66), are obviously also relevant for examining other technologies. 
The second section of the book, ‘Imperial Court,’ examines, in Wolfgang 
Lefévre’s felicitous phrase, “symbolic technology politics” or how the 
imperial court made use of its control over prestigious technologies such as 
114                                                                                                  EASTM 41 (2015) 
 
hydraulic works (Liu Heping, focusing mainly on court efforts in the 
northern Song) or imported artistic metalwork techniques (Luo Wenhua, 
describing how skilled migrant craftsmen from Nepal were enlisted by the 
Qianlong emperor in the seventeenth century) to bolster its political 
prestige. Perhaps the most important conclusion to come out of this section 
is Lefévre’s suggestion that Chinese emperors could reinforce their author-
ity by picturing themselves (or having themselves pictured) as techno-
logical leaders/work-masters in a way that one does not find among 
Western rulers. 
The book’s third section deals with those gathering places (‘Agora’) that 
were the sites of activities, often overlapping, in which technology played a 
significant role. Two Chinese “locales” are treated at length in Anne 
Gerritsen’s discussion of ceramic technology at Jingdezhen 景德鎮 and 
Susan Naquin’s masterful and elegant examination of “temple culture” 
over five centuries in Shouzhou 壽州, Anhui. While reminding us of the 
skimpiness of the surviving sources relating to temple art and architecture 
(and what appears to be more than one case where the author was refused 
permission to examine surviving items of interest), Naquin nevertheless 
displays a remarkable knack for drawing every last bit of information out 
of what is available. When lack of evidence forces her to speculate, her 
speculations are invariably persuasive. One finishes this article with a real 
feeling for the environment in which the technologies relating to temples 
were practiced and, insofar as the sources permit, how and by whom. 
In the next to last article in this section, Joachim Kurtz discusses the 
rhetorical strategies found in six Jesuit works in the seventeenth century 
that attempted to introduce Western technology to the Chinese, show its 
usefulness, and convince the Chinese scholarly elite that European learning 
(including Christianity) was compatible with China’s civilization. Finally, 
Matteo Valleriani focuses on comparisons between the roles of officials in 
the leading technologies of Renaissance Venice (e.g., shipbuilding and 
glassmaking) and Florence (especially architecture and military engineer-
ing), and those in China, judging their activities to be different but crucial 
in both civilizations. 
The fourth and final section of the book, ‘Scholarly Arts,’ leads off with 
Martina Siebert’s piece focusing on the Chinese predilection to trace the 
“origin of things” (wu yuan 物原), including technology, in their culture 
back to the beginnings. (She includes a very handy chart providing 
detailed information on some twenty-two examples of encyclopedias on 
“The Origin of Things” that illustrate just how important this element was 
in the historical-mindedness of the Chinese.)  
 
Martin Hoffman, in his examination of biographies in the standard 
histories of officials noted and admired for their technical achievements 
Reviews                                                                                                  115 
 
(often large-scale construction projects), makes the perhaps counter-
intuitive point that the authors of these accounts rarely connect these skills 
with “groundbreaking inventions or advances in a specific craft” but rather 
stress the personal exceptionability of their subjects. In contrast, local 
histories often introduced craftsmen who were renowned for producing 
one or more products that helped create the distinctiveness of a place. By 
extension, the skills displayed by the craftsmen may well have been seen to 
confer on a location a special character. 
Finally, Marcus Popplow’s “Two Cultures Speaking with One Voice? 
Invention, Ingenuity, and Agricultural Innovation in Pre-industrial Euro-
pean and Chinese Discourse” quite successfully discusses the Siebert, 
Hoffman and Bray contributions from a Europeanist’s perspective while 
pointing out that “the study of pre-industrial discourses on technology is 
not a well developed field for either culture.” (p. 328) He stresses, with 
interesting discussions of invention, ingenuity, and agricultural innovation, 
the need for further efforts to formulate and test better categories for 
comparative studies in order to avoid falling back on stereotypes. 
Despite several very well written and stimulating contributions, this 
book overall will be no one’s easy read. The four main section titles, for 
example, all tend in varying degrees to be quirky and/or uninformative. 
Perhaps the most unfortunate is ‘Agora,’ with its inevitable suggestion of 
Greek togas. The editor, not very helpfully, explains that: “In creation and 
maintenance, construction projects represent agoras, that is, marketplaces 
in which technological knowledge was communicated, generated or 
unheard, facilitating or compromising the needs and demands of the day.” 
(p. 157) Moreover, much of the book cries out for a careful editing. There 
are not only far too many minor mistakes or infelicities in English usage 
but also not a few sections where the phrasing to a greater or lesser extent 
obscures the author’s intended meaning. It would be a shame if these 
problems were to lead to neglect of the abundant fine scholarship to be 
found here.  
 


Dagmar Schäfer (ed.), Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History

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Dagmar Schäfer (ed.), Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History

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