Download or read book The Chinese Astronomical Bureau 1620 1850 written by Ping-Ying Chang and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-07 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new insight into one of the most interesting and long-lived institutions known to historians of science, the Chinese imperial Astronomical Bureau, which for two millennia observed, recorded, interpreted and predicted the movements of the celestial bodies. Utilising archival material, such as the résumés written for imperial audiences and personnel administration records, the book traces the rise and fall of more than thirty hereditary families serving at the Astronomical Bureau from the late Ming period to the end of the Qing dynasty. The book also presents an in-depth view into the organisation and function of the Bureau and succinctly charts the impacts of historical developments during the Ming and Qing periods, including the Regency of Prince Dorgon, the influence of the Jesuits, the relationship between the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors and the He family and the failure of the bureau to predict correctly the solar eclipse of 1730. Presenting a social history of the Qing Astronomical Bureau from the perspective of hereditary astronomer families, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese Imperial history, the history of science and Asian history.
Download or read book The Chinese Astronomical Bureau 1620 1850 written by Ping-Ying Chang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new insight into one of the most interesting and long-lived institutions known to historians of science, the Chinese imperial Astronomical Bureau, which for two millennia observed, recorded, interpreted and predicted the movements of the celestial bodies. Utilising archival material, such as the résumés written for imperial audiences and personnel administration records, the book traces the rise and fall of more than thirty hereditary families serving at the Astronomical Bureau from the late Ming period to the end of the Qing dynasty. The book also presents an in-depth view into the organisation and function of the Bureau and succinctly charts the impacts of historical developments during the Ming and Qing periods, including the Regency of Prince Dorgon, the influence of the Jesuits, the relationship between the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors and the He family and the failure of the bureau to predict correctly the solar eclipse of 1730. Presenting a social history of the Qing Astronomical Bureau from the perspective of hereditary astronomer families, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese Imperial history, the history of science and Asian history.
Download or read book Chinese Hereditary Mathematician Families of the Astronomical Bureau 1620 1850 written by Ping-Ying Chang and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Laws of the Land written by Tristan G. Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of fengshui’s roles in public life and law during China’s last imperial dynasty Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912). Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines. Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.
Download or read book Heavenly Numbers written by Christopher Cullen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a history of the development of mathematical astronomy in China, from the late third century BCE, to the early 3rd century CE - a period often referred to as 'early imperial China'. It narrates the changes in ways of understanding the movements of the heavens and the heavenly bodies that took place during those four and a half centuries, and tells the stories of the institutions and individuals involved in those changes. It gives clear explanations of technical practice in observation, instrumentation, and calculation, and the steady accumulation of data over many years - but it centres on the activity of the individual human beings who observed the heavens, recorded what they saw, and made calculations to analyse and eventually make predictions about the motions of the celestial bodies. It is these individuals, their observations, their calculations, and the words they left to us that provide the narrative thread that runs through this work. Throughout the book, the author gives clear translations of original material that allow the reader direct access to what the people in this book said about themselves and what they tried to do.
Download or read book Overlapping Cosmologies In Asia written by Bill M. Mak and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-02-28 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new, transnational, and interdisciplinary understanding of cosmology in Asian history. Cosmologies were not coherent systems belonging to separate cultures but rather complex bodies of knowledge and practice that regularly coexisted and co-mingled in extraordinarily diverse ways.
Download or read book Bamboo in Vietnam written by Đinh Trọng Hiếu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-13 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents interdisciplinary research on bamboo in Vietnam, drawing on the anthropology of gesture, ethnobotany and the history of technology. The authors have adopted a technological approach which reviews how the terminology of different parts of the bamboo plant in the dictionaries in Romanized Vietnamese or in Vietnamese vernacular writing (nôm) enabled the authors to identify not only the plant but also each technical gesture for its appropriation by the artisan. Lithographic, literary and historical sources from the chronicles have been mobilized to illustrate the many uses of this versatile plant. Richly illustrated throughout, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Vietnam, anthropology, the history of science and technology, environmental history and architecture. It will also be of great value to those interested in the applications of bamboo in the contemporary world.
Download or read book Jesuit Mission and Submission Qing Rulership and the Fate of Christianity in China 1644 1735 written by Litian Swen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book uncovers the Jesuits’ master-slave relation with Emperor Kangxi. Against the backdrop of this relationship, the book narrates Kangxi-Pope negotiations (1705-1721) regarding Chinese Rites Controversy and redefines the rise and fall of the Christian mission in early Qing China.
Download or read book Granting the Seasons written by Nathan Sivin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-12-19 with total page 663 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s most sophisticated system of computational astronomy was created for a Mongol emperor who could neither read nor write Chinese, to celebrate victory over China after forty years of devastating war. This book explains how and why, and reconstructs the observatory and the science that made it possible. For two thousand years, a fundamental ritual of government was the emperor’s “granting the seasons” to his people at the New Year by issuing an almanac containing an accurate lunisolar calendar. The high point of this tradition was the “Season-granting system” (Shou-shih li, 1280). Its treatise records detailed instructions for computing eclipses of the sun and moon and motions of the planets, based on a rich archive of observations, some ancient and some new. Sivin, the West’s leading scholar of the Chinese sciences, not only recreates the project’s cultural, political, bureaucratic, and personal dimensions, but translates the extensive treatise and explains every procedure in minimally technical language. The book contains many tables, illustrations, and aids to reference. It is clearly written for anyone who wants to understand the fundamental role of science in Chinese history. There is no comparable study of state science in any other early civilization.
Download or read book Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient China written by Christopher Cullen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-04-18 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Hs Kuang ch i and Astronomical Reform written by Keizō Hashimoto and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Issue with Chinese Astronomy written by Gleb Nosovskiy and published by . This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Ancient' China is a misunderstanding at best NASA research of earth-moon mechanics by astrophysicist Robert Newton leads mathematicians of MS U to a breakthrough in the chronology of civilization, China including. 'The Issue with Chinese Astronomy' is that it just can't serve anymore as a solid foundation of 'ancient' Chinese History. It looks that 'ancient' China is a misunderstanding at best. It is presumed to be exceptionally ancient, a lot more so than European history, and its datings are said to be perfectly reliable. The basics of Chinese chronology are believed to be so firm that it serves as a classical example of an indubitably ancient and reliable chronology. There is a popular misconception about Chinese chronology being based on the "ancient Chinese" astronomical records, which permit to date the events of the "ancient Chinese" history without any ambiguity whatsoever. This example makes it difficult to believe that the history of Europe, Egypt and Asia Minor is as brief as the new chronology claims it to be. Moreover, one must naturally wonder about the possible reasons why the documented history of China begins thousands of years ago, remaining reliable nonetheless, whereas the much shorter history of Europe contains so many errors. Could it really be that the Chinese have maintained the chronology and history of the last six thousand years unbroken and distortion-free, whereas the history of every other nation is a millennium old at best, and filled with errors? Another example is the invention of the printing press by the Germans in the XV century, 1440 being the earliest estimation. There is nothing odd about this invention being made in Europe around that time - after all, all European languages use phonetic alphabets. However, consensual history is trying to convince us that somebody invented printing molds in China 300 years before, in the XI century - for tens of thousands of hieroglyphs, no less. The invention had promptly been forgotten, serving no other purpose than going down in history. The more plausible version is that a European (possibly Dutch) book about the invention of the printing press in Germany became translated into Chinese around the XVII century and became part of Chinese history.One must also recollect the alleged invention of the logarithms in China that took place 500 years before they were invented in the Netherlands. The comparison of two publications, European and Chinese, demonstrates that a misprint from Napier's table of natural logarithms (first published in 1620) was repeated in a Chinese book that is presumed to be 500 years older. Is that the natural way of making history, one wonders? The Spanish Armada of 300 great vessels also became an important part of Chinese history. Every Chinese history book reports about the construction of a gigantic 300-vessel Armada in 1405; some of the ships are said to have been 150 meters long, which is quite impossible for wooden ships. This fleet was presumably sent to India, the Arabic countries and so on; the expedition recurred six or seven times, its purpose remains unclear. This is obviously the Great Spanish Armada transformed into a Chinese myth. The authors give a brief description of the real situation with Chinese history and chronology as opposed to whatever is advertised. The authors are far from claiming that their reconstruction is complete. The work on the reconstruction of Chinese history has only just begun. China special PS: Dr. Prof. Fomenko will refute, repent and eat his shapka (fur hat) if it is proven that the Earth is flat thus making it possible that most comets were visible in China and not in Europe.
Download or read book Cosmos and Computation in Early Chinese Mathematical Astronomy written by Nathan Sivin and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Foundations of Celestial Reckoning written by and published by Scientific Writings from the Ancient and Medieval World. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Foundations of Celestial Reckoning gives the reader direct access to the foundational documents of the tradition of calculation created by astronomers of the early Chinese empire between the late second century BCE and the third century CE. The paradigm they established was to shape East Asian thought and practice in the field of mathematical astronomy for centuries to come. It was in many ways radically different from better known traditions of astronomy in other parts of the ancient world. This book includes full English translations of the first three systems of mathematical astronomy adopted for use by imperial astronomical officials, together with introductory material explaining the origin and nature of each system, and a general introduction to the work as a whole. The translations, which are accompanied by the original Chinese text, give a consistent rendering of all technical terms, and include detailed explanatory notes. The text in which the second of the three systems is found also includes a unique collection of documents compiled around 178 CE by two experts in the field, one of whom was the author of the third system translated in this book. Using material transcribed from government archives of the two preceding centuries, these scholars carefully document and review controversies and large-scale official debates on astronomical matters up to their own time. Nothing equivalent in detail and clarity has survived from any other ancient culture. The availability of the totality of this material in English opens new perspectives to all historians of pre-modern astronomy.
Download or read book Ancient Chinese Astronomy written by Herbert Chatley and published by . This book was released on 1938 with total page 8 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History of Chinese Astronomy written by and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Ancient Chinese Astronomy written by Minhui Liu and published by . This book was released on 2023-06-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
