Shared Ideas, Divergent Approaches: The Hydromethods of the Great West (Taixi shuifa 泰西水法) and the Question on Tides

Abstract

One of the questions about natural phenomena asked in the Hydromethods of the Great West (Taixi shuifa 泰西水法; 1612) (hereafter TXSF), composed by the Italian Jesuit Sabatino de Ursis with the support of the Chinese official Xu Guangqi 徐光啟, concerns the causes of sea tides. The idiosyncratic answer given in the TXSF serves as an example for the Jesuit missionaries’ strategically motivated approach to the transfer of knowledge through the translation of Western scientific thought into Chinese. From a chronological overview of the attempts made both in the East and in the West to theoretically conceptualize the causes of the cyclical occurrence of ebb and flow, the comparison reveals that despite being based on totally different cosmologies, the related insights were virtually on a par. The aim to nevertheless convince the audience of the TXSF of the superiority of Western sciences resulted in a particular rhetoric and a division of tasks in * This article is part of the author’s PhD thesis written within the research project “Translating Western Science, Technology and Medicine to Late Ming China: Convergences and Divergences in the Light of the Kunyu gezhi 坤輿格致 (Investigations of the Earth’s Interior; 1640) and the Taixi shuifa 泰西水法 (Hydromethods of the Great West; 1612).” This project was granted by the German Research Foundation for the years 2018 to 2021 and is carried out at the Department of Chinese Studies at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen under the direction of Prof. Dr. Hans Ulrich Vogel. I thank Prof. Vogel as my supervisor for his dedicated support, and my project colleague Dr. Cao Jin 曹晋 for her persistent encouragement and great cooperation. My thanks also go to Dr. Alexander Jost, senior scientist at the University of Salzburg and associated researcher of this project, for his valuable remarks. Moreover, I am very grateful to the anonymous referees of CAHST for their helpful and constructive comments. ** In this issue of CAHST, the book title Taixi shuifa 泰西水法 has been translated differently by the authors of two separate articles, one as Hydromethods of the Great West in this article, the other as Hydraulic Methods of the Far West in “Introduction of the Archimedean Screw Pump to East Asia during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” CAHST would like to retain these translations as they are, so as to highlight the difficulties in translating such titles and the authors’ differing interpretations. (This article was copyedited by Charlie Zaharoff.) 1 Research interests: History of science and technology in premodern China, intercivilizational knowledge transfer. Email: sabine.kink@uni-tuebingen.de http://engine.scichina.com/doi/10.3724/SP.J.1461.2020.01063 CAHST—Volume 4, Number 1, June 2020 64 the composition of the tides paragraph. In order to verify the success of this joint effort of de Ursis and Xu Guangqi, a change of perspective from the transmitter to the receiver side is necessary. Thus, the paper also explores the work’s reception in later Chinese works dealing with this topic.