Peter J. Golas - Picturing Technology in China

The disparagement that once pervaded much of Western thinking and writing about Chinas record in science and technology has now long given way to a general recognition that achievements in these realms constitute one of the great triumphs of the Chinese people and their civilization. In the area of technology, more than two generations of scholarly effort, much of it inspired by Joseph Needham and the volumes of his Science and Civilisation in China, have fleshed out a remarkable story of Chinese inventive genius and a broad Chinese talent for technological innovation that could hardly have been guessed at before the middle of the last century.

Parts of that story, however, remain to be fleshed out. For our purposes, none is more important than the question of how Chinese approaches to portraying technology influenced the overall development of technology in China. Until relatively recently, much of the work on surviving images of premodern technology analyzed these images, often with considerable skill, to elucidate how a particular technology or piece of equipment worked. From these studies have emerged many interesting insights into how the visual depiction of technology, as well as the technology itself, did or did not change over time.

One of our purposes in this volume will be to pull together many of these insights into an overview of what we presently understand about the illustrations of technology in China up to about the nineteenth century. At the same time, we shall pay special attention to newer approaches that are now beginning to deepen our understanding of the place of both technology and portrayals of technology in the larger Chinese sociopolitical, economic, and cultural order.

It will rapidly become clear that much of what I have to say has been inspired by that vast body of work on the portrayal of technology in European culture, especially in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But despite the fact that the images produced by the artists of the Renaissance generally conform much better than most Chinese images to what we, with our twenty-first-century perspective, tend to expect from technological illustrations. Despite this, I shun the all-too-common approach that sets up the European achievements as some kind of universal standard and then seeks explanations for why the Chinese were unable to meet that standard. I am above all interested in understanding the complex of motivations that led the Chinese to produce the images they did, not why they failed to produce images more like those in Europe. When I reference the European experience, it is mainly to help us identify what was particularly distinctive in the Chinese experience, and perhaps suggest roots of that distinctiveness.

Moreover, it deserves to be noted that, seen in a broad historical perspective, the Chinese illustrations by no means infallibly failed to measure up to contemporary European illustrations even when judged by criteria that were much less emphasized by Chinese than by Westerners. As early as the Song dynasty (9601278), Chinese artists on occasion produced illustrations of technological subjects that displayed a degree of accuracy, intelligibility and even realism generally not found in European images until much later. To take just one example, we can contrast the copy of a thirteenth-century Chinese illustration of the reeling or unwinding of silk fibers from cocoons in Fig. 0.1 with the spinning and weaving scene from a fourteenth-century Flemish manuscript in Fig. 0.2.

To be sure, most Chinese illustrations of technology in this period fell far short of the realism and precision of the remarkable series of painted illustrations of farming and sericulture of which Fig. 0.1 is only one example. But one will search in vain for any European portrayals of technology from these centuries that could match them. After about the thirteenth century, however, one seems to see rather less advance in Chinese portrayals of technological subjects than earlier achievements might have portended. Here, too, attempting to explain why this was the case will require us to carry further our examination of the endlessly fascinating question of the interrelations between technology and broader Chinese culture.