Picturing Technology in China: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century

Author: 
Peter J. Golas

Publisher: 
HKU Press

Publication Date:
2015. 1

Abstract:
Although the history of technological and scientific illustrations is a well-established field in the West, scholarship on the much longer Chinese experience is still undeveloped. This work by Peter Golas is a short, illustrated overview tracing the subject to pre-Han inscriptions but focusing mainly on the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. His main theme is that technological drawings developed in a different way in China from in the West largely because they were made by artists rather than by specialist illustrators or practitioners of technology. He examines the techniques of these artists, their use of painting, woodblock prints and the book, and what their drawings reveal about changing technology in agriculture, industry, architecture, astronomical, military, and other spheres.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction

1.  Early Graphics in China
- Pictorial Writing
- Geometrical Designs
- From Ornament to Narrative: Warring States and Han Illustrations
- Early Farming Paintings

2.  Han to Tang: Realism on the Rise
- Aesthetics and Realism to the Fore
- Scale Drawing and Perspective
- The Dominance of Brush and Line
- Models, Automata, and Technological Drawing
- The Advent of Woodblock Printing

3.  Song and Yuan: A Golden Age
- Ruled-line Painting and Its Critics
- Government, Printing, and Technological Representations
- The Collection of the Most Important Military Techniques (Wujing zongyao)
- The New Armillary Sphere and Celestial Globe System Essentials (Xinyixiang fayao)
- The Building Standards (Yingzao fashi)
- The Pictures of Tilling and Weaving (Geng zhi tu)
- The Agricultural Treatise (Nongshu) of Wang Zhen

4.  The New Confucian Paradigm
- Realism in Retreat
- Elite Dominance of Painting
- "Historical" Painting
- Philosophic Contributions to the New Painting Aesthetic
- Painting and Calligraphy

5.  Late Ming and The Exploitation of the Works of Nature
- The Exploitation of the Works of Nature: A Culmination of Sorts
- Song Yingxing and His World
- Book Illustration in the Late Ming
- Why This Work?
- Assessing the Illustrations
- Production Challenges
- The Later History of the Illustrations

6.  Qing Developments: Roads Not Taken
- The Seventeenth-Century Transition
- The Jesuit Contribution and Its Limited Impact
- A Qualified Last Hurrah for Realism: Architectural Painting in the Qing

Closing Comments
- Non-technological Aims in Portrayals of Technology
- Pre-eminence of Agriculture and Human Inputs
- Underrepresented Technologies
- The Absence of Standards for Technical Drawing
- The Role of Government Workshops
- Maturity or Stagnation?

Bibliography
Index