Chinese astronomy in the time of the Jesuits: Studies following Science and Civilisation in China

Abstract

Viewing traditional Chinese science as one of the tributaries to be merged into the grand ocean of modern/universal science, Joseph Needham placed great importance on the period of the Jesuits in the ‘Sciences of the Heavens’ section in volume 3 of Science and Civilisation in China. He considered that period a turning point when Chinese astronomy – a representative field of Chinese science – changed from its traditional form into universal/modern astronomy. Among the work of other historians of Chinese science, Joseph Needham’s work helped foster a growing interest in the astronomical work of the Jesuits in China. After more than 50 years, as many of the details in Needham’s original work have been gradually clarified and enhanced, a new picture of the Jesuits’ contribution to Chinese astronomy has taken shape. In some important respects, that picture is quite contrary to Needham’s overall claim about the role and result of Jesuit works in the development of astronomy in China, which has led to new questions that invite further investigation.

Keywords

Joseph Needham Chinese astronomy time of the Jesuits European astronomy in China

In volume 3 of Science and Civilisation in China, Joseph Needham (1959) devoted one section (section 20j) to ‘The time of the Jesuits’ (pp. 437–461). The section has only 20 pages, which is limited, compared to the 290 pages dedicated to the entire section on astronomy; however, by treating the period as a transitional stage leading to the final integration of Chinese astronomy into modern science, Needham attributed special importance to this section of the history of Chinese astronomy.

In his general view of the history of human science, Needham saw all traditional Chinese sciences as tributaries to be eventually merged into the grand ocean of the modern and universal science discovered and developed in Europe, but which was bound to be shared by people all over the world, including the Chinese. In the field of astronomy, he found a pertinent example that enabled him to analyse and illustrate such a process. From the voluminous but diffuse literature on the period, mostly created by sinologists, he told a succinct story that touched upon the most important aspects of the ‘mutual impact of Chinese and Western thought’ (Needham, 1959: 437) in the 17th and 18th centuries.

All in all, Needham (1959) saw the transmission as ‘an example of cultural relations at the highest level between the two civilizations theretofore sundered’, one of which ‘had the qualities of noble adventure’ (p. 457). At the same time, however, he also emphasized that ‘the coming of the Jesuits was by no means (as it has often been made to appear) an unmixed blessing for Chinese science’ (Needham, 1959: 437). As an expression of this standpoint and an introduction to the whole section on the period, he drew up a balance sheet of the merits and demerits of the contribution made by the Jesuits to the development of Chinese astronomy.

The merits included the following:

European methods for the prediction of eclipses;

A clear exposition of the geometrical analysis of planetary motions, and the Euclidean geometry necessary for applying it;

The application of geometry in gnomonics and the stereographic projections of the astrolabe, and in surveying;

The doctrine of the spherical earth and its division into spaces separated by meridians and parallels;

The new 16th-century algebra of the time of Vieta, with new computing methods and, ultimately, mechanical devices such as the slide rule;

The most up-to-date European techniques of instrument-making, graduating of scales, micrometre screws, and so on, with increasing use of the telescope.

However, the demerits as seen by Needham included the following:

The imposition of the closed Ptolemaic–Aristotelian geocentric universe of solid concentric celestial spheres, which was dissi-pating in contemporary Europe, upon what Needham believed to be the indigenous Xuan Ye¹ doctrine of the floating of heavenly bodies in infinite space;

The obstruction of the spread of Copernican heliocentric doctrine in China;

The substitution of an erroneous theory of the precession of the equinoxes for the ‘cautious Chinese’ who refused to form any theory at all about it;

The complete failure in appreciating the equatorial and polar character of traditional Chinese astronomy, and therefore confusing the xiu² divisions with the zodiac, thereby equalizing the duodenary equatorial divisions when there was no need to do so;

The imposition of the less satisfactory Greek ecliptic coordinates upon Chinese astronomy.

Needham was more interested in the demerits and paid more attention to them. In section (e) on the ‘polar and equatorial character of Chinese astronomy’ and section (g) on the ‘development of astronomical instruments’ in the same chapter, he provided lengthy discussions on the issues related to demerits 3 and 4. In the section ‘on the time of the Jesuits’, he extended the discussion to demerits 1 and 2, which had obvious importance to a historian of science of his generation, who saw cosmology as the conceptual basis of science.

Through the story of how the celestial spheres were dissipating in Europe and its possible connection with China, Needham tried to show the absurdity of Matteo Ricci’s enumeration of the disbelief in the solid heavens as one of the Chinese ‘absurdities’. He then turned to ‘the two most important features in European astronomy at the time the Jesuits began their work in China’: ‘(a) the invention and use of the telescope, and (b) the acceptance of the heliocentric theory of Copernicus’. After a review of how ‘the former they [the Jesuits] transmitted, but the latter, after some hesitations, they held back’ in the wake of the papal condemnation of Galileo and Copernicanism in Europe, he characterized the Jesuit dissemination of European astronomy in China as an ‘imperfect transmission’ (Needham, 1959: 443–447).

Next, Needham tried to show how the limited motives of the Jesuits in China restricted their transmission of science: on the one hand, they introduced in the Chongzhen lishu³ (The Chongzhen Reign Treatises on Calendrical Astronomy) an astronomical system that belonged to the new and universal ‘modern’ science; on the other hand, however, in order ‘to support and commend “Western” religion by the prestige of the science from the West’, they labelled the system ‘Western science’, which in his view was the name for a premodern and ‘culture-rooted’ science.

Finally, through a description of the refitting of the imperial observatory by Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688) and his Jesuit successors and their works on positional astronomy, as well as a survey of the responses to the Jesuit astronomical work of ‘a number of Chinese scholars who were more or less outside their [the Jesuits and their followers’] circle’, Needham sketched a picture of the integration of Chinese astronomy into modern science. According to his estimation, in about 1850, ‘when Fêng Kuei-Fên gave tables of right ascensions and declinations of 100 stars in his Hsien-Feng Yuan Nien Chung Hsing Piao,⁴ Chinese astronomical science might be said to have merged at last with that of the world as a whole’ (Needham, 1959: 451–456).

Among historians of Chinese science, Needham’s work helped foster a long-lasting interest in Jesuit astronomical work in China. Most of the points in his balance sheet have been studied further by later researchers. For example, following in the footsteps of demerit 1, Jiang Xiaoyuan reviewed the history of the celestial spheres and their fate in China. He found that Needham’s accusation of the Jesuits ‘did not reflect the fact in its entirety’, because the Jesuits openly refuted the theory of the celestial spheres in the Chongzhen lishu, and the influence of the theory on Chinese astronomers was very little, if any (Jiang, 1987). In my study of Li Zhizao and Furtado’s Huanyou quan⁵ (An Explanation of Things in the Cosmos) – the Chinese translation and reception of the Coimbra commentaries on Aristotle’s De Caelo – I examined the issue and confirmed Jiang’s second impression (Shi, 1988). I found that the theory was thoroughly criticized by some Chinese astronomers of the time, such as Jie Xuan, who based his criticism not only on the Tychonic system of the world introduced into China through the Chongzhen lishu, but also on the traditional Chinese doctrine treating the heavens as a series of concentric whirlpools of qi moving at different speeds (Shi, 2004).

Demerit 2 has been keenly scrutinized further by historians of science in China. One point at issue was the reason for the Jesuits’ failure in transmitting the heliocentric theory to China. Needham (1959) did not accept the contention that the reason was ‘the resistance of the Chinese to any abandonment of the geocentric worldview’, but at the same time he believed that ‘this can have been only a part of the story’, the other part being the condemnation of Galileo back in Europe (pp. 443–445).

On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Copernicus, Nathan Sivin (1973) published a complete and contextualized article on the issue. Similarly to Needham, Sivin attributed the main reason to the direction taken by the Catholic Church on Copernicanism in 1616, but he did not believe that the Chinese had any intellectual or linguistic failings or any metaphysical disposition to reject the early fruits of modern science: ‘To the contrary, those best prepared to judge were quite receptive’. In his opinion, the major hindrance came from two factors:

In the beginning, the Jesuits characterized Copernicus’ world system in a very misleading way so that ‘when a Jesuit was free to correctly describe it in 1760, Chinese scientists rejected the heliocentric system because it contradicted the earlier statements about Copernicus’.

‘To the very end of the Jesuit scientific effort in China, the rivalry between cosmologies was represented as between one astronomical innovator and another, for the most convenient and accurate methods of calculations, rather than between the scholastic philosopher and the mathematical and experimental scientist, for the most fruitful approach to the physical reality. The character of early modern science was concealed from Chinese scientists’ (Sivin, 1973).

Twenty years later, in their studies of the manuscript Lifa wenda⁶ (Questions and Answers in Calendrical Astronomy), written in the second decade of the 18th century at the request of Emperor Kangxi, Jean-Claude Martzloff, Hashimoto Keizo and Catherine Jami found that the French Jesuit Jean-François Fouquet (1665–1741) had already provided a full and correct introduction to Copernicus’ sun-centred model of the planetary motions (Hashimoto, 1999; Hashimoto and Jami, 1997; Martzloff, 1994). Soon after, Yang (1999) discovered a full and clear description of Copernicus’ heliocentric system of the world in the writings of Huang Baijia (1643–1709). Those discoveries updated the date of the first clear introduction of the heliocentric system to China, but they did not change the second factor stressed by Sivin, because neither Fouquet nor Huang Baijia highlighted the cosmological significance of the system. Both of them presented it only as a pre-Tychonic scheme for the mathematical treatment of the planetary motions.

The first factor that Sivin stressed is also confirmed by the study of the astronomical section of Tianbu zhenyuan⁷ (True Principles of the Pacing of Heavens) by Nikolaus Smogulecki (1611–1656) and Xue Fengzuo (1600–1680). It was found that the work was in fact an adaptation of the theory and tables of Philippe van Lansberge (1516–1632) based on heliocentric models of the planetary motions. However, the contents in Tianbu zhenyuan turn out to be very misleading, because the true face of Lansberge’s models is deliberately veiled through simple changes and omissions of any words that might admit to the idea of the sun’s centrality or the movability of the Earth, even though both Smogulecki and Xue Fengzuo openly claimed that the system was a treatment of the planetary motions that was far more precise than that of Tycho Brahe (Shi, 2000, 2007).

Other points in Needham’s balance sheet also received considerable attention, but points 1 and 2 in the list of merits are studied much more than other points. Actually, these two points are related to one single topic – planetary astronomy, which was of central importance to Chinese astronomy at the time of the Jesuits. However, Needham did almost nothing on that topic. This limitation has been substantially remedied through the efforts of a number of scholars, and the most studied work on planetary astronomy produced in the period is the great astronomical encyclopaedia, the Chongzhen lishu compiled between 1629 and 1639. In the past three decades, we have seen at least four doctoral dissertations and several articles on this great Jesuit astronomical work in Chinese and its later editions (Hashimoto, 1988; Jiang, 1988; Ning, 2007b; Wong, 2004; Zhang, 2014).

A key issue is how the works of Tycho Brahe and other European astronomers from Ptolemy to Kepler are introduced, and which European sources were used by the Jesuit compilers. Starting with Hashimoto Keizo’s pioneering work, clearer answers to these questions have been found (see Hashimoto, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1993; Jiang, 1988, 1989, 1992; Martzloff, 1998; Ning, 2007a, 2007b, 2011; Sun, 1995).

Another interesting issue is the history of the encyclopaedia itself, on which Pan Nai, Chu Pingyi, Chu Longfei and I have carried out very important surveys (Chu, 2008, 2009; Chu and Shi, 2018; Xu and Pan, 2009). A collective collation of the Chongzhen lishu has been completed on the basis of nearly 20 fragmentary copies of the work preserved in different libraries and archives across the world, which provide the clearest yet picture of how this encyclopaedic work evolved through a great number of additions, deletions and revisions made both before and after the compilation of the whole set of treatises was completed (Shi and Chu, 2017).

Other important works on planetary astronomy mentioned by Needham in section 20(j)—Tianbu zhenyuan, Lifa wenda, Yuzhi lixiang kaocheng⁸ (Thorough Investigation of Calendrical Astronomy Imperially Composed) and Yuzhi lixiang kaocheng houbian⁹ (Later Volumes of the Thorough Inves-tigation of Calendrical Astronomy Imperially Composed)—have also been studied in unprecedented depth. Meanwhile, the works of Chinese astronomers of the time, such as Wang Xichan, Xue Fengzuo and Mei Wending, have also been more thoroughly analysed.

With all of these new studies, the picture of astronomical knowledge transmitted by the Jesuits to China has become even more complicated than Needham depicted in Science and Civilisation in China. For example, we now know that, in parallel with the Tychonic system introduced in the Chongzhen lishu, a complete Copernican system was introduced in Tianbu zhenyuan as a better system than that of Tycho Brahe (Shi, 2000, 2007) and even Newton’s theory of the moon was fully adopted in Yuzhi lixiang kaocheng houbian in addition to Kepler’s first two laws, although their cosmological meanings were not mentioned (Han, 2001; Lu, 1997; Shi, 2008; Shi and Xing, 2006).

From these works, it is clear that what was introduced by the Jesuits to China was in fact much more ‘modern’ than in Needham’s judgement. Moreover, Chinese astronomers in the generations of Wang Xichan and Mei Wending have been found to be more capable and active in their study of new astronomical knowledge from the West. For example, according to our recent study, they were able to find and fix all of the crucial knowledge gaps and mistakes left by the Jesuits in the Chongzhen lishu, and it might be their works, rather than those of the Jesuits as was previously believed, that form the very basis of Yuzhi lixiang kaocheng compiled at the order of Emperor Kangxi (Chu and Shi, 2012, 2013).

All of these new discoveries are accompanied by the results from the studies in another important dimension neglected by Needham: the social and cultural context of the transmission. This has been fruitfully explored by recent scholars, including Huang Yilong (1990, 1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1992, 1993, 1996), Chu Pingyi (1997, 2002) and Catherine Jami (2015), on the basis of the controversies, conflicts and mutual accommodations involved in the transmission and adoption of new astronomical knowledge from Europe during this special period.

Putting all these new results of research together and turning back to the big picture of Chinese astronomy in the time of the Jesuits drawn by Needham more than 50 years ago, we may form a more or less different observation on that picture. According to Needham, the period was a transitional stage for the final integration of Chinese astronomy into modern science. Now, however, we need to reconsider that judgement in the light of the new discoveries.

Of course, with all the new knowledge introduced from Europe by the Jesuits, the methodology of astronomy in China witnessed a change so thorough and substantial that Hashimoto (1981) even characterized it as ‘a process of scientific revolution’, while Sivin (1982) called it ‘a conceptual revolution in astronomy’, or China’s ‘own scientific revolution’.

Just as Sivin (1982) had noticed, however, such a revolution turned out to be quite different from its counterpart in contemporary Europe, because

… it did not generate the same level of tension as the one going on in Europe at the same time. It did not burst forth in as fundamental a reorientation of thought about Nature. It did not cast doubt on all the traditional ideas of what constitutes an astronomical problem. It did not narrow people’s view of what meaning astronomical prediction can have for the ultimate understanding of Nature and of man’s relation to it.

In other words, it was different from its European counterpart in a very crucial dimension: the goal and basic value attached to the study of nature.

In fact, both the transmitter and the receiver of astronomical knowledge from Europe in that period shared the same goal, which was to serve a tradition that was thousands of years old at the time: the creation of a precise calendar that symbolized the authority of the emperor and the legitimacy of his power. In such a tradition, understanding nature and its works was not as important a task as in Europe. Within such a cultural milieu, both the Jesuits and Chinese astronomers could take a purely instrumentalist stance towards the different systems of planetary astronomy, no matter whether they were Copernican, Tychonic, Keplerian, or even Newtonian. As Xu Guangqi put it, their job was to cast new materials into a given mould serving a given goal.

Therefore, what happened to Chinese astronomy in the time of the Jesuits cannot be understood as a gradual integration of Chinese astronomy into modern science, but rather as an integration of early modern science into the traditional framework of native Chinese astronomy.

Bearing that in mind, it seems a little hard for us to believe that, as Needham (1959) claimed, when Chinese people called the systems introduced by the Jesuits ‘new’, they were united ‘unknowingly with that group of men at the other end of the world who exactly at the same time were meeting in the Royal Society to work out the implication of the “new, or experimental, philosophy”’ (p. 450).

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Yunli Shi is a professor at the Department for the History of Science and Scientific Archaeology of the University of Science and Technology of China. His research interests are in the history of astronomy, the history of scientific thought and the history of scientific exchange between China and other countries.

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