Notes from Enlightenment Studio: The Movement and Materiality of Scientific Information in Nineteenth-Century China

Between 1867 and 1872, a scholar-clerk in Jiangxi Province composed an inventory of scientific and mathematical books. The list records not only their contents, but also the paths they had traced into the scholar's possession. Thus, the inventory preserves a record of how scientific information moved through inland China in the years immediately following the Taiping Rebellion. Analyzing both the physical and metaphorical aspects of this movement, this article argues that scientific knowledge and practice were promoted and constrained by material conditions. The inventory suggests the rarity of certain scientific-mathematical volumes, and underlines that foreign books translated in Shanghai did not circulate easily, even to provincial capitals. In addition to this material movement, information also moved through different representational languages in different texts, for instance through the translation of mathematics from physical forms (counting rod, abacus) to symbolic ones (abstract notation). As illustrated by the scholar's commentaries, material conditions informed intellectual trends. Finally, the inventory shows the continued importance of manuscripts, even in the age of woodblock and moveable type print. The methods of replication of scientific texts shaped what could be known, and in what manner.