From Heaven to Earth: Circles and the Construction of the Imperial Order in Late Ming and Early Qing China
Résumé
The Jesuit missionaries who worked in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries taught the mathematical sciences to some Chinese literati, reformed the Chinese calendar, and applied European surveying methods to the mapping of the Qing empire. Their activities induced profound changes in the techniques used by the imperial state to manage Heaven and Earth, in an empire where the sovereign was viewed as the intermediary between the cosmos and the human realm. The new techniques in great part relied on mathematical knowledge about the circle. Looking at the definitions of the circle found in three Jesuit textbooks on geometry published in China at the time, and at the context in which these definitions are found thus sheds light in the extent to and ways in which the mathematics that underlay European astronomy at the time were put to use in China to reinforce the cosmological legitimacy of emperors as well as their control over their territories. Thus, one of the outcomes of the Jesuit missionaries’ work in China was that similar mathematical knowledge came to underlie the two very different cosmologies that dominated at the two ends of the Eurasian continent.
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