With the Measuring Rod against the Floods: Ferdinand Verbiest and His Forgotten Introduction of Benedetto Castelli’s River Hydraulics to China

The monumental Studies to Fathom Principles(Qiongli xue窮理學;1683)by Ferdinand Verbiest S.J.(Nan Huairen南懷仁,1623–1688)was never printed,and its exact content is not known.A section of the only extant,though incomplete,manuscript deals with fluvial flood prevention and river control measures,a subject that until then had not cropped up in any Chinese-language work of the Jesuits.In this section,Verbiest not only described the already well-known Aristotelian theory of the origin of rivers,but also introduced to China new scientific propositions,concepts,and numerical examples originating from the seminal Renaissance work Della misura dell’acque correnti(Of the Mensuration of Running Waters;1628)by Benedetto Castelli(1578–1643).In addition,Verbiest presented to his readers some noteworthy examples of pertinent Western achievements such as the pound-lock with miter gate,and he provided them with a simple economic analysis of flood control options.The significance and possible influence of Verbiest’s text on further developments in Chinese approaches to water engineering are discussed,highlighting a hitherto largely disregarded facet of Western science and technology transfer in the field of river hydraulics and flood management.

Shared Ideas,Divergent Approaches:The Hydromethods of the Great West(Taixi shuifa泰西水法)and the Question on Tides

One of the questions about natural phenomena asked in the Hydromethods of the Great West(Taixi shuifa泰西水法;1612)(hereafter TXSF),composed by the Italian Jesuit Sabatino de Ursis with the support of the Chinese official Xu Guangqi徐光啟,concerns the causes of sea tides.The idiosyncratic answer given in the TXSF serves as an example for the Jesuit missionaries,strategically motivated approach to the transfer of knowledge through the translation of Western scientific thought into Chinese.From a chronological overview of the attempts made both in the East and in the West to theoretically conceptualize the causes of the cyclical occurrence of ebb and flow,the comparison reveals that despite being based on totally different cosmologies,the related insights were virtually on a par.The aim to nevertheless convince the audience of the TXSF of the superiority of Western sciences resulted in a particular rhetoric and a division of tasks in the composition of the tides paragraph.In order to verify the success of this joint effort of de Ursis and Xu Guangqi,a change of perspective from the transmitter to the receiver side is necessary.Thus,the paper also explores the work's reception in later Chinese works dealing with this topic.