Tiānguān kǎoyì 天官考異
Critical Study of Discrepancies in the Celestial Offices by 吳肅公 (撰)
About the work
The Tiānguān kǎoyì is a one-juǎn philological-and-observational study by 吳肅公 Wú Sùgōng (1626–1699) of discrepancies between the canonical asterism inventory inherited from the Shǐjì 史記 Tiānguān shū 天官書 of 司馬遷 and the working inventory of the Qīng Qīntiānjiān under the Jesuit-Tychonic reform. The work belongs to the kǎoyì 考異 (“critical study of discrepancies”) philological sub-genre that was the principal weapon of the kǎozhèng 考證 movement on Confucian-classical texts and that Wú here applies to the technical astronomical canon.
Abstract
Composition window: Wú’s mature scholarly years, c. 1660–1699. The work was composed in the immediate wake of the Schall-Verbiest astronomical reform (1635–74), the controversies surrounding 楊光先 Yáng Guāngxiān’s 1664–65 anti-Christian attack (cf. KR3fa028 Bùdéyǐ), and the consolidation of the Tychonic Xīyáng xīnfǎ lìshū system at the Bureau under 南懷仁 Verbiest (1669 onward). Wú’s stance is moderate: he accepts the observational precision of the new system but argues that its asterism inventory should be brought into philological alignment with the Shǐjì-canonical names and groupings; the new system, in his view, has multiplied asterism boundaries unnecessarily and has departed from the Tiānguān shū division-of-offices schema.
The work is preserved in Wú’s collected works and in the Sìkù wèishōu shū jíkān; it is reprinted in the Zhōngguó kēxué jìshù diǎnjí tōnghuì (refid KX03-07-018). It is consulted by modern historians of late-imperial Chinese science (notably Han Qi 韓琦, Catherine Jami) as one of the principal indigenous-Confucian responses to the Jesuit reform, distinct from both the rejectionist (Yáng Guāngxiān) and the synthesist (Méi Wéndǐng) positions.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language translation located.
- Jami, Catherine. 2012. The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (1662–1722). Oxford: OUP. — the standard recent treatment of the Kāng-xī-era Chinese reception of Western astronomy.
- Han Qi 韓琦. 1999. “Astronomy, Chinese and Western: The Influence of Xu Guangqi’s Views in the Early and Mid-Qing Period.” Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in Late Ming China, ed. C.A. Peterson et al.
- Pankenier, David W. 2013. Astrology and Cosmology in Early China. Cambridge: CUP. — sets out the canonical Tiānguān shū system against which Wú is measuring.
Other points of interest
This is one of a small number of late-17th-century Chinese works that engage critically rather than rejectingly with the Jesuit reform, prefiguring the more famous and influential synthesist work of Méi Wéndǐng. Wú’s position — accept the observation, reform the nomenclature — is in many ways the position that the Qīndìng compilers of KR3fa030 Tiānwén zhèngyì and KR3fa037 Yíxiàng kǎochéng xùbiān ultimately followed.