Dì yuán shuō 地圓說
Discourse on the Sphericity of the Earth by 焦廷琥 (撰)
About the work
The Dì yuán shuō is a short Qīng monograph in one juǎn by 焦廷琥 Jiāo Tínghú (1783–1821), arguing for the sphericity of the earth on the combined evidence of classical Chinese texts and the Jesuit-introduced Western astronomy. The work belongs to the QiánJiā 乾嘉 xīxué zhōngyuán 西學中源 (“Western learning has Chinese origins”) tradition, which sought to demonstrate that the empirical results of Western astronomy had been anticipated by Chinese classical thought and which therefore reduced the apparent challenge of the Jesuit reform to a matter of better measurement.
Abstract
Composition window: Jiāo’s mature scholarly years, c. 1810 to his early death in 1821 (he was 38). The work was produced in close intellectual contact with his father Jiāo Xún 焦循 (1763–1820) — the great Yángzhōu kǎozhèng mathematician and classicist — and with the wider Yángzhōu circle including 阮元 Ruǎn Yuán (who had recently published the Chóurén zhuàn and the supplementary KR3fa032 Dìqiú túshuō of Michel Benoist with his own bǔtú).
Jiāo argues for the sphericity of the earth by adducing: (a) classical Chinese statements that, on a strong reading, imply sphericity — the Yìzhuàn phrase “the earth is a square (fāng) seven times its diameter” reinterpreted via the Xuánjī / yùhéng armillary tradition; the Shàngshū Yáo diǎn solstitial-equinoctial framework; the Lúshì chūnqiū and Huáinánzǐ passages on the celestial sphere; (b) the empirical evidence introduced by the Jesuits — circumnavigation, the differing visibility of constellations at different latitudes, the curve of the earth’s shadow during a lunar eclipse; (c) the consilience of the two as evidence that the Chinese tradition implicitly held the sphericity position before its explicit articulation by the Jesuits. The work concludes with a brief discussion of how the classical gàitiān 蓋天 model can be reread as a degenerate form of the spherical model.
The text was preserved in Jiāo’s collected works (the Jiāoshì cóngshū 焦氏叢書 of the Yángzhōu Jiāo family) and in the Sìkù wèishōu shū jíkān; it is reprinted in the Zhōngguó kēxué jìshù diǎnjí tōnghuì (refid KX03-07-029). It is consulted in the modern literature as one of the clearest short examples of the xīxué zhōngyuán argument.
Translations and research
- Elman, Benjamin A. 2005. On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. — the principal English-language treatment of the xī-xué zhōng-yuán framework.
- Han Qi 韓琦. 1999. “Astronomy, Chinese and Western: The Influence of Xu Guangqi’s Views in the Early and Mid-Qing Period.”
- Henderson, John B. 1984. The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology. New York: Columbia UP.