Xuānxī tōng 宣西通
A Comprehensive Connection of the [Hóngfàn] Xuán and the West by 許桂林 (撰)
About the work
The Xuānxī tōng is a four-juǎn synthesist monograph by 許桂林 Xǔ Guìlín (1779–1821) that takes the xuánjī yùhéng 璿璣玉衡 passage of the Hóngfàn 洪範 — and by extension the xuán 璿 / xuān 宣 of the classical canonical vocabulary — as the framework into which the Jesuit-introduced astronomical theory (Tychonic, Keplerian, and after Benoist also Copernican-heliocentric) can be inserted as a refinement-and-completion. The title pair xuān + xī + tōng literally encodes the thesis: the classical Xuān / Xuán + the Western — a comprehensive connection (tōng 通).
Abstract
Composition window: Xǔ’s mature scholarly years c. 1810–1821 (he died in 1821 at age 42). The work is one of the most influential late-Jiā-qìng synthesist texts in the xīxué zhōngyuán lineage; Xǔ argues, with extensive philological apparatus, that the Hóngfàn’s “xuánjī yùhéng” already contains the celestial-and-equatorial coordinate system, the precession-of-the-equinoxes phenomenon, and the qīzhèng planetary apparatus, and that the Jesuit-introduced empirical refinements are the recovery of, rather than the replacement of, the classical Chinese cosmology.
The four juǎn cover: (a) Xuánjī yùhéng and the celestial-equatorial reference system; (b) the Yáo diǎn solstitial-equinoctial framework and the precession problem; (c) the qīzhèng (Sun, Moon, planets) and the Tychonic-Keplerian theory; (d) the Hóngfàn jiǔchóu 洪範九疇 as the master frame within which the previous three reductions take their place.
The text is preserved in Xǔ’s collected works (Yuènán xiānshēng wénjí 月南先生文集) and in the Sìkù wèishōu shū jíkān; it is reprinted in the Zhōngguó kēxué jìshù diǎnjí tōnghuì (refid KX03-07-030). Companion digest: KR3fa035 Xuānxī tōng (a shorter version of the same work, also by Xǔ, catalog reference KXDLJ0031311).
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language translation located.
- Elman, Benjamin A. 2005. On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. — sets out the late-Qián-Jiā synthesis tradition that Xǔ continues.
- Henderson, John B. 1984. The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology. New York: Columbia UP.
- Han Qi 韓琦. 1999. “Astronomy, Chinese and Western.”