Wáng Yīngmíng 王英明
Style name Zǐhuì 子晦. Native of Kāizhōu 開州 (also written Chánzhōu 澶州 / Chányuān 澶淵, in modern Púyáng 濮陽 of Hénán). Jǔrén (provincial graduate) of Wànlì bǐngwǔ (1606); did not advance to the jìnshì degree, returning instead to private scholarship and teaching in his native locality.
A late-Wànlì-period polymath specializing in calendrics, the pitch-pipes, military strategy, agricultural-and-frontier defense (tún 屯), water-conservancy, and river-management — the broad applied-science curriculum of the Confucian-scholar-as-statesman ideal that Xú Guāngqǐ also exemplified. The preface to his Lìtǐ lüè by his son’s collaborator Wēng Hànlín 翁漢麐 (1646) describes him as “broad in talent and learning, with no aspect of calendrics, pitch-pipes, military matters, agricultural-and-frontier defense, river-and-water control that he did not deeply investigate” and as “outstanding among the great Confucians of the age”. His jǔrén-eligibility level prevented him from entering the highest official ranks; he refused to seek further examination and devoted himself to teaching and writing.
His principal extant work is the Lìtǐ lüè 歷體略 (KR3f0017), in 3 juàn, completed Wànlì rénzǐ (1612) — a foundational mid-late-Wànlì work on astronomical-cosmological theory that, remarkably, already integrates the European nine-spheres cosmology, the Sino-Jesuit account of solar and lunar eclipses, and other elements of post-Ricci astronomical doctrine, although Wáng Yīngmíng is not known to have been a Catholic convert nor a direct collaborator with the Beijing Jesuit residence. The 提要 of his work observes that “although [Wáng’s] middle and lower juàn expound Chinese methods, [these methods] are also in agreement with the Western methods. For at this time, although Xú Guāngqǐ’s Xīnfǎ suànshū had not yet emerged, Lì Mǎdòu had previously arrived in China and his teachings had been transmitted; therefore Yīngmíng tacitly used them”. This suggests an indirect transmission of Ricci’s astronomical teachings into the broader literati culture by 1612, a decade before the formal Chóngzhēn calendar-reform project — important documentation of the Wànlì-period reach of the Jesuit astronomical synthesis beyond its inner converted circle.
His son Wáng Yǎng 王懩 served as Jiāngnán Dūliángdào (Grain-Transport Circuit Intendant) under the early Qīng (Shùnzhì bǐngxū = 1646); when Wáng Yǎng undertook to print his father’s posthumous Lìtǐ lüè in 1646, he commissioned Wēng Hànlín 翁漢麐 (the “Great-Wú” 東吳 scholar) to supply the diagrams that Wáng Yīngmíng had deliberately not included. Wēng’s preface explains the four geometric difficulties that, in Wáng’s view, made any planar diagram of the spherical heavens inevitably misleading — a striking late-Wànlì cosmological self-awareness about the limitations of two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional celestial geometry. The recension preserved in the Sìkù is this 1646 Wáng Yǎng / Wēng Hànlín edition.