Zhāng Yōngjìng 張雍敬
Style name Jiǎnān 簡菴. Native of Xīnchéng 新塍, Xiùshuǐ 秀水 (Jiāxīng prefecture, Zhèjiāng). Late-Kāng-xī calendrical scholar; CBDB c_personid 511281 (dynasty Qing, no birth/death years recorded). Active in the closing decades of the seventeenth century alongside the leading Qīng lìsuàn 曆算 figures Wáng Xīchǎn 王錫闡 (Yínxù 寅旭, 1628–1682) of Wújiāng and Méi Wéndǐng 梅文鼎 (Dìngjiǔ 定九, 1633–1721) of Xuānchéng, both of whom Zhū Yízūn’s preface to KR3fb021 reports him to have consulted.
His one surviving major work is the Dìnglì yùhéng 定歷玉衡 (“Jade Balance for Fixing the Calendar”) in 21 juàn (KR3fb021), a substantial calendrical reform proposal that “comprehensively investigated 56 schools of calendrical method, corrected 44 errors of past and present calendrics, and produced a book in 18 juàn” (later expanded to 21). The work was prefaced by his Xiùshuǐ townsman Zhū Yízūn 朱彝尊 (1629–1709) and circulated among the Qīng lìsuàn circle in the 1690s–1700s.
Zhāng’s distinctive position in the Qīng reception of Western astronomy was one of defence of native Chinese methods against the Jesuit-derived Shíxiàn lì, articulated in the formula (preserved in the Zhū Yízūn preface): “whatever the Western methods drown in number and exceed in principle, what they arrogate as unknowable — these we do not accept their delusions” (凡西洋之言溺于數之中出于理之外傲人以所不知者弗受其惑). This places him alongside Wáng Xīchǎn — but not Méi Wéndǐng — in the explicitly conservative camp of Qīng lìsuàn scholarship.