Bèi Lín 貝琳
Style name Zōngqì 宗器, hào Zhúxī Zhuōyú 竹溪拙臾. Ancestral home Dìnghǎi 定海 in Níngbō (Zhèjiāng); born and raised in Jīnlíng 金陵 (Nánjīng), where his father had been resettled in the Míng military-household-registration system. Birth year not securely recorded; died Hóngzhì 3 (1490).
Trained in classical learning as a youth in hopes of escaping the hereditary military registration; then went north to the capital to study astronomy and calendrical computation. Conscripted under the Zhèngtǒng frontier emergency, then rehabilitated into the civil bureaucracy of the Qīntiānjiān 欽天監 (Imperial Astronomical Bureau): Tiānshùn 1 (1457) appointed Lòukè bóshì 漏刻博士 (Erudite of the Clepsydra). Promoted to Wǔguān língtái láng 五官靈台郎 after answering Yīngzōng’s summons on a tiānxiàng shìjǐng (heavenly-warning) consultation; further promoted to Jiànfù 監副 (Vice Director) in Chénghuà 6 (1470); transferred to the Nánjīng branch of the Bureau as Jiànfù in Chénghuà 8 (1472), where he settled. The Bèi-family thereafter held Qīntiānjiān posts in succession through seven generations, until the fall of the Míng — one of the great hereditary astronomical lines of late-imperial China.
His principal extant work is the Qīzhèng tuībù 七政推步 (KR3f0006), in 7 juàn, completed at the Nánjīng Qīntiānjiān in Chénghuà 13 (1477). It is his thoroughgoing compilation-and-rectification of the early-Míng-translated Islamic-derived Huíhuí lì 回回曆 — the calendar originally compiled by the Khwarezmian astronomer Mashā ‘Aytah (馬沙亦黑 → 提要 emendation 瑪沙伊赫), translated into Chinese by Lǐ Chōng 李翀 and Wú Bózōng 吳伯宗 in Hóngwǔ 15 (1382), and held in working manuscript at the Bureau without printing for nearly a century. Bèi Lín’s contribution was to collate, complete the lacunae, supplement ten essential ready-reckoner tables (including solar-and-lunar longitude and the planets’ mean-motion zhōngxíng tables), append the first 277-star Sino-Western nomenclature concordance, and the first set of thirteen ecliptic-coordinate star-charts — and to print the result as a usable manual. Through Bèi Lín’s edition, the Huíhuí lì tradition entered the textual record of Chinese astronomy; Méi Wéndǐng 梅文鼎 of the Qīng later observed (in Lìsuàn shūjì 厯算書記) that “the Huíhuí lì was engraved by Bèi Lín”.
Bèi Lín’s tomb (and his wife’s) lies in the present-day Dōngshān street area of Jiāngníng district, Nánjīng; rediscovered in 2016 and listed as a Nánjīng municipal cultural-heritage site in September 2023.