By Catherine Jami
ISBN-10: 0199601402
ISBN-13: 9780199601400
In 1644 the Qing dynasty seized strength in China. Its Manchu elite have been at the start visible by way of so much in their matters as foreigners from past the good Wall, and the consolidation of Qing rule awarded major cultural and political difficulties, in addition to army demanding situations. It was once the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722) who set the dynasty on an organization footing, and one in every of his major stratagems to accomplish this was once the appropriation for imperial reasons of the clinical wisdom delivered to China via the Jesuit challenge (1582-1773).
For virtually centuries, the Jesuits positioned the sciences within the carrier of evangelization, educating and working towards what got here to be often called 'Western studying' between chinese language students, a lot of whom took an energetic curiosity in it. After coming to the throne as undefined, Kangxi started his life-long intervention in mathematical and clinical concerns whilst he compelled a go back to using Western equipment in authentic astronomy. In heart existence, he studied astronomy, musical conception and arithmetic, with Jesuits as his lecturers. In his final years he backed a superb compilation protecting those 3 disciplines, and set a number of of his sons to paintings in this venture. All of this task shaped an integral part of his plan to set up Manchu authority over the chinese language. This ebook explains why Kangxi made the sciences a device for laying the rules of empire, and to teach how, as a part of this procedure, arithmetic was once reconstructed as a department of imperial learning.