ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Imperial Calculators of China's Qing Dynasty

• In Event: Science, Authority, and Circulation

English Abstract

The Palace Museum (Forbidden City) preserves six rotating-disk calculators made for the Qing court. These boxed instruments enclose gear trains and hidden mechanical parts; this design sets them apart from other mathematical devices in the palace. Tracing the introduction of these objects into China helps clarify how specific forms of European mechanical knowledge reached the Qing court and were reshaped there. This paper draws on direct examination of the instruments to analyze their form, operating mechanisms, workshop practice, and courtly context to investigate the rotating-disk calculators’ intellectual genealogy and the circumstances of their manufacture. I argue that the palace rotating-disk calculators are modeled on the disc device invented by Hillerin de Boistissandeau and were most probably produced during the early eighteenth century, in the transition between the Kangxi and Yongzheng reigns. In the Qing court their practical utility was often secondary: the devices functioned primarily as delicate symbols of contact with European expertise and were gradually pushed to the margins of court practice. This paper traces the diffusion of rotating-disk calculators in China and uses this small group of objects to show how imported mechanical techniques could be maintained in the palace even as their status and meaning at court declined. In this sense, the case makes visible how European and Qing actors inhabited different mechanical worlds and disputed scientific authority at the Qing court in the early eighteenth century.

Author

• Xintong Yang