Science in China 1600-1900

Distinguished historian Benjamin A Elman's collective volume on the history of Science in imperial China, brings together over 30 years of historical literature on the subject. With updates to the literature and new material including transcripts of podcasts and translated interview articles, Science in China takes the reader on a journey starting in the early 17th Century with the missionary efforts of the Jesuits in China, and ending with the Protestant missions in the 19th Century. These two milestone encounters brought Western sciences to local Chinese scholars with great success in shaping modern Chinese science. Elman studies the interaction between Western and Chinese sciences through philological research and evidence, and treats the two encounters not as separate events but as a continuum of creative exchange of scientific knowledge and discourse.

Readership: Undergraduates and researchers in history of science, Chinese history, history of Chinese science, philology, and history of East Asia and East Asian science.

Benjamin A Elman is Gordon Wu '58 Professor of Chinese Studies and professor of East Asian Studies and History with his primary department in East Asian Studies at Princeton University, USA. His teaching and research fields include: Chinese intellectual and cultural history, 1000 1900; history of science in China, 1600 1930; history of education in late imperial China; and, Sino-Japanese cultural history, 1600 1850. He received his Ph.D. in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (in 1980) and came to Princeton in 2002 from the University of California, Los Angeles. From 1999 to 2001, he was the Mellon Visiting Professor in Traditional Chinese Civilization at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, New Jersey). His previous publications include: From Philosophy to Philology (1984, 1990, 2001); Classicism, Politics, and Kinship (1990); A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (2000); On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550 1900 (2005); and, A Cultural History of Modern Science in Late Imperial China (2006). In 2011, Professor Elman was selected as one of the three winners of the Andrew W Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.

About the Editor

Ho Yi Kai is Manager and Assistant Editor-in-Chief of World Century Publishing Corp., and Senior Editor at World Scientific Publishing Co. His teaching and research interests include Chinese Classical Literature, Chinese Philology, Bibliology and Overseas Chinese. He received his BA from Peking University, and MA and PhD from Nanjing University, China. He was a Teaching Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Research Associate at the Chinese Heritage Centre at the university. He published Studies on the Pictorial Biography of Qing Dynasty Scholars (2010) in Chinese.