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Although the history of technological and scientific illustrations is a well-established field in the West, scholarship on the much longer Chinese experience is still undeveloped. This work by Peter Golas is a short, illustrated overview tracing the subject to pre-Han inscriptions but focusing mainly on the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. His main theme is that technological drawings developed in a different way in China from in the West largely because they were made by artists rather than by specialist illustrators or practitioners of technology. He examines the techniques of these artists, their use of painting, woodblock prints and the book, and what their drawings reveal about changing technology in agriculture, industry, architecture, astronomical, military, and other spheres. The text is elegantly written, and the images, about 100 in all, are carefully chosen. This is likely to appeal to both scholars and general readers.
Price: £43.00
Pages: 252
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Imprint: Hong Kong University Press
Publication Date:
02 January 2015
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9789888208159
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
“Picturing Technology develops a rich and convincing analysis of technology’s place in the material, intellectual and aesthetic traditions of Chinese civilisation. This pathbreaking work by one of the leading historians of technology in China also challenges us to rethink a key question about the rise of the modern world: how closely do skills in technological illustration relate to mechanical understanding, invention or technological achievement?”
—Francesca Bray, University of Edinburgh
—Francesca Bray, University of Edinburgh