The Exploitation of the Works of Nature (Tiangong Kaiwu)

Timeline

1. 1634–1636Fenyi County School, Jiangxi · JiangxiAfter repeatedly failing the metropolitan examinations, Song Yingxing took a post at the Fenyi county school, visiting fields, kilns, mines, and craftsmen, and wrote up his observations into a manuscript organized by production category. He deliberately placed the five grains before gold and jade, criticizing luxury and empty talk of the mind-nature. His preface states that Observing Celestial Phenomena and Musical Pitch-Pipes were deleted before printing, indicating the original manuscript was once larger, ultimately limited to everyday production techniques.
2. 1637Nanchang Prefecture · JiangxiHis fellow townsman and friend Tu Shaokui (courtesy name Boju) funded the printing while in mourning retirement at home, known to the world as the Tu edition, printed in the Nanchang prefecture area. The whole book is about 80,000-plus characters with over a hundred illustrations, the first published printing of Song Yingxing's manuscript. The hasty setting led to many look-alike and sound-alike errors, but the illustrations and process records came directly from the author's own observations, becoming the ancestor of all later collated editions.
3. 1644–1771Network of Chinese-classics reprinting in Edo Japan · EdoAfter the fall of the Ming, the Tu edition circulated very little in China, and Qing writers mostly quoted it through secondhand fragments. During the Edo period, Japanese scholars and booksellers repeatedly reprinted the book as a record of Chinese crafts, preserving the text overseas. European sinology later also came to know Ming technology through editions transmitted eastward, so Song Yingxing's work first gained the name 'encyclopedia' outside China.
4. 1920National Library of China and other collecting institutions · BeijingTwentieth-century scholars reconfirmed three copies of the Tu edition in China, France, and Japan, restoring the complete first printing domestically. Subsequently, Japanese, French, English, German, and other translations appeared one after another, and Joseph Needham and others wrote it into narratives of world history of science and technology. Today it is both a basic source for the history of Ming technology and a standard text through which China and the world understand '17th-century Chinese industrial knowledge.'