Complete Treatise on Agricultural Administration

Timeline

1. 1621–1633Capital / experimental fields in Shanghai and Tianjin · ShanghaiXu Guangqi wrote works such as Notes on Sweet Potatoes and Record of Northern Plowing in his early years; after the Tianqi era he gathered agricultural books from successive dynasties, water-conservancy documents and his own planting experiments in Shanghai and Tianjin into a single compilation. He stressed that water conservancy and famine relief were the core of state agricultural policy, not merely records of farming technique. When he died of illness in the sixth year of Chongzhen, the material was abundant but 'recorded as obtained,' and the entries had not yet been pruned.
2. 1635–1639Songjiang Prefecture, Southern Zhili · SongjiangAround the eighth year of Chongzhen, Xu Guangqi's grandson Xu Erjue handed the manuscript to the Songjiang literatus Chen Zilong. Chen felt the original 'drawn from many sources, recorded as obtained' and, together with Xie Tingzheng, Zhang Mi and others, rechecked it, deleting about a third of the repetitions and adding about a fifth of new text (including Zhang Guowei's water-conservancy discussions and Chen's own notes), organizing it into 60 juan and 12 categories, titled Complete Treatise on Agricultural Administration to reflect Xu's original intent of 'agricultural administration.'
3. 1639–1641Songjiang Prefecture, Southern Zhili · SongjiangYingtian governor-general Zhang Guowei and Songjiang prefect Fang Yuegong funded the printing; the Pinglu Hall edition appeared in the twelfth year of Chongzhen and is the earliest surviving printed edition. Around 1641 Chen Zilong and others presented the book to the Chongzhen emperor. The first printing coincided with late-Ming famines and military pay pressures, and the sections on famine relief, water conservancy and military-agricultural colonies were circulated as workable statecraft proposals.
4. 1837Jiangnan-to-national printing network · ChinaAfter the Daoguang era of the Qing, the Guizhou edition, Shuhailou edition and Shandong Bookshop edition were successively reprinted; the 1959 Zhonghua Shuju collated edition and the 1979 Shi Shenghan annotated edition became the modern standard texts. Its records of sweet potatoes, water conservancy and famine relief make it not only a compilation of farming technique but also a policy document of the late-Ming state crisis, and together with The Exploitation of the Works of Nature it forms the twin masterpieces of 17th-century Chinese practical learning.