Complete Encyclopedia of Agricultural Administration by Xu Guangqi
4 min readXu Guangqi (1562-1633) was born in Shanghai county of Songjiang Fu (present-day Shanghai city). Two events, the baptismal ritual and his conversion to Catholicism in 1603 and his spassing of the highest imperial civil service examinations in 1604, turned out to be the most significant turning points in his life, laying the foundation for later success as the pioneer of science of the Xu Guangqi was the first Chinese to be in systematic contact with Western science and technology as well as the first translator of Euclid’s Elements, a famous ancient Greek works, into Chinese. Today, after 400 years, the principle of “translation, understanding and overtaking”, which was put forward by Xu Guangqi to learn science andtechnology from the West, still sparkles with brilliance.
Xu Guangqi was appointed to supervise the compilation of Chongzhen Almanac(in 137 volumes on 46 categories) while adopting the universe system by Tycho Ottesen Brahe,a Danish astronomer, which was more advanced than the Ptolemaic system introduced by MatteoRicci(however, at that time the more advanced Copernican system had already appeared in the West). Xu Guangqi introduced the idea of spherical earth, the survey bylongitude and latitude, and spherical trigonometry. In mathematics, for the first time he broke through the limitation of Chinese traditional mathematics, and translated the Euclidean geometrical system well-known and admired for its strict logical reasoning. As well, he wasthe first translator of Euclid’s Elements, which he believed “should not be doubted, conjectured, tested and changed”.
Creatively, he put forward the practical 10 aspects about mathematics in his works Ten Perspectives of Practical Use of Mathematics. He spent most of his time and energy on agricultural research, completing many works such as Detailed Annotation on Sweet Potato, Miscellaneous Annotation on Agricultural Heritage, Talks on Plough in the North, Western Techniques of Hydraulics (co-author), of which Complete Encyclopedia of Agricultural Administration was the most influential and significant.
Complete Encyclopedia of Agricultural Administration was another large comprehensive agricultural book which appeared in ancient China after the publishing of Wang Zhen’s Treatise on Agriculture in Yuandynasty. Finished in 1639 in 60 volumes with about 700,000 Chinese characters, the great book comprises 12 categories, in the compiling principle of “absorbing others’ wisdomswhile offering the author’s own insights”.299 different varieties of literature in ancient time, particularly Ming dynasty, were kept, most of which were missing in other compilations. The book focused on agricultural administration which took up more than half of its contents, hence the title of the book, Complete Encyclopedia of Agricultural Administration. The idea of agricultural administration is shown with emphasis on the following four aspects: at first, on agriculture; secondly, on production while maintaining and improving agricultural production in south China, he also suggested developing agricultural production in north China through wasteland land reclamation and water conservancy construction; thirdly, on the imperial policy for disaster prevention and relief, and of the three major disasters of flood, drought and locusts, he gave priority to the locust disaster with the most time and effort in research of the prevention and control of this disaster which he considered to be among the most serious; fourthly, on development of agricultural technology. The main contributions of the book include: ①Scientific development of the theory of natural conditions and advocacy of the approach to assessment of local natural conditions to see whether they were suitable for growth of the crops through experiment, rather than sticking to the sole theory of weather and soil onditions.②Recommendation of a series of measurements to improve farming techniques for dry farmland crops in south China, such as cotton, bean and rape, including the knacks of the farming management of cotton in the Yangtze River delta in 14 Chinese characters: selecting the right and best crop, early sowing, deep rooting and short stems, scattered seedlings arrangement and heaping fertilizer around the roots; also,a proposal for higher yield through such techniques as avoidance of excessive moisture for wheat and rotational farming for broad beans.③ Targeted at the vigorous expansion of sweet potato plantations, it offered the”13 know-hows for successful introduction of sweet potato to the Yangtze River drainage basin from the south China”, with useful information for winter storage of sweet potato on the basis of his experiments.④ For the first time, the book systematically summed up the occurring laws and ways of preventing the locust disaster, identified the locust prevailing periods(between summer and autumn) and the insects’ instinctive preference to habitation near dried up streams; it also put forth a series of measures for locust prevention and control. To sum up, Complete Encyclopedia of Agricultural Administration deserves to be seen as a comprehensive masterpiece on farming techniqueswith remarkable accomplishments in the history of Chinese agriculture.
