Historians of science and technology have not identified the eighteenth century as one of the most significant periods in Chinese history. The ambitious examination of the world of science and civilization in China by Joseph Needham is explicitly confined to the period up to the end of the sixteenth century, and other works, examining the contributions of the Jesuits, stress the importance of the seventeenth century. The more conservative atmosphere of the mid-Qing (c. 1720–1820), marked by the orthodox neo-Confucianism promoted by the Manchu rulers, stands in contrast to the more open intellectual climate of the late Ming (c. 1550–1644) and early Qing (c.1644–1720). By the early eighteenth century, Jesuits were limited both by the relatively obsolete nature of their knowledge and by their closer integration at court level. Outside the imperial capital at Beijing, the most important trends in eighteenth-century scholarship were marked by a shift away from an interest in Jesuit science toward a rediscovery of ancient knowledge. In the Yangzi Delta, followers of evidential scholarship (kaozhengxue), or philological “search for evidence, ” were concerned with precise scholarship and practical matters, but they generally appropriated Jesuit science in efforts to “rediscover” their own presumed scientific tradition rather than attempting to contribute new knowledge to mathematics and astronomy.

JESUIT SCIENCE

If the seventeenth century was a significant period of cultural interaction between Jesuit missionaries and Confucian scholars, little further scientific knowledge was transmitted during the eighteenth century. Not only were the Jesuits mainly interested in using science as a way of achieving religious aims, but also the Church’s injunction in 1616 against the teaching of heliocentric astronomy, as well as other aspects of science, severely limited the nature of their knowledge.