An Encounter of Incommensurables: European Cosmological Knowledge in the Fenye Chapters of Chinese Local Gazetteers (1660-1820)

Abstract

It has often been argued that the introduction of early modern European cosmology at the turn of the seventeenth century by Jesuit missionaries—subsumed under the generic term “Western learning” (xixue 西學)—signalled the demise of traditional fenye (分野, or “field allocation”) theory, as the concept of Earth’s sphericity and the widened sense of world geography are fundamentally at odds with the Sinocentric worldview underpinning fenye. However, the fenye chapters in Qing dynasty local gazetteers tell a different story: in comparison with earlier Ming gazetteers their proportion increased. These chapters rarely take a stance against Western learning. Rather, they invoke Western learning as part and parcel of the imperially sanctioned astronomy to be reckoned with, or even suggest it as a remedy for flaws in traditional fenye techniques, leading to a plurality of discourses in which Sino-Western relationships become entangled with tension between the imperial and the local. This phenomenon is particularly visible in the peripheral regions of the empire, such as Guangxi, as these were traditionally marginalised in the Sinocentric cosmology of the fenye system. This paper explores cosmological discourses to answer the following questions: What were the agendas that Western learning was made to serve in these gazetteers? How did local endeavours relate to court-sponsored imperial projects? What were their sources of knowledge on matters of Western learning, and how can we map out the geography of Western learning based on these local sources?

Keywords

• field allocation (fenye)
• western learning
• local gazetteers
• geography of knowledge
• scientific incommensurability