Abstract
China has the longest astronomical heritage of any country of the world. Systematic astronomical records began to be kept in the eighth century BC and continue more or less uninterrupted up to the present day. Whilst astronomy in Babylon, the only other great civilization in the ancient world from which a vast array of astronomical records is preserved, had more or less ceased by the first century AD, the traditional astronomy of China that had developed by the Han dynasty (c. 200 BC), continued up until the start of the present century. That is not to say, however, that astronomy in China was not influenced at times by other cultures. For example, during the Yuan dynasty, many Islamic astronomers were invited to the Chinese capital, and an Islamic Observatory was set up.1 More significantly, when the Jesuits came to China in the seventeenth century AD they brought with them western astronomical knowledge with which they helped to reform the Chinese calendar.2 However, throughout all of this, Chinese astronomy retained a character all of its own. Furthermore, it was to be at the root of all of the astronomy which was to develop in the two other great ancient and medieval cultures of East Asia, Japan and Korea.
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References
Yabuuti & van Dalen (1997).
For discussions of the activities of the Jesuit astronomers in China, see d’ Elia (1960) and Bernard (1973).
Ho (1970).
Nakayama (1969: 18–19).
Needham (1954).
Needham (1954: 134).
Xu, Yau & Stephenson (1989); Xu, Stephenson & Jiang (1995).
Stephenson & Yau (1992).
Han (1955).
In modem Chinese usage, T’ien-wen means astronomy, but in the context of early Chinese history, it may be more appropriate to translate the term as astrology. See Nakayama (1966: 442). This Table is based upon the work of Han (1955).
Yabuuti (1973).
Yabuuti (1974).
Cullen (1993).
The gaps in the Table relate to dates where it is not clear which calendar was adopted.
Yabuuti (1979).
An English translation of the Hui-hui-li with commentary is currently being prepared by B. van Dalen.
The apparent precision of this value simply comes from a minor alteration of the value from the preceding Ssu fenli of 365 math = 365 5math . See Sivin (1969: 12). 19 A list of the values of the constants in the various calendars is given by Yabuuti (1963a, 1963b).
Yabuuti (1963a: 460–470).
Liu & Stephenson (1998).
Yabuuti (1963a: 462).
Yabuuti (1963a: 469).
Sivin (1986).
For example, in Liu Hsiang’s Wu-ching T’ung-i. See Needham (1959: 414).
This is one of several arguments made against the “astronomical” explanation of eclipses by Wang Ch’ung in chapter 32 of his Lun Heng. See Forke (1907: 269) and Needham (1959: 411–413).
Translations of the relevant parts of these calendars are given by Sivin (1969). In addition, he gives a detailed discussion of the two (astronomically equivalent) methods described in the Ssu -fen-li with worked examples. For additional discussions, see Eberhard & Müller (1936) and, briefly, Aaboe (1972).
Rounding down in this way implies that the initial eclipse was at one extreme of the nodal zone. However, this implication is not explicitly stated in the text, and may not have been considered by the early Chinese astronomers.
In practice, of course, this would break down since the relation 23 eclipse possibilities = 135 months is not without error.
For a general discussion of these cycles, see Sivin (1966, 1969).
Yabuuti (1973).
Yabuuti (1963a: 476).
Yabuuti (1963a: 479).
The k’o is a unit of time such that there are 100 k’o in one day. See Section 6.5 below.
Nakayama (1969: 144–145).
Yabuuti (1963a: 482–483).
See Chiu T’ang-shu, 35 for a description of the work. This has been translated and discussed by Beer et al. (1961), who remark that it is “one of the most remarkable pieces of organized field research in the ear ly middle ages: ‘
Sivin (1997) has translated the Shou-shih-li I, a discussion of the calendar contained in the Yuan-shih, into English in an unpublished manuscript. A detailed discussion of the Shou-shih-li is given by Nakayama (1969: 123–150).
Or, alternatively, 4 math marks in each of the initial and central halves of a double hour if this system was being used.
Maspero (1939).
Maspero (1939).
It should be noted that Maspero analyses the sunrise and sunset timings to try to determine their accuracy, having already assumed that the small mark was at the end of the double hour on the basis of the limited written evidence discussed above.
Although, of course, the distribution of the errors is certainly not random. At least in part, this is probably a factor of the interpolation used in calculating the length of day and night throughout the year. This and the following graphs seem to suggest that the Chinese customarily used a ratio for the longest to the shortest night which was slightly too small.
This is explicitly stated in the second set of times and may be inferred for the first set from the times themselves which would otherwise have sunrise and sunset an hour earlier than the true value.
Needham, Lu, Combridge, & Major (1986: 9).
Needham (1959: 315–317).
Needham (1959: 327).
Forte (1988).
The Hsin I Hsiang Fa Yuo has been translated into English by Needham, Wang & de Solla Price (1986).
Needham (1965: 494–498).
Bo (1997).
Needham 1965: 508).
Hua (1997).
See Stephenson (1994) for a list of the lunar lodges.
Some commentators, for example Stephenson (1997a), have interpreted phrases such as Chih wei hou 1 k’o as meaning “the 1 st mark in the central half of the hour of wei.” However, the practice of splitting the double hour into an initial and a central half did not come into general use until later times and a more likely reading is “after the 1 st mark of the hour of wei,” as I have given above. I am grateful to Dr. Liu Ciyuan of Shaanxi Observatory, China, for a helpful discussion of this issue.
I follow Sivin (1997) in the translation of these terms.
Or, at least, are not among the limited collection of work that is readily available to modem scholars.
Mo-k’o Hui-hsu, 7; trans. Needham, Wang, & de Solla Price (1996: 16).
We might speculate that the records in the Yuan-shih, which were compiled by an author involved in calendar reform, are more likely to have come from the Bureau of Astronomy and Calendar where he presumably worked, albeit many years later, and the records in the Wen-hsien T’ung-k’ao to have come from the Astronomical Department of the Imperial Academy. However, there is no firm evidence either way.
Despite P’eng Ch’eng’s comment that the astronomers in the observatories “contented themselves with copying out the positions of the sun, moon, and planets according to very rough ephemerides ... never using the (astronomical equipment in the) observatory” [Mo-k’o Hua-hsi, 7; trans. Needham, Wang & de Solla Price (1986: 16)], these very inaccurate times cannot have been calculated. The Sung calendars were able to predict the time of an eclipse to at least within an hour. Furthermore, calculating an eclipse time using these methods is not an easy task — certainly requiring more effort than actually observing the eclipse.
Stephenson & Fatoohi (1995); Fatoohi & Stephenson (1996). .
And, for the lunar eclipses, to the greater length of the night watches in winter than in summer.
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Steele, J.M. (2000). China. In: Observations and Predictions of Eclipse Times by Early Astronomers. Archimedes, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9528-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9528-5_6
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