Shen Kuo

• 1. Introduction

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  Shen Kuo, writing in 1088 from a garden estate he called Dream Brook, described how a steel needle rubbed with lodestone would point not due south but slightly east. With that observation, a Chinese official set down the first known explanation of magnetic declination. In Europe, no one would grasp the same idea for another four hundred years. The man who wrote it lived from 1031 to 1095, during the Northern Song dynasty. He held office as a finance minister, a state inspector, and head of the Bureau of Astronomy. He commanded soldiers, argued borders with a hostile king, and was eventually disgraced and exiled from court. How did one civil servant come to write about fossils, eclipses, drydocks, printing, tornadoes, and a glowing object hovering over a city at night? And why, after such range, did later scholars complain he never built a single grand theory to hold it all together?

• 2. Wit And Determination

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  Qiantang, modern-day Hangzhou, was where Shen Kuo was born in 1031, into a family that could not boast the prominent northern clan history of his elite peers. His father Shen Zhou served only minor provincial posts. His mother, whose maiden name was Xu, came from Suzhou and gave Kuo his first education herself. She taught him and his brother Pi the military doctrines of her own elder brother, Xu Dong. Lacking a famous lineage, Shen had to rely on his own wit and stern determination to pass the imperial examinations and enter the life of a state bureaucrat. From about 1040, the family moved around Sichuan province and finally to the seaport at Xiamen, where his father took minor posts in each new place. The boy watched the diverse topography of the land as they traveled, and absorbed the managerial problems his father faced in governance. Because he often fell ill as a child, Shen developed a natural curiosity about medicine and pharmaceutics. When Shen Zhou died in the late winter of 1051, his son was twenty-one, and Confucian custom kept him in mourning until 1054, when he began serving in minor local posts.

• 3. The Climb At Court

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  In 1063 Shen Kuo passed the imperial examinations and was placed among the best and brightest students. Serving at Yangzhou, his dutiful character caught the eye of Zhang Chu, the Fiscal Intendant, who recommended him for a court appointment and whose daughter Shen would later marry as his second wife. By 1072 he had been appointed head official of the Bureau of Astronomy, responsible for reforming the calendar alongside his colleague Wei Pu. His talent for economy and finance carried him to the post of Finance Commissioner at the central court. At court Shen attached himself to Chancellor Wang Anshi, leader of the Reformist faction known as the New Policies Group. The bond had roots: Wang had written the funerary epitaph for Shen's own father. In 1072 Shen dredged silt from the Bian Canal outside the capital and proved its worth as fertilizer. He became one of eighteen core political loyalists in Wang Anshi's elite circle. The scholar Li Zhiyi recorded that Shen so admired a female mathematician named Hu Wenrou that he lamented, "If only she were a man, Wenrou would be my friend."

• 4. Diplomat And Soldier

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  In the summer of 1075 Shen Kuo rode to the camp of the Khitan monarch at Mt. Yongan, near modern Pingquan in Hebei. The Khitans of the Liao dynasty had been pushing their borders south, bullying a string of weak Song ambassadors into concessions. Shen arrived armed with copies of previously archived diplomatic negotiations between the Song and Liao. He refuted Emperor Daozong's bluffs point for point, and the Song reestablished their rightful border. Five years later the brush gave way to the sword. In 1080 Shen was entrusted as a military officer defending Yanzhou, modern-day Yan'an in Shaanxi province. During the autumn of 1081 he captured several fortified towns of the Western Xia. In the sixteen months of his campaign, the Emperor Shenzong sent him 273 letters. But the Emperor also trusted an arrogant officer who ignored Shen's plan for strategic fortifications, expelled him from the main citadel, and then led his own forces to ruin. Xinzhong Yao states the death toll reached 60,000. Shen still held his own fortifications and the one possible Tangut invasion route to Yanzhou.

• 5. Disgrace And Dream Brook

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  Cai Que, the new Chancellor, held Shen Kuo responsible for the disaster and the loss of life, abandoned the territory Shen had fought for, and ousted him from office. Shen was placed under probation in a fixed residence for the next six years. Cut off from governance, he picked up the ink brush and turned to intensive scholarly study. After completing two geographical atlases for a state-sponsored program, his probation was lifted and his earlier faults pardoned. In the 1070s he had purchased a lavish garden estate on the outskirts of modern-day Zhenjiang, in Jiangsu province. He named it Dream Brook, or Mengxi, after visiting it for the first time in 1086. Shen moved there permanently in 1088 and, that same year, completed the Dream Pool Essays, naming the book after the property. There he enjoyed what he called the "nine guests": the Chinese zither, an older variant of weiqi, Zen meditation, ink, tea, alchemy, chanting poetry, conversation, and wine. He spent his last years in leisure, isolation, and illness, until his death in 1095.

• 6. Reading The Earth

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  While visiting the Taihang Mountains in 1074, Shen Kuo noticed a horizontal belt of bivalve shells and ovoid rocks running through a cliff hundreds of miles from the ocean. He concluded the cliff had once been an ancient seashore that had since shifted hundreds of miles east. From this he formed a hypothesis of land formation, reasoning that erosion of mountains, uplift, and the deposition of silt had reshaped the continent over an enormous span of time. Around 1080, a landslide on a riverbank near Yanzhou revealed hundreds of petrified bamboos still intact with roots and trunks, all turned to stone, several dozens of feet underground. Bamboo did not grow in that northern region in his day. Shen deduced that the climate of Yanzhou must once have been damp and gloomy enough to support it, an early reckoning with gradual climate change. His account of soil erosion predated Georgius Agricola's book of 1546, and his theory of sedimentary deposition predated James Hutton, whose 1802 work is considered the foundation of modern geology.

• 7. Mirrors, Needles, And Type

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  Experimenting with a concave mirror, Shen Kuo noted that the image it produced was inverted, and he compared optical image inversion to an oarlock and a waisted drum. He was the first to note the relationship among three radiation phenomena: the focal point, the burning point, and the pinhole. He never claimed to be the first to handle camera obscura, hinting that the inverted image of a seaside pagoda had appeared in Duan Chengshi's writings during the Tang dynasty. On the compass, beyond declination, he judged the suspended magnetic needle the best form and preferred a twenty-four-point rose over the old eight cardinal points. Shen also rescued an inventor from oblivion. He wrote at length about the ceramic movable type printing of Bi Sheng, an obscure commoner and artisan who lived from 990 to 1051 and worked during the Qingli reign period. Without Shen's account, nothing of Bi Sheng would be known. When Bi Sheng died, Shen wrote, his fount of type passed to Shen's own followers, who kept it as a precious possession. A printer named Yao Shu later persuaded a disciple to print texts using what he called the "movable type of Shen Kuo."

• 8. Curiosities And A Pearl

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  Lightning once struck a house and left every wooden wall merely blackened, the lacquerwares untouched, yet metal objects melted into liquid. Shen Kuo refused to dismiss it. "Most people can only judge of things by the experiences of ordinary life, but phenomena outside the scope of this are really quite numerous," he wrote. He was a believer in destiny and divination who still warned against assuming all of life was preordained. In the "Strange Happenings" passage of the Dream Pool Essays, he recorded an object as bright as a pearl that hovered over Yangzhou at night during the reign of Emperor Renzong. A man near Xingkai Lake claimed it emitted lights like sunbeams over a ten-mile radius before departing at tremendous speed. A poet of Gaoyou named Yibo wrote a poem about it, and locals around Fanliang erected a "Pearl Pavilion" where spectators on boats hoped to glimpse it again. Sivin praised Shen for being perhaps the first in history to distinguish our unconnected experiences from the unified causal world we postulate to explain them. Yet Sivin also wrote that this originality stands "cheek by jowl with trivial didacticism, court anecdotes, and ephemeral curiosities."

  Joseph Needham called Shen Kuo "one of the greatest scientific minds in Chinese history," and the French sinologist Jacques Gernet found in him an "amazingly modern mind." Xinzhong Yao judged his Dream Pool Essays an indispensable primary source attesting to the unmatched level of Chinese science before the twelfth century. The same Yao noted that Shen's legacy was tainted by his eager involvement in Wang Anshi's reforms. The harsher verdicts targeted his method, not his merit. Toby Huff wrote that Shen's "scattered set" of writings lacked clear organization and theoretical acuteness. Donald Holzman observed that Shen had nowhere organized his observations into anything like a general theory. Sivin concluded that the one common thread running through all that diverse knowledge was the varied responsibilities of Shen's career as a high civil servant. The Dream Pool Essays survives as some 507 separate essays, much of his other writing lost to the purges of minister Cai Jing. In 1964 the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing discovered a new asteroid and named it 2027 Shen Guo.