Chinese Intellectual History

An Extended Bibliography

General Studies

Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 2, History of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956.

Unschuld, Paul. Medicine in China: A History of Ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Métailié, Georges. Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology, Part 4, Traditional Botany: An Ethnobotanical Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Sterckx, Roel, Martina Siebert and Dagmar Schäfer, eds. Animals through Chinese History Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Harbsmeier, Christoph. Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 7, Part 1, Logic and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Furth, Charlotte, Judith Zeitlin and Hsiung Ping-chen, eds. Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.

Early and Middle Periods

Sivin, Nathan. Cosmos and Computation in Early Chinese Mathematical Astronomy. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969.

Graham, A. C. Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978.

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books, 1999.

Sterckx, Roel. The Animal and the Daemon in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.

Lloyd, Geoffrey, and Nathan Sivin. The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Barbieri-Low, Anthony. Artisans in Early Imperial China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.

Bray, Francesca. Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.

Chia, Lucille and Hilde de Weerdt, eds. Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print: China, 900-1400. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Furth, Charlotte. A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Chen, Ruth Yun-Ju. “The Quest for Efficiency: Knowledge Management in Medical Formularies.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 80, no. 2 (2020): 347-380.

Kim, Yung Sik. The Natural Philosophy of Chu Hsi (1130-1200). Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2000.

Brose, Michael C. "Uyghur Technologists of Writing and Literacy in Mongol China." T'oung Pao, vol. 91, no. 4-5 (2005): 396-435.

Late Imperial Era

Bray, Francesca. Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Hanson, Marta, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

Wu, Yi-li. Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Hofmann, Martin, Kurtz Joachim, and Ari Daniel Levine, eds. Powerful Arguments: Standards of Validity in Late Imperial China. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020.

Bian, He. Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Early Modern Culture in China, 1500-1800. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Elman, Benjamin A. On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Asper, Markus, ed. Thinking in Cases: Ancient Greek and Imperial Chinese Case Narratives. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019.

Smith, Richard. Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.

Ruitenbeek, Klaas. Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China: A Study of the 15th Century Carpenters Manual Lu Ban Jing. New York: Brill, 1996.

Nappi, Carla. The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Schaefer, Dagmar. The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth Century China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Vedal, Nathan. The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.

Hsia, Florence. Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Zhang, Qiong. Making the New World Their Own: Chinese Encounters with Jesuit Science in the Age of Discovery. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Engelfriet, Peter. Euclid in China: The Genesis of the First Chinese Translation of Euclid’s Elements Books I-VI and its Reception up to 1723. Leiden: Brill, 1998.

Peterson, Willard J. “Changing Literati Attitudes toward New Learning in Astronomy and Mathematics in Early Qing.” Monumenta Serica, vol. 50, (2002): 375-390.

Noel, Golvers. Libraries of Western Learning for China: Circulation of Western Books between Europe and China in the Jesuit Mission (ca. 1650-1750) of Books and readers. Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Institute, 2015.

Bai, Limin. “Mathematical Study and Intellectual Transition in the Early and Mid-Qing.” Late Imperial China, vol. 16, no. 2 (1995): 23-61.

Jami, Catherine. The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority During the Kangxi Reign (1662-1722). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Perkins, Franklin. Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Hostetler, Laura. Qing Colonial Enterprise, Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Saarela, Mårten Söderblom. The Early Modern Travels of Manchu: A Script and Its Study in East Asia and Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.

Chu, Ping-yi. “Technical Knowledge, Cultural Practices and Social Boundaries: Wan-nan Scholars and the Recasting of Jesuit Astronomy, 1600-1800.” PhD Diss., UCLA, 1994.

He, Yingtian. “Well-Ordered Textures: The Book of Odes and the Study of Wu in Mid-Qing China.” PhD Diss., Princeton University, 2023.

Mosca, Matthew. From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Brown, Tristan. Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

Barnes, Linda L. Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts, China Healing and the West to 1848, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Fan, Fa-ti. British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Wright, David. Translating Science: The Transmission of Western Chemistry into Late Imperial China, 1840-1900. Leiden: Brill, 2001.

Liu, Lydia H. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Lean, Eugenia. Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900–1940. New York : Columbia University Press, 2020.