108 Facts About Shen Kuo

Shen Kuo or Shen Gua, courtesy name Cunzhong and pseudonym Mengqi Weng, was a Chinese polymath, scientist, and statesman of the Song dynasty.

Shen Kuo discovered the concept of true north in terms of magnetic declination towards the north pole, with experimentation of suspended magnetic needles and "the improved meridian determined by Shen Kuo's [astronomical] measurement of the distance between the pole star and true north".

Alongside his colleague Wei Pu, Shen Kuo planned to map the orbital paths of the Moon and the planets in an intensive five-year project involving daily observations, yet this was thwarted by political opponents at court.

Shen Kuo devised a geological hypothesis for land formation, based upon findings of inland marine fossils, knowledge of soil erosion, and the deposition of silt.

Shen Kuo proposed a hypothesis of gradual climate change, after observing ancient petrified bamboos that were preserved underground in a dry northern habitat that would not support bamboo growth in his time.

Shen Kuo was the first literary figure in China to mention the use of the drydock to repair boats suspended out of water, and wrote of the effectiveness of the relatively new invention of the canal pound lock.

Shen Kuo wrote several other books besides the Dream Pool Essays, yet much of the writing in his other books has not survived.

Some of Shen Kuo's poetry was preserved in posthumous written works.

Shen Kuo wrote commentary on ancient Daoist and Confucian texts.

Shen Kuo's father Shen Zhou was a somewhat lower-class gentry figure serving in official posts on the provincial level; his mother was from a family of equal status in Suzhou, with her maiden name being Xu.

Shen Kuo received his initial childhood education from his mother, which was a common practice in China during this period.

Shen Kuo was very educated herself, teaching Kuo and his brother Pi the military doctrines of her own elder brother Xu Dong.

Since Shen Kuo was unable to boast of a prominent familial clan history like many of his elite peers born in the north, he was forced to rely on his wit and stern determination to achieve in his studies, subsequently passing the imperial examinations and enter the challenging and sophisticated life of an exam-drafted state bureaucrat.

From about 1040 AD, Shen Kuo's family moved around Sichuan province and finally to the international seaport at Xiamen, where Shen Kuo's father accepted minor provincial posts in each new location.

Shen Kuo Zhou served several years in the prestigious capital judiciary, the equivalent of a national supreme court.

Shen Kuo took notice of the various towns and rural features of China as his family traveled, while he became interested during his youth in the diverse topography of the land.

Shen Kuo observed the intriguing aspects of his father's engagement in administrative governance and the managerial problems involved; these experiences had a deep impact on him as he later became a government official.

Since he often became ill as a child, Shen Kuo developed a natural curiosity about medicine and pharmaceutics.

Shen Zhou died in the late winter of 1051, when his son Shen Kuo was 21 years old.

Shen Kuo grieved for his father, and following Confucian ethics, remained inactive in a state of mourning for three years until 1054.

Shen Kuo noted that the success of the silt fertilization method relied upon the effective operation of sluice gates of irrigation canals.

In 1063 Shen Kuo successfully passed the imperial examinations, the difficult national-level standard test that every high official was required to pass in order to enter the governmental system.

Shen Kuo made a lasting impression upon Zhang, who recommended Shen Kuo for a court appointment in the financial administration of the central court.

Shen Kuo took advantage of this meeting to copy some of Su's poetry, which he presented to the Emperor indicating that it expressed "abusive and hateful" speech against the Song court; these poems were later politicized by Li Ding and Shu Dan in order to level a court case against Su.

Shen Kuo was even made 'companion to the heir apparent'.

At court Shen Kuo was a political favorite of the Chancellor Wang Anshi, who was the leader of the political faction of Reformers, known as the New Policies Group.

Shen Kuo had a previous history with Wang Anshi, since it was Wang who had composed the funerary epitaph for Shen's father, Zhou.

Shen Kuo soon impressed Wang Anshi with his skills and abilities as an administrator and government agent.

In 1072, Shen Kuo was sent to supervise Wang's program of surveying the building of silt deposits in the Bian Canal outside the capital city.

Shen Kuo gained further reputation at court once he was dispatched as an envoy to the Khitan Liao dynasty in the summer of 1075.

Shen Kuo refuted Emperor Daozong's bluffs point for point, while the Song reestablished their rightful border line.

Nonetheless, Shen Kuo was successful in defending his fortifications and the only possible Tangut invasion-route to Yanzhou.

Shen Kuo's life was now forever changed, as he lost his once reputable career in state governance and the military.

Shen Kuo was then put under probation in a fixed residence for the next six years.

Shen Kuo was pardoned by the court for any previous faults or crimes that were claimed against him.

Lady Zhang was said to be overbearing and fierce, often abusive to Shen Kuo, even attempting at one time to pull off his beard.

Shen Kuo's children were often upset over this, and prostrated themselves to Lady Zhang to quit this behavior.

However, after Lady Zhang died, Shen Kuo fell into a deep depression and even attempted to jump into the Yangtze River to drown himself.

Shen Kuo permanently moved to the Dream Brook Estate in 1088, and in that same year he completed his life's written work of the Dream Pool Essays, naming the book after his garden-estate property.

Shen Kuo wrote extensively on a wide range of different subjects.

Shen Kuo's written work included two geographical atlases, a treatise on music with mathematical harmonics, governmental administration, mathematical astronomy, astronomical instruments, martial defensive tactics and fortifications, painting, tea, medicine, and much poetry.

Shen Kuo created a raised-relief map using sawdust, wood, beeswax, and wheat paste.

For pharmacology, Shen Kuo wrote of the difficulties of adequate diagnosis and therapy, as well as the proper selection, preparation, and administration of drugs.

Shen Kuo held great concern for detail and philological accuracy in identification, use and cultivation of different types of medicinal herbs, such as in which months medicinal plants should be gathered, their exact ripening times, which parts should be used for therapy; for domesticated herbs he wrote about planting times, fertilization, and other matters of horticulture.

For example, Shen Kuo noted that the mineral orpiment was used to quickly erase writing errors on paper.

The writing of Shen Kuo is the only source for the date when the drydock was first used in China.

Shen Kuo addressed problems of writing out very large numbers, as large as.

Sal Restivo writes that Shen Kuo used summation of higher series to ascertain the number of kegs which could be piled in layers in a space shaped like the frustum of a rectangular pyramid.

Shen Kuo simplified the counting rods technique by outlining short cuts in algorithm procedures used on the counting board, an idea expanded on by the mathematician Yang Hui.

Shen Kuo wrote extensively about what he had learned while working for the state treasury, including mathematical problems posed by computing land tax, estimating requirements, currency issues, metrology, and so forth.

Shen Kuo once computed the amount of terrain space required for battle formations in military strategy, and computed the longest possible military campaign given the limits of human carriers who would bring their own food and food for other soldiers.

Shen Kuo wrote about the earlier Yi Xing, a Buddhist monk who applied an early escapement mechanism to a water-powered celestial globe.

Shen Kuo calculated the total number for this using up to five rows and twenty five game pieces, which yielded the number 847,288,609,443.

Shen Kuo experimented with the pinhole camera and burning mirror as the ancient Chinese Mohists had done in the 4th century BC, as Mozi of China's Warring States period was perhaps the first to describe the concept of camera obscura, if not his Greek contemporary Aristotle.

The Iraqi Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham further experimented with camera obscura and was the first to attribute geometrical and quantitative properties to it, but Shen Kuo was first to note the relationship of the three separate radiation phenomena: the focal point, burning point, and pinhole.

Shen Kuo wrote that steel needles were magnetized once they were rubbed with lodestone, and that they were put in floating position or in mountings; he described the suspended compass as the best form to be used, and noted that the magnetic needle of compasses pointed either south or north.

However, Zhu Yu's book recounts events back to 1086, when Shen Kuo was writing the Dream Pool Essays; this meant that in Shen's time the compass might have already been in navigational use.

Many of Shen Kuo's contemporaries were interested in antiquarian pursuits of collecting old artworks.

Shen Kuo criticized those in his day who reconstructed ancient ritual objects using only their imagination and not the tangible evidence from archeological digs or finds.

Shen Kuo disdained the notion of others that these objects were products of the "sages" or the aristocratic class of antiquity, rightfully crediting the items' manufacture and production to the common working people and artisans of previous eras.

Shen Kuo observed ancient weaponry, describing the scaled sight devices on ancient crossbows and the ancients' production of swords with composite blades that had a midrib of wrought iron and low-carbon steel while having two sharp edges of high-carbon steel.

Needham asserts Shen Kuo had discovered the survey device known as Jacob's staff, which was not described elsewhere until the Provencal Jewish mathematician Levi ben Gerson wrote of it in 1321.

Shen Kuo wrote that while viewing the whole of a mountain, the distance on the instrument was long, but while viewing a small part of the mountainside the distance was short due to the device's cross piece that had to be pushed further away from the observer's eye, with the graduation starting on the further end.

Shen Kuo wrote that if one placed an arrow on the device and looked past its end, the degree of the mountain could be measured and thus its height could be calculated.

Shen Kuo inferred that the land was reshaped and formed by erosion of the mountains, uplift, and the deposition of silt, after observing strange natural erosions of the Taihang Mountains and the Yandang Mountain near Wenzhou.

Shen Kuo hypothesized that, with the inundation of silt, the land of the continent must have been formed over an enormous span of time.

Shen Kuo proposed that the cliff was once the location of an ancient seashore that by his time had shifted hundreds of miles east.

Shen Kuo wrote that in the Zhiping reign period a man of Zezhou unearthed an object in his garden that looked like a serpent or dragon, and after examining it, concluded the dead animal had apparently turned to "stone".

Shen Kuo likened this to the "stone crabs" found in China.

Shen Kuo wrote that since petrified bamboos were found underground in a climatic area where they had never been known to be grown, the climate there must have shifted geographically over time.

Around the year 1080, Shen Kuo noted that a landslide on the bank of a large river near Yanzhou had revealed an open space several dozens of feet under the ground once the bank collapsed.

Shen Kuo noted that bamboos do not grow in Yanzhou, located in northern China, and he was puzzled during which previous dynasty the bamboos could have grown.

Shen Kuo was known to have read the works of Shen Kuo.

However, Shen Kuo made some observations that were not found elsewhere in Chinese literature.

For instance, Shen Kuo was the first in East Asia to describe tornadoes, which were thought to exist only in the Western hemisphere until their observation in China during the first decade of the 20th century.

Shen Kuo gave reasoning that rainbows were formed by the shadow of the sun in rain, occurring when the sun would shine upon it.

Shen Kuo hypothesized that rays of sunlight refract before reaching the surface of the earth, hence people on earth observing the sun are not viewing it in its exact position, in other words, the altitude of the apparent sun is higher than the actual altitude of the sun.

Shen Kuo is credited with making improved designs of the gnomon, armillary sphere, and clepsydra clock.

Shen Kuo wrote of solar and lunar eclipses in this manner, yet expanded upon this to explain why the celestial bodies were spherical, going against the 'flat earth' theory for celestial bodies.

However, there is no evidence to suggest that Shen Kuo supported a round earth theory, which was introduced into Chinese science by Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi in the 17th century.

Much like what Zhang Heng had said, Shen Kuo likened the Moon to a ball of silver, which does not produce light, but simply reflects light if provided from another source.

Shen Kuo explained that when the Sun's light is slanting, the Moon appears full.

Shen Kuo then explained if one were to cover any sort of sphere with white powder, and then viewed from the side it would appear to be a crescent, hence he reasoned that celestial bodies were spherical.

Shen Kuo wrote that, although the Sun and Moon were in conjunction and opposition with each other once a month, this did not mean the Sun would be eclipsed every time their paths met, because of the small obliquity of their orbital paths.

Shen Kuo is known for his cosmological hypotheses in explaining the variations of planetary motions, including retrogradation.

Shen Kuo's hypotheses were similar to the concept of the epicycle in the Greco-Roman tradition, only Shen Kuo compared the side-section of orbital paths of planets and variations of planetary speeds to points in the tips of a willow leaf.

Shen Kuo criticized earlier Chinese astronomers for failing to describe celestial movement in spatial terms, yet he did not attempt to provide any reasoning for the motive power of the planets or other celestial movements.

The officials and astronomers at court were deeply opposed to Wei and Shen Kuo's work, offended by their insistence that the coordinates of the renowned Yi Xing were inaccurate.

When Wei and Shen Kuo made a public demonstration using the gnomon to prove the doubtful wrong, the other ministers reluctantly agreed to correct the lunar and solar errors.

Shen Kuo wrote that during the Qingli reign period, under Emperor Renzong of Song, an obscure commoner and artisan known as Bi Sheng invented ceramic movable type printing.

Shen Kuo noted that the process was tedious if one only wanted to print a few copies of a book, but if one desired to make hundreds or thousands of copies, the process was incredibly fast and efficient.

Beyond Shen Kuo's writing nothing is known of Bi Sheng's life or the influence of movable type in his lifetime.

Shen Kuo described the phenomena of natural predator insects controlling the population of pests, the latter of which had the potential to wreak havoc upon the agricultural base of China.

Shen Kuo was worried about deforestation due to the needs of the iron industry and ink makers using pine soot in the production process, so he suggested for the latter an alternative of petroleum, which he believed was "produced inexhaustibly within the earth".

Shen Kuo used the soot from the smoke of burned petroleum fuel to invent a new, more durable type of writing ink; the Ming dynasty pharmacologist Li Shizhen wrote that Shen Kuo's ink was "lustrous like lacquer, and superior to that made from pinewood lamp-black," or the soot from pinewood.

Shen Kuo was much in favor of philosophical Daoist notions which challenged the authority of empirical science in his day.

Shen Kuo referred to the ancient Daoist I Ching in explaining the spiritual processes and attainment of foreknowledge that cannot be attained through "crude traces", which he likens to mathematical astronomy.

Nathan Sivin proposes that Shen Kuo was the first in history to "make a clear distinction between our unconnected experiences and the unitary causal world we postulate to explain them," which Biderman and Scharfstein state is arguably inherent in the works of Heraclitus, Plato, and Democritus as well.

Shen Kuo was a firm believer in destiny and prognostication, and made rational explanations for the relations between them.

Shen Kuo held a special interest in fate, mystical divination, bizarre phenomena, yet warned against the tendency to believe that all matters in life were preordained.

Much of Shen Kuo's written work was probably purged under the leadership of minister Cai Jing, who revived the New Policies of Wang Anshi, although he set out on a campaign of attrition to destroy or radically alter the written work of his predecessors and especially Conservative enemies.

For example, only six of Shen Kuo's books remain, and four of these have been significantly altered since the time they were penned by the author.

In modern times, the best attempt at a complete list and summary of Shen Kuo's writing was an appendix written by Hu Daojing in his standard edition of Brush Talks, written in 1956.

In 1075, Shen Kuo wrote the Xining Fengyuan Li, which was lost, but listed in a 7th chapter of a Song dynasty bibliography.

Shen Kuo wrote the Mengqi Wanghuai Lu, which was compiled during Shen Kuo's retirement.

However, Toby E Huff writes that Shen Kuo's "scattered set" of writings lacks clear-cut organization and "theoretical acuteness," that is, scientific theory.

Nathan Sivin wrote that Shen Kuo's originality stands "cheek by jowl with trivial didacticism, court anecdotes, and ephemeral curiosities" that provide little insight.

Shen Kuo's tomb was eventually destroyed, yet Ming dynasty records indicated its location, which was found in 1983 and protected by the government in 1986.