Preserving And Spreading Of Books And Documents On Science And Technology In Ancient China

The accomplishments of science and technology in ancient China are an integral part of Chinese traditional culture. They once stood out well in human civilization and have produced huge after-influences. Because of the strengthening of human consciousness, the attention is mainly focused on unearthing ancient works on social science. Only a very few have devoted to the documents on science and technology, excluding those concerning traditional Chinese medical science and medicine. Untill the modern times, a number of scholars worked on sorting and studying of ancient scientific and technological works, and have compiled some relevant bibliographies, such as "Catalogue of Ancient and Modern Arithmetic" by Liuduo, "Brief Booklist Compendia of Arithmetic" by Ding Fubao, "Chinese Arithmetic Catalogue Collected by Liyan". As the country pay attention to science and technology, more and more ancient science and technology documents are excavated and compiled. Also during the Eighth-five period, some scholars were organized by the state and put out "The compilation of Chinese Scientific and Technological Works". After a careful and attentive selection among over 10,000 books and records from the Qin Dynasty to the end of Qing Dynasty, some ancient classic works on mathematics, astronomy, agronomy, medical science, geography and engineering, etc. were ultimately published. All these are helpful for us to further utilize and study our ancient scientific and technological documents. Nevertheless, these scholars just compiled some extant materials. Few of them paid attention to why some documents of this kind have been passed down while the others have lost. They also did little research on the relation between the development of various disciplines in different dynasties and the preservation or losing of documents. And so, noticing this phenomenon, the writer of this paper compares different situations among different dynasties, and considering social development as well as scientific and technological levels, analyzes the main causes of documents missing, and sums up the ways of preserving ancient scientific and technological works.The paper is composed of four sections.1. Introduction. A brief introduction to the preservation of Chinese ancient documents on science and technology, and to the status quo of research. Put forward questions and state the significance of research as well as some study methods.2. The contents of books and documents on science and technology in ancient China. The books and documents cover the fields such as medical science, agronomy, astronomy, mathemetics and industrial technology , etc. According to the features of social development together with scientific levels, the paper discusses the situations of books and documents on science and technology and the survey of their representative books from five periods, namely, the Qin and Han Dynasties, the Wei, Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties, the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the Song and Yuan Dynasties, and the Ming and Qing Dynasties.3. Analysis of documents spreading, preserving and missing in each dynasty. By comparing booklists in each dynasty, the paper analyzes the situations of documents preservation and missing. Taking social states into consideration, it reveals the main causes of documents' missing, including wars, prohibiting and destroying, missing for being outdated, a shortage of attention, etc.4. Sum up the principle means of preserving ancient scientific and technological documents. First of all, this could be accomplished by compiling serials of books or leishu. In addition , such documents can also be found in some ancient history books, local chronules, miscellanies, poetry and rhyme proses.