Liu Xianzhou's Thought Of Historiography In Ancient Chinese Machinery

Academician of China Academy of Sciences Liu Xianzhou is a famous Chinese mechanical expert and mechanical engineering educator,and one of the pioneers of research on history of Chinese machinery.On the basis of systematically investigating and analyzing Liu Xianzhou's writings on the history of machinery,in particular History of Chinese Mechanical Engineering Inventions(Part I)and Agricultural Mechanical Inventions in Ancient China,as well as influential theses,contributions and studies,this paper made an in-depth analysis on his idea of ancient Chinese mechanical classification,studies on restoration of ancient Chinese machinery,and contributions to ancient Chinese mechanical historiography.Specifically,this paper compared the classification o f ancient machinery by him with the “Classification Diagram of Farm Tools” in the Book of Agriculture authored by Wang Zhen,an agronomist and agricultural mechanical expert of Yuan Dynasty,as well as w ith the classification of machinery in Chinese History of Science and T echnology by Joseph Needham,in an attempt to accurately grasp the connotation,characteristics and level of his idea of classifying ancient C hinese machinery;then investigated his contributions to the restoration of ancient Chinese machinery,including “the restoration of mechanical parts”,“the restoration of ancient farming practices”,“the brief restoration of horse-driven blowers” and “the restoration of Mu Niu Liu Ma”,and made a comparison with Wang Zhenduo,another Chinese expert on restoration of ancient machinery,in a bid to determine the characteristics,level and influence of his theory on mechanical restoration from a historical perspective;finally,this paper reviewed and evaluated Liu Xianzhou's academic research on the history of machinery and its influence,identifying that Liu Xianzhou specially emphasized original documents,and was good at exploring the origin of ancient mechanical i-nventions by picture information.Also,he often explained the ancient mechanical practices using modern mechanical theories.This paper tried to comprehensively evaluate the pioneering work done by Liu Xianzhou on modern history of Chinese machinery from t he general perspective of modern history of science and technology,aimed at initiating an investigation on this subject,learning from history,seizing the day and looking into future.