Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Technical Drawing

Hsien-Chun Wang has noted that “Chinese drawing conventions did not involve clear geometric rules of projection.” As such, the translation of 17th century Jesuit texts on science and technology failed to represent machines like water pumps in ways that would have allowed readers to reproduce them.




This persisted until the mid to late 19th century when shipyards like the Jiangnan Arsenal began training Chinese engineers, and when missionary publications began printing descriptions of steam engines accompanied by diagrams using western standards of perspective and scale. Granted, the images analyzed in this module were produced for a sensational pictorial, but as a reflection of contemporary conventions in illustration, they are arguably symptomatic of a need for new modes of visual representation.