§103. Experiments
Shen Nong, sage progenitor of medicine, was said to have investigated the materia medica, trying and tasting plants to teach people what to use and what to reject. “He suffered poisoning as much as seventy times a day.” As this text suggests, the literati tend to attribute the origin of technical arts to ancient sages.
“All that is done by the hundred artisans are originally the creation of sages” Others, however, with more experience, refute the learned fantasy, understanding that technical knowledge comes from working with the things themselves. “As regards the people who protect and manage the dikes and channels of the nine rivers and the four lakes, they are the same in all ages; they did not learn their business from Yu the Great [an ancient sage], they learnt it from the waters.” Song dynasty polymath Shen Kuo also took exception to the literati account. “As for clever techniques and mechanical devices... how could all of this have come from the sages? The hundred craftsmen, the numerous administrators, the people of the marketplace and the countryside: all of them took part.”36If Shen Nong experimented we can be sure others did too, but procedures and protocols were either not recorded or have been lost, and the almost universal tendency in the historical record is simply to state results. Needham thinks we have to consider what he delicately calls “social factors” which may have prevented “the publication of the records which the higher artisans certainly kept.” He thinks that “experiment demanded too much active intervention... to make it philosophically respectable”; that is, respectable to the Confucian literati who kept the books. Even when technical points were recorded, “The literary scholars of later times abbreviated the records, not being themselves interested in scientific and technical matters.”37
The lack of written records has not eliminated indirect evidence of experimentation.
It seems unlikely that people could attain China's early mastery of technical arts such as metallurgy, ceramics, or iatrochem- istry without experiments and learning from trials. Needham finds early experiments on resonance phenomena in bells and strings, experiments with a vacuum from the second century bce, and systematic tests on the strength of materials (parameter variation) in the construction of long- beam bridges. There is a hint of lost discussions and methods in this observation from Guanzi: “Since artisans were made to assemble and dwell together, they came to examine their best materials and pay careful attention to the four seasons. They differentiated between the well and poorly made, assessed their needs, discussed and compared their estimates and procedures.”38The remark is a literatus's insipid impression of a brilliant technical culture. What Guanzi relates with vague scholarly approval though no understanding is described as it were from the inside by Francis Bacon. “Nothing can contribute to a shower, so to speak, of useful and new inventions, falling as it were from the sky, more than when experiments from various mechanical arts are brought to the attention of someone or a group of people who can sharpen their minds by discussing the matter together. In this way, through what we have called ‘transfer of experiments,' disciplines (artes) can be stimulated and kindled as through a concentration of rays.”39
Perhaps the most convincing evidence of Chinese experimentation is the invention of the laboratory as we know it. The Chinese innovated physical, flame, and reagent tests for the identity of important materials, which were recorded in systematic pharmacopeias, with substances defined by a combination of chemical and physical properties in a way that guaranteed the reproducibility of chemical operations. Practitioners also left detailed instructions for the manufacture of a variety of laboratory apparatus. Their so-called alchemical (wai dan) literature assembled what was the world's most extensive compendium of reactions and their products down to the thirteenth century. Needham, a biochemist, was impressed by their research on steroids, whose extraction they had reduced to a routine by the eleventh century.40