Such accounts are easy to find in Chinese. By far the best is MeidongChen, Zhongguo kexue jishu shi. Tianwenxue juan: (History of Chinese science and technology: Astronomy;Beijing, 2003).
2.
SivinN., “On the limits of empirical knowledge in Chinese and Western science”, in Medicine, philosophy, and religion in ancient China: Researches and reflections (Aldershot, Hants, 1995), chap. 5, pp. 168–80, cites exceptions.
3.
Histoire des mathematiques chinoises (Paris, 1988), transl. by WilsonStephen L. as A history of Chinese mathematics (Berlin, 1997).
4.
Martzloff, pp. 282, 284; cf. Xin Tang shu (New history of the Tang period, Zhonghua Shuju edition), xxxA, 745.
5.
The author notes that “most authors of the Anglo-Saxon world call the Shoushi li ‘Season Granting System,’ interpreting shou as ‘to instruct, communicate’ on the one part, and shi as ‘season’ on the other. But this translation is doubtless inappropriate…”. Martzloff is, I believe, correct that in the locus classicus for the system's title, Shangshu (the so-called Classic of history, this part from the 4th or 3rd century b.c.), shoushi had mainly to do with finding “favorable moments for human activities by scrutiny of the sky, that is to say by means of astrology” (p. 348). But the historical question is how imperial bureaucrats in a.d. 1280, when the Shoushi li was written and named, would have interpreted the classic's phrase jing shou ren shi. What was then the standard commentary on Shangshu glossed it as “respectfully note the seasons of the sky in order to communicate them to the people (jing ji tian shi yi shou ren ye).” It was reading shi, in other words, not as “[favorable] moments [for human activities]” to be inferred, but as “seasons” to be recorded and bestowed. See Shisanjing zhu shu, Shangshu zhu shu (1926, Jinjiang Tushuju edition), 2: 4b.
6.
Appendix D, which lists official canons, is based on ZunguiChen, Zhongguo tianwenxue shi (History of Chinese astronomy, 3 vols, Shanghai, 1980–84), iii, 1399–1407. Chen's dates are less accurate than those of other recent lists. Cf. N. Sivin, Granting the seasons (Secaucus, 2008), 43–56.
7.
In 1368 the new Ming dynasty merely renamed and continued to use the Shoushi li; it had the revised version prepared, and adopted it, 16 years later. See Ming shi (History of the Ming Period, Zhonghua Shuju edition), xxxi, 516–17.
