HIST4702 (2023-24) Digital History Project: 火攻挈要
Comparison with Artillery Work in European Language
Dictated by a Jesuit missionary from Europe and recorded by a Chinese elite, one may wonder Huo gong qie yao’s connection with European artillery texts.
We chose the La pyrotechnie, ou L’art du feu : contenant dix livres (Pyrotechnics, or The Art of Fire: containing ten books), a 1627 French edition of De la pirotechnia (1540), for three reasons:
First, De la pirotechnia, writtenby Italian metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio(c. 1480 – c. 1539), was one of the most well-circulated metallurgic masterpieces in 16thand 17th-century Europe. It epitomizes the European knowledge of artillery and gunpowder that was accessible in Adam Schall’s early years. Second, none of us can read 16th-century Spanish but one of our teammates has some knowledge of old French. Third, the French edition is available via Gale database that CUHK library subscribes to. The database provided OCR text of La pyrotechnie with a confidence of 90% accuracy claimed on their website.
La pyrotechnie consists of 10 books and covers assorted aspects of mining, separation of metals, molds for casting artillery, formulas of gunpowder, etc.. So how did we process with such a lengthy text?
Firstly, we filtered the pages relating to our topic by searching the keywords poudre(powder) and composant(component).
Cirrus word cloud of the relevant pages in La pyrotechnie (with an expanded French stopword list):
Secondly, we put the Chinese text of Huo gong qie yao into Google Translator for a French text, which we imported into Voyant-Tool for analysis.
Cirrus of the machine translation of Huo gong qie yao’s Vol 2:
Due to the unavoidable inaccuracy of OCR text and machine translation in distant reading, we only dealt with nouns of materials relating to gunpowder or artillery:
| Materials in common | ||
| Component (in English) | Component (in French) | Component (in Chinese) |
| Charcoal | charbon | 炭 |
| Sulfur | soufre* | 硫/磺 |
| Wood | bois | 木 |
| Water | eau | 水 |
| Stone | pierre | 石 |
| Fire | feu | 火 |
| Salt | sel | 鹽/碱 |
| Cooper | cuivre | 銅 |
| Saltpeter | salpêtre* | 硝 |
| Iron scale | écaille de fer | 鐵末 |
| Rosin/ Greek pitch | poix grecque(colophane) | 松香 |
| *In the French text, a “long s”(ſ) wassometimes used in place of the letter “s”, which was always misidentified as “f” by the OCR machine. So, foufre and falpêtre are in fact soufre and salpêtre. | ||
| Differences in materials | ||||
| Component (in English) | Component (in French) | Component (in Chinese) | French text | Chinese text |
| gold | or | 金 | ✔ | |
| Silver | argent | 銀 | ✔ | |
| Diamond | diamant | 金剛石 | ✔ | |
| Platinum | platine | 鉑 | ✔ | |
| Glass | verre | 玻璃 | ✔ | |
| Realgar | réalgar | 雄黃 | ✔ | |
| Camphor | camphre | 潮腦 | ✔ | |
We also located a chapter in La pyrotechnie dedicated to gunpowder, which is Chapter 2 De la poudre qu’on met en œuare pour faire tirer l’artillerie(Powder that is used to fire artillery) in Book 10, as an auxiliary reference.
Cirrus of the Chapter 2 in Book 10:
Now from the graphs and tables above, you can find that the formulas in the two texts share components in common, such as charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter. Meanwhile, we were unable to find gold, silver, diamond, platinum and glass as components in the formulas from the Chinese text.
To recap, although Huo gong qie yao shared similarities with European gunpowder texts to some extent, we knew little to what extent Schall referred to De la pirotechnia or its translations. The differences between the two texts suggest that Huo gong qie yao’s knowledge might be derived from both assorted European sources and Chinese traditions.