Comparison with Earlier and Contemporary Chinese works

HIST4702 (2023-24) Digital History Project: 火攻挈要

Comparison with Earlier and Contemporary Chinese Works

We compared Huo gong qie yao火攻挈要 with the two major workson weapons published in the late Ming era:

  • Bing Lu兵錄 (Books of Soldiers, 1606-1632, by He Rubin何汝賓)
  • Qi qi tu shuo奇器圖説 (Diagrams and Explanations of the Wonderful Machines, 1627, by Johann Terrenz鄧玉函 and Wang Zheng王徵) 

*We used the OCR text of Huo gong qie yao’s reprint in 1847(海山仙館叢書本) from CTEXT

Target:

Examining the relationship between Huo gong qie yao and contemporary works (Bing lu and Qi qi tu shuo) to see if it took any ideas from them.

Difficulty:

In Ctext, the OCR texts of Bing lu and Qi qi tu shuo have many misidentified words.

Solution:

1. For Bing Lu兵錄, we imported more accurate OCR text from the Database of Chinese Classic Ancient Books 中國基本古籍庫 into CTEXT for analysis. CUHK library is a subscriber to this database.

2. For Qi qi tu shuo奇器圖説, we found the full OCR text in “Wikisource”, which is in the public domain and of higher OCR quality.

Findings:

(Image: Sparse similar texts between Huo gong qie yao and Bing lu. We set N=5. )
(Image: Similarity matrix between Huo gong qie yao and Qi qi tu shuo)

Supplementary material:

  • Xi fa shen ji西法神機 (Marvelous Machinery from the West, 1622-1623, by Sun Yuanhua孫元化)

Xi fa shen ji  is not included in CTEXT so we imported an excerpt from the Database of Chinese Classic Ancient Books into CTEXT. We found the relationship between Bing lu and Xi fa shen ji is the closest among the four books.

Image: Network graph showing the closer relationship between Xi fa shen ji and Bing lu
(Image: Intensive similarity between Bing lu and Xi fa shen ji )

Conclusion:

Huo gong qie yao shares few similarities with the other two books. Between Bing lu and Huo gong qie yao“, the major similarity is the text dealing with the usage of different weapons However, considering that they were compiled nearly in the same period and the usage of weapons was common knowledge among those military authors, there is no evidence to prove that Huo gong qie yao had taken any ideas from Bing lu. Instead, Bing lu shares significant similarities with Xi fa shen ji.

As for Qi qi tu shuo, results in the similarity matrix chart show that it has no relationship with Huo gong qie yao since the highest weight of similarity is merely 0.000112.