Kao Gong Ji The Worlds Oldest Encyclopaedia Of Technologies Zengjian Guan by Zengjian Guan 9789004416901, 9004416900 instant download after payment.

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In Kao Gong Ji: The World’s Oldest Encyclopaedia of Technologies, Guan Zengjian and Konrad Herrmann offer an English translation and commentary of the first technological encyclopaedia in China. This work came into being around the 5th century C.E. and contains descriptions of thirty technologies used at the time. Most prominent are bronze casting, the manufacture of carriages and weapons, a metrological standard, the making of musical instruments, and the planning of cities. The technologies, including the manufacturing process and quality assurance, are based on standardization and modularization. In several commentaries, the editors show to which degree the descriptions of Kao Gong Ji correspond to archaeological findings.
Revised and updated translation from the Chinese edition:《考工记: 翻译与评注》(ISBN: 978-7-313-12133-2) by Guan Zengjian, © Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press 2014. Published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press.
Among the civilisations of the world, China is so far unequaled, since it is the only civilisation that can look back on a continuous tradition of 5,000 years. It has, accordingly, acquired a rich body of written culture, much of which remains untranslated and therefore unknown in the West.
The "Kao Gong Ji" is the oldest book on technology known in China. Excerpts with technological content appeared only later in philosophical, mathematical or historiographic works. Because its largest part probably originated in the era between the Chunqiu (770-476 BCE) and the Zhanguo period (475-221 BCE) about 2,500 years ago, "Kao Gong Ji" is also the oldest surviving technological work in the world. Written sources on science and technology that are roughly comparable include the works, from a later moment in time, of the Greek mathematician, physicist and engineer Archimedes (287-212 BCE).
Due to "Kao Gong Ji's" pre-eminent significance for the technologies developed in China, we have decided to present this book to a worldwide audience of readers interested in the history of science and technology, and to offer three translations: modern Chinese and, for the first time, English and German.