EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts
Section 21 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 237 cious source for historical studies and is particularly famous for recording the earliest known gunpowder formulae. This research concentrated on how this book was read and which was important to the readers in the different periods. In the mid-fourteenth century, a Uighur traveler did his best seeking this book in his dangerous journey in the South-East China. In the sixteenth century, the publishers reissued Wujing Zongyao for profit and its printed edition initiated a trend of publications of military manuals afterwards. The famous general Qi Jiguang (1528–1588) also drew some idea of trebuchet from it and left us a unique manuscript. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the high time of evidential research, the Qing scholars treated the book as a source for reconstructing earlier Classics. Emperor Qianlong wrote a poem (1774) on Wujing Zongyao, and his officials transformed the illustration of the trebuchet into a cannon while preparing a new edition in the Siku Quanshu 四庫全書 (Complete Library in the Four Branches of Literature). It seems no reader really cared about the ancient gunpowder formulae. It was not until 1917 that a Japanese sinologist, who was familiar with Chinese sources and the current research of military history in Europe, pointed out the significance of the formulae fromWujing Zongyao. In the twentieth century, the formulae became a strong evidence for the origin of gunpowder.
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