Twentieth-century appraisers of Dai Zhen 戴震 discovered elements in his thought, for instance “early modern individualism and objective methodology” (3), that seemed to transcend the High Qing and reveal some form of incipient modernity. Though he does not reject these familiar judgments, Minghui Hu deliberately sidesteps them to investigate instead Dai's quest to place his powerful technical methodology in the service of the “reconstruction of the classical world” (5). This project was founded on a “utopian vision” of that world, the conviction that in its totality it “demonstrated a cohesive whole of cosmological and political order” (9). This “new classical vision” is the conceptual thread on which the chapters of this book hang.
To provide context, Hu paints on a broad canvas. His story begins long before Dai's birth with the introduction to China of Jesuit mathematical astronomy, concentrating on the attack launched against it by Yang Guangxian 楊光先 in 1664 and its recovery upon the commencement of Kangxi's personal rule. As its influence expanded, Jesuit astronomy produced at court the problem of “reconciling an increasingly quantified view of the sky with the need to trace all truth back to the ancients” (52). In other words, how did the new astronomy relate to classical learning? In the next chapter, Dai's outlook is contrasted with two others, more parochial, that stood in mutual opposition. One belonged to the eccentric Fr. Joachim Bouvet, who thought that the wisdom of the Yijing was not specifically Chinese but rather once common throughout the post-diluvian world. Mei Wending 梅文鼎, one of the first Chinese scholars to master the mathematical astronomy of the Jesuits without being their protégé, thought by contrast that missionary knowledge had originated in ancient China and only later diffused westward—an opinion he shared with Kangxi. Although Hu later tells us that Dai too held this view (129), he emphasizes here that unlike Bouvet and Mei, “Dai Zhen and his followers moved to a position where all truths were universal and origins were not so important. Such a cosmopolitan (some might even say ‘universalist’) position was not common in the early modern world” (55).
Hu then identifies a “science faction” of students given mathematical and astronomical training at the late Kangxi court. This faction fell under a cloud in the Yongzheng reign together with its patron Yinzhi 胤祉, but returned to influence in the early Qianlong era. Toward the end of the Kangxi period the court gave up trying to monopolize Jesuit mathematical astronomy among its own technicians. Allowed to diffuse, its techniques “entered the vast intellectual terrain of classical knowledge” (97) and there sharpened the tension between those who saw the new astronomy simply as a means of more accurate observation and those who hoped to “integrate the new science into the universal framework of the classical scriptures” (102). Finally, Qianlong's rehabilitation of the “science faction” allowed Qin Huitian 秦蕙田 (whose affiliation with this faction remains somewhat nebulous) to offer the young Dai Zhen a position among the compilers of his semi-official Wuli tongkao 五禮通考. This opportunity broadened Dai's scholarly network upon his arrival in Beijing.
Dai Zhen, making only cameo appearances in the preceding three chapters, comes into focus in the four that remain. First his early life is traced up to a formative “manifesto” of 1750 advocating “the overall integration of specialized knowledge into a single framework” permitting “a more accurate and complete picture of the classical world” (126). Dai's arrival in Beijing in 1754 is the subject of the next chapter. Here Hu pinpoints Dai's distinct outlook by reference to his mentor Jiang Yong 江永 and his brilliant contemporary Qian Daxin 錢大昕. Unlike Jiang, whose research hewed closely to the technical side of mathematical astronomy, Dai harbored the loftier goal of attempting the “overall reconstruction of the classical world” (151) in every minute detail. Unlike Qian, Dai accepted that observations in his own day could correct even the classics (in Hu's terms, Dai's “cosmological realism” contrasts with Qian's “textual empiricism”). Dai's ability to thereby free himself from classical commentaries was, in Hu's view, one of his most radical achievements (9). In the last two chapters, specific cases illustrate Dai's quest to “figure out every single detail, retrieving the precise scale, design, and shape of everything recorded in the great books of antiquity” (151). Chapter 7 focuses on Dai's encounter with Hui Dong 惠棟 and his effort to ascertain in “concrete reality” the elusive floorplan of the Palace of Light, a politically significant structure mentioned, but often vaguely, in important early texts. The final chapter contrasts the “pragmatic” “tunnel vision” of the Qing state with Dai's “new classical vision” using three case studies. In two of these three classically-oriented debates, Dai's intervention appears curiously peripheral.
Pursuing a scholar as polymathic as Dai requires considerable erudition; readers will admire the range of Minghui Hu's learning as he sure-footedly leads them into the thicket of High Qing intellectual history and pauses to pluck out some of its thorniest issues. Not all readers, however, may feel that their capable guide has quite led them to the advertised destination. Those who open this book on the strength of its title, China's Transition to Modernity, will likely close it again without a clear sense of what Hu regards as Dai's exact role in this transition, let alone what this transition entailed or the criteria used to identify “modernity.” Evidently, for Hu, Dai's modernity lies in his “new classical vision” which, as he repeatedly asserts, makes the Qing scholar a “visionary.” Yet although the author is clear about what Dai's “new classical vision” entailed, the stakes of this vision—why it made Dai modern, or betokened a transition in that direction—could be made more transparent.
Any book centered on a single figure, particularly one asserted to have “changed the trajectory of Chinese intellectual history” (133), faces the challenge of relating the individual to the context of his time. The author commendably takes up this challenge, covering no less than the period from 1664 to 1800, while carefully detailing Dai's nuanced differences with contemporaries over technical questions. Still, at least this reader remained unsure of where Hu stands on the crucial question of whether Dai should be understood as a revolutionary individual genius or the most gifted aspirant toward a goal widely sought. Thus we are told that it was Qin Huitian who conceived the agenda of effecting “a partnership between the Jesuit sciences and the Confucian heritage,” and Dai and Qian who were tapped to “manage” this task (133). Likewise, Dai's 1754 arrival in Beijing coincided with the rise of prominence of a cohort of “technical literati” that included Qian Daxin, another scholar who wed a command of mathematical astronomy to vast humanistic learning. Hu implies that Dai would set the agenda for this elite cohort, who subsequently came to “engage, absorb, and challenge” his outlook (133). Yet as he remarks toward the end of his book, “The intellectual orientation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been characterized in this book as a pursuit of how to build a vision of external order based upon ancient exemplars instead of how to cultivate internal transcendence to accomplish moral perfection.… In particular, the classical vision in Dai's formulation had an affinity for mapping the totality of the ancient ‘cosmopolis’ systematically” (187–88). Did his contemporaries then have their own “classical visions,” Dai's simply being more systematic and less reliant on classical authority? Did Dai differ in kind, or just in range and quality?
As with any book, a number of tiny errors have crept in. For instance, Ling Tingkan 凌廷堪 is called “Lin Tingkan” throughout, and Suksaha termed “Suksah.” The author once refers to the trials of the Jesuits elicited by Yang Guangxian as occurring in 1644 rather than 1664, seemingly a typo, yet later in the same passage describes 1689 as “forty-five years later” (87). On page 152 we are told that Dai “met Hui [Dong] in 1757,” on page 174 that he “met the old gentleman in 1756.” Based on its context, it seems the reference on page 100 to Tomé Pereira (d. 1708) should be to André Pereira (d. 1743). Students of early Manchu politics may quibble with his claim that “The history of Qing factionalism began in the early 1660s…” (85).
Historians of Qing intellectual history will celebrate the publication of this important and original study. Hu is surely right that Qing historians must draw natural science and classical learning closer together to better understand not only Dai Zhen but High Qing scholarship as a whole. He does an excellent job of demonstrating the value of this approach in his eclectic and learned monograph, drawing on Chinese, Japanese, and Western-language research. Even specialists will learn something new on almost every page. That he raises weighty and complex issues which cannot be settled in the span of one book indicates his ambition; the seeds of debate he plants here will surely bear fruit in the years to come.
