Talk:Ruan Yuan

Rather poor

This page is exceedingly poor. Someone writing from 219.77.107.65 has simply copied and pasted the blurb from the Amazon page [1], which is about the book Ruan Yuan, 1764-1849: The Life And Work of a Major Scholar-Official in Nineteenth-Century China Before the Opium War.

In fact, Ruan Yuan sounds like an interesting fellow. According to this page [2],

Ruan Yuan did not follow the traditional Neo-Confucian beliefs which were based on the commentaries on the classic texts by Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi. Rather he believed in evidential studies which believed that truth was best achieved by studying the classics themselves, and older commentaries on them. This approach, also known as Han Learning, had gained favour and led to huge efforts being put into collecting ancient works. Starting in 1772, when Ruan Yuan was a young boy, the Chinese Emperor Qianlong organised major searches for lost texts. Experts in textual analysis studied the texts while other experts tried to reconstruct lost texts from quotations in surviving works.

Moreover, we find that

Ruan began his most famous work, namely the Chouren zhuan or Biographies of astronomers and mathematicians.

In this work Ruan put forward the idea, which had been gaining credence in China for some time, that all Western sciences were of Chinese origin.

Beautiful whacky Sinocentrism that still has echoes today!

Bathrobe 09:07, 16 July 2007 (UTC)