Introduction

The value for history, science, and culture of Shen Kua's iconic 11th-century text Meng Hsi Pi T’an 梦溪笔谈 (Brush Talks from Dream Brook) has been explored by modern researchers since the 20th century. As the earliest notebook encyclopaedia to be produced in ancient China, Meng Hsi Pi T’an caught the interest of mid-century science historians when philologist Hu Tao-Ching produced several acclaimed versions of the work, including a simplified version for lay readers (Hu, 1957; Wang and Zhao, 2011). Science history pioneers Joseph Needham and Wang Ling described Meng Hsi Pi T’an as ‘a landmark in the history of science in China’ and included English translations of parts of it in their own influential text Science and Civilisation in China (Needham and Ling, 1954, p 135; 1959). Shen has sometimes been labelled ‘China's greatest scientist’ (Holzman, 1958, p 260) and is relatively well known in China. However, the significance of his work is still underappreciated elsewhere in the world, and perhaps in China too (Zuo, 2010).

In particular, Meng Hsi Pi T’an has generally been overlooked as a historical example of science communication. Even within China, only rarely have researchers characterised it as a popular science text or in other ways that might bring it under science communication's purview (for example Zeng and Guo, 2013). Zhang (2013, pp 366–7) is the notable exception: she argues that the book makes contributions to ‘democratizing scientific knowledge’, ‘preserving grassroots science’, and ‘communicating science and technology to the lay public’, considering it part of ‘technical communication's enduring tradition’. In line with Zhang's view and the evidence she presents, this chapter makes the case for Shen Kua and his Meng Hsi Pi T’an to be incorporated into histories of science communication.

The significance of global histories of science Communication

Published histories of science communication tend to focus on the West, particularly Britain and France, in the past 300 years (Orthia, 2020). This tends to be the case whether those histories are produced in Western or non-Western countries. They generally do not include communication cultures older than the so-called Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries or cultures beyond Western Europe and its settler colonies, except when discussing the spread of Western science within them.