Silken Strands: Making Technology Work in China

Abstract

WorK In ChInA Dagmar schäferIn 1371, only three years after proclaiming his reign, zhu Yuanzhang 朱元 章 (1328-98, reign hongwu 1368-98) founder of the ming dynasty, turned his hand to the organization of material production within his empire.this entailed the employment of artisans and installation of workshops at the court, and the set-up of governance structures for the management of public works.In addition, in some trades such as silk and porcelain, the ming founder initiated spatially distributed networks of state-owned workshops.In the case of silk this network consisted of twenty-three workshops located in the provinces of Zhejiang, Nanzhili, Fujian, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Henan and shandong.the geographical scope was unprecedented and the structure innovative: unlike the song and Yuan states who usually incorporated local expertise, the Ming state assigned each workshop a specific set of products.And whereas the song and Yuan rulers intruded on the localities in a rather ad hoc manner, the ming founder, zhu Yuanzhang, established quotas and stabilized production.Consolidating tasks and numbers, he institutionalized complex channels of communication through which craft work, both on the managerial and the technical level, was transmitted.this article scrutinizes the Chinese concepts and modalities of practical knowledge transmission that informed state models of craft production.my main example is silk manufacture: a complex socio-technical system involving core issues of the Chinese world.silk was part of ritual and rulership, diplomacy and philosophical discourse, luxury consumption and everyday needs.the ming dynasty is my central focus, my basis for comparison when I look at the grand schemes of various eras, song, Yuan, and Qing, to trace changes in the basic conditions for technological production. 1 the thematic concern of this article lies in the technical side of communication, that is, how actors and agents created channels and packaged and conveyed information to make production work. 2 the mobility of artifacts and people, both geographically and socially

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