Rediscovering Shixue: The Point-Notation as Social and Intellectual Signifiers Under the Institutional Censorship of Imperial China in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The late seventeenth century saw a golden era when the scientific technique of perspective, as a gift from the Scientific Revolution, expanded its territory to China via French missionaries. Among them, Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766) is the most successful one who not only served as the court painter in China but also collaborated with his Chinese apprentice Nian Xiyao (1671–1738) in publishing the first Chinese treatise specializing in perspective—Shixue (1735). Modeled after Andrea Pozzo’s Perspectiva Pictorum et Architectorum (1693–1700), Shixue has long been overlooked for its novelty, along with its unique semiotics of point-notation. Hence, the scope of this research is aimed at rediscovering Nian’s uncanny style of point-notation in Shixue as a silent response to Chinese institutional censorship. After the interpretation of the concealed orders within these point-notations, it is safe to conclude that Nian composed Shixue into both a poetical anthology and his autobiography to some extent.