title: "Primitive Engineering: Ancient Vessels of Civilizational Inheritance—Inspired by 'China at Work'" slug: "fanchunping-vernacular-engineering-2012.en" date: "2012-01-01" category: "engineering" author: "Fan Chunping" excerpt: "'China at Work' was compiled by an American who spent eight years traveling through rural China in the 1920s, photographing and documenting. These vernacular engineering practices—authentic records of a near-static way of life under a natural economy—are the genes of our civilization."

Primitive Engineering: Ancient Vessels of Civilizational Inheritance—Inspired by China at Work

Author: Fan Chunping (Senior Editor, Academic Journal Office, Beijing Institute of Technology)

Published in Science & Technology Review, 2012, 30(2)

A Treasure

China at Work: An Illustrated Record of the Primitive Industries of China's Masses, Whose Life Is Toil, and Thus an Account of Chinese Civilization was conceived and funded by the visionary and humanistic American Henry Chapman Mercer. The German-American Rudolf P. Hommel spent eight years traveling through rural China in the 1920s, photographing and documenting, followed by another decade of painstaking research, to produce this historical record of China's ancient craft culture. The original edition was published in 1937 by the John Day Company of New York.

The book contains 536 photographs—everything from sewing needles, irons, fishhooks, nail molds, marking hammers, door locks, knives and saws, to wheelbarrows, millstones, fishing boats, mineshafts, brick kilns, dyeing methods, bricklaying techniques, and water wheels—too many to enumerate.

The Display of Primitive Engineering

The crafts documented in this book are largely unrelated to art. They are the technologies and techniques, accumulated through experience, that were used in production and daily labor to sustain life and transmit material culture—along with the tools that served as their vehicles and instruments. They represent a display of primitive engineering, and also the way of life of our ancestors.

Consider the method used by fishermen on Poyang Lake to lure fish into their boats on moonlit nights. The book records it thus: "The fisherman sits steadily in his small boat, and the fish leap one after another, leaving the embrace of the lake to jump voluntarily into the boat... As the fishing boat approaches and disturbs the school, the fish are lured by the moonlight reflected off the wooden planks and leap to avoid this 'obstacle'—landing precisely in the boat." This romantic and elegant fishing method has now been lost.

The Forgotten Genes of Civilization

Some might say: these are things from the 1920s, merely eighty or ninety years ago—how can they be called "ancient"?

Under China's natural economy, technological progress was slow. For millennia, the lives of China's rural common people existed in a near-static, primordial state. Yet a heritage of several thousand years virtually evaporated in three or four decades—washed away by the torrent of modern technology surging in from the West. The frugal way of life Hommel praised in his book has also been discarded by us.

When future generations discover new knowledge in these records, all history becomes news; as long as someone records and preserves it, all current events become history.

When we eat industrially produced meat and vegetables—raised on industrial feed and fertilizer through industrial processes, having lost their original fresh flavors—we have lost our connection to the earth. When rural dust gives way to dust storms; when city streets become spotless but are shrouded in photochemical smog and aerosols.

All of this reveals to us the elegance of a simple, natural, and primitive way of life.

Published in Science & Technology Review, 2012, 30(2)