My PhD thesis looks closely at a Chinese word, bowu 博物, interpreted by historians of science and technology in China as ‘broad learnings’ and which refers to knowledge with a great diversity of origins across Chinese history.

Arguing for its enduring relevance in knowledge-making of the natural world in China, this thesis presents a first step in investigating the long-term history of bowu by tracing various manifestations of bowu as an intellectual and cultural category of knowledge. Chapter One provides a comprehensive review of some exemplary uses of bowu in pre-modern eras, ranging from association with a kind of polymath (bowu junzi 博物君子) which emerged between the fifth and second centuries BC to the term’s continuous occurrence in major reference books, such as the Qing imperial encyclopaedia Qindin Gujin tushu jicheng 欽定古今圖書集成. The following three chapters focus on the transitional period, starting from the 1850s, during which bowu experienced profound and rapid changes in meaning. Chapter Two examines one of the most significant moments in the history of bowu, when American Baptist medical missionary Daniel Jerome Macgowan (1815-1893) interpreted bowu to refer to natural philosophy and general sciences. This chapter centres on Macgowan’s 1851 compilation of a popular scientific work in Chinese, titled Bowu tongshu 博物通書 (Philosophical Almanac), which communicated basic elements and general uses of novel technologies of electric telegraphy. Chapter Three presents a different approach to bowu taking place around the same period. The renowned British medical missionary Benjamin Hobson (1816-1873), whose Chinese works introducing Western medical knowledge had been widely circulated and read by Chinese elites and doctors, published a three-volume Chinese book in 1855 called Bowu xinbian 博物新編. The book sought to ‘diffuse’ useful knowledge that helped its readers to take a new look at the natural world. These two chapters aim to show how Western natural philosophy and natural history made their way into late imperial China through their association with bowu. The last chapter studies the modern developments of traditional bowu and local operations of bowu xue (‘bowu learning’) from the perspective of native practitioners of the early Republican era, when Chinese educators and reform-minded members of the gentry established learned institutes, launched specialized journals, and organized field practices of bowu xue across the new nation.

With these four chapters, the goal of my thesis is to show that long-term historical studies of local knowledge categories like bowu provide us with a clearer understanding of the importance of non-Western knowledge systems in shaping and re-shaping our visions of the natural world prior to the arrival and standardization of modern disciplinary sciences, yet they did not become visible parts of the historiography of modernity in most places around the globe.