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The disparagement that once pervaded much of Western thinking and writing about China’s record in science and technology has now long given way to a general recognition that achievements in these realms constitute one of the great triumphs of the Chinese people and their civilization. In the area of technology, more than two generations of scholarly effort, much of it inspired by Joseph Needham and the volumes of his Science and Civilisation in China, have fleshed out a remarkable story of Chinese inventive genius and a broad Chinese talent for technological innovation that could hardly have been guessed at before the middle of the last century.
Parts of that story, however, remain to be fleshed out. For our purposes, none is more important than the question of how Chinese approaches to portraying technology influenced the overall development of technology in China. Until relatively recently, much of the work on surviving images of premodern technology analyzed these images, often with considerable skill, to elucidate how a particular technology or piece of equipment worked. From these studies have emerged many interesting insights into how the visual depiction of technology, as well as the technology itself, did or did not change over time.
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