Book Description

Taste for clocks and other mechanical curiosities of the West seems to have invaded the court of China at an early date ; already at the beginning of the fourteenth century a French ironsmith, Guillaume Boucher, probably a prisoner brought back from some Mongol raid into Hungary, had constructed for the first Yuan Emperor of China an elaborate clock with fountains ; and when, in 1599, the great Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci arrived in Peking he secured Imperial favour and an entry to the Court largely by a gift of clocks. It was, however, only at the end of the seventeenth century, in the reign of K'ang Hsi, that clocks in great numbers began to invade the Palace. This enlightened monarch, who was filled with an admiration, rare in his dynasty, for the arts and sciences of Europe, welcomed learned Jesuit mathematicians and philosophers to his Court, and formed a collection of scientific instruments and time-pieces of all descriptions. -- Introduction.