Wang Zhen (, 1290–1333) was a Chinese agronomist, inventor, mechanical engineer, politician, and writer of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). He was one of the early innovators of the wooden movable type printing technology. His illustrated agricultural treatise was also one of the most advanced of its day, covering a wide range of equipment and technologies available in the late 13th and early 14th century.
Life and works
Wang Zhen was born in Shandong province, and spent many years as an official of both Anhui and Jiangxi provinces. From 1290 to 1301, he was a magistrate for Jingde, Anhui province, where he was a pioneer of the use of wooden movable type printing. The wooden movable type was described in Wang Zhen's publication of 1313, known as the Nong Shu (), or Book of Agriculture. Although the title describes the main focus of the work, it incorporated much more information on a wide variety of subjects that was not limited to the scope of agriculture. Wang's Nong Shu of 1313 was a very important medieval treatise outlining the application and use of the various Chinese sciences, technologies, and agricultural practices. From water-powered bellows to movable type printing, it is considered a descriptive masterpiece on contemporary medieval Chinese technology.
Wang wrote the masterpiece Nong Shu for many practical reasons, but also as a means to aid and support destitute rural farmers in China looking for means to improve their economic livelihoods in the face of poverty and oppression during the Yuan period. Although the previous Song dynasty was a period of high Chinese culture and relative economic and agricultural stability, the Yuan dynasty thoroughly damaged the economic and agricultural base of China during the Song–Yuan transition. Hence, a book such as the Nong Shu could help rural farmers maximize efficiency of producing yields and they could learn how to use various agricultural tools to aid their daily lives. However, it was not intended to be read by rural farmers (who were largely illiterate), but local officials who desired to research the best agricultural methods currently available that the peasants otherwise would know little of.
The Nong Shu was an incredibly long book even for its own time, which had over 110,000 written Chinese characters. However, this was only slightly larger than the early medieval Chinese agricultural treatise Chi Min Yao Shu written by Jia Sixia in 535, which had slightly over 100,000 written Chinese characters.
Technological innovations
Water-powered bellows
The Chinese during the Han dynasty (202 BC – AD 220) were the first to apply hydraulic power (i.e. a waterwheel) in working the inflatable bellows of the blast furnace in creating cast iron. This was recorded in AD 31, an innovation of the engineer Du Shi, Prefect of Nanyang. After Du Shi, Chinese in subsequent dynastic periods continued the use of water power to operate the bellows of the blast furnace. In the 5th century text of the Wu Chang Ji, its author Pi Ling wrote that a planned, artificial lake had been constructed in the Yuan-Jia reign period (424–429) for the sole purpose of powering water wheels aiding the smelting and casting processes of the Chinese iron industry. The 5th-century text Shui Jing Zhu mentions the use of rushing river water to power waterwheels, as does the Tang dynasty geography text of the Yuan-he Jun Xian Tu Chi, written in 814.
Although Du Shi was the first to apply water power to bellows in metallurgy, the first drawn and printed illustration of its operation with water power came in 1313, with Wang Zhen's Nong Shu. Wang explained the methods used for the water-powered blast-furnace in previous times and in his era of the 14th century:
Wang's movable type printing
In improving movable type printing, Wang mentioned an alternative method of baking porcelain printing type with earthenware frame in order to make whole blocks. Wang is best known for his usage of wooden movable type while he was a magistrate of Jingde in Anhui province from 1290 to 1301. His main contribution was improving the speed of typesetting with simple mechanical devices, along with the complex, systematic arrangement of wooden movable types. Wang summarized the process of making wooden movable type as described in the passage below: