On Familiar Strangers and Foreign Dynasties in the Early History of the Chinese Armillary Sphere
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his 1732 Observations , vol. 2, Antoine Gaubil (1689–1759) would place Zhang Heng’s 張衡 (78–139 CE) supposed creation of ‘armillaries, a sphere, a celestial globe, and a book explaining the use of these instruments’ in 164 CE, ‘the year that foreign subjects of the Roman Empire arrived in China’ (p. 24), implying that it may have been from them that he learned the art. The irony is that 164 CE falls a quarter century after Zhang Heng’s death and that Zhang Heng was actually one of the few purely ‘Chinese’ figures in the history of the armillary sphere in early imperial China. Romans may have had no part in this story, as Gaubil would suggest, but the history of the conception, construction, and use of observational armillary instruments in China all the way up through the Tang 唐 (618–907) is one that is disproportionally tied to strangers, albeit those of a more familiar sort: the Red Di 赤狄, Xiongnu 匈奴, Xianbei 鮮卑, Qiang 羌, and Indian- and Central Asian- connected Buddhists. This paper will offer a retrospective of that history from the perspective of exchange between peoples and cultures interior to what we all too often treat as a monolithic East Asian tradition in astronomy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".