The Anatomy of Lenses (Jingshi, ~1681) is mentioned in a number of other seventeenth-century texts, but was only rediscovered in 2005. Scholars working both in English and Chinese have simply accepted Jingshi’s claim that its editor Sun Yunqiu made telescopes. Within ten years of Galileo’s work on the telescope, a Jesuit had already brought one to China. Nonetheless, no such early telescope survives. So what did Sun Yunqiu do? Working with museum curators, historians of science, and current-day fabricators of lenses, I have investigated what it actually took to make a telescope in seventeenth-century China and what Sun Yunqiu’s achievement probably was. I have reconstructed the role of artisans, particularly jade workers, who shaped crystal into lenses and have some tentative conclusions about writing about technology in seventeenth-century China.

Image from the Library of Congress
https://www.loc.gov/item/2021666411