In this first of our “10 Questions for the Historian of Science” interview series, I asked Fangyi Cheng about his research, the state of the history of science, and its place within contemporary global debates.
Fangyi Cheng. Source: Ole Birk Laursen, 2025.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is your academic background?
Fangyi Cheng: My name is Fangyi Cheng, and I am currently a Full Professor at the Boya (Liberal Arts) College, Sun Yat-sen University. I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. My research focuses primarily on the history of Sino-foreign exchanges and the early Inner Asian history.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the topic of your research and how did you become interested in this?
Fangyi Cheng: My interest in this field really grew out of a fascination with how cultural forms transform as they move across different civilizations. I have always been drawn to the ways myths, stories, folktales, institutions, games, and customs change when they travel from one cultural context to another. Whether I am studying the nomadic peoples of the north or the Western Christian missionaries who came to China, the underlying thread is the same: I am captivated by the transformations that occur in the course of cultural exchange. This theme of cultural transmission and transformation continues to inspire me, and it remains the central passion that drives my research.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your working theories and methods?
Fangyi Cheng: The theories and methods I use really depend on the type of research and the kinds of sources available. For example, in my work on missionaries, the materials are often easier to locate, since missionaries themselves were very conscious about preserving, organizing, and publishing their records. In a recent book I published, which reconstructs the family history of an American Protestant missionary in China, I was able to draw on a remarkable set of family archives, including photographs, memoirs, and other personal documents that had been carefully preserved.
By contrast, when I study themes such as the transmission of myths, stories, or games, the sources tend to be much more scattered. This requires me to engage in wide-ranging archival work and source collection. One approach I especially enjoy is working across different languages and cultural traditions. Many of the materials I encounter exist in multiple forms as they circulate among different civilizations, or even within different times and regions of the samestory or practice. What fascinates me most is being able to trace these scattered fragments, follow the threads that connect them, and eventually weave them together into a coherent narrative.
In terms of theory, I often draw on different frameworks depending on the nature of the topic. For my research on missionaries, I find postcolonial theory particularly useful, since it constantly reminds us of the power relations that are embedded in cultural encounters and exchanges. In other cases—such as the study of myths, stories, and other forms of cultural transmission—I am especially interested in theories of agency. These highlight the active roles played not only by the transmitters but also by the recipients, who both shape and transform the content as it moves across cultural contexts. Beyond these, I remain open to adopting other theoretical perspectives whenever they help me better understand the dynamics of cultural exchange.
Ole Birk Laursen: How is your research situated within the field of the history of science?
Fangyi Cheng: My encounter with the history of science was somewhat accidental, and yet in hindsight it feels entirely natural. On the surface it began with a simple curiosity about the maps produced by Jesuit missionaries—and very quickly I realized that maps are not merely illustrations but vehicles for scientific knowledge. Paying attention to the animals and marine creatures depicted on those maps led me into the world of natural history and the broader field of natural science. Likewise, when I studied missionaries’ practical work—for example the activities of medical missionaries—it became clear that these were also important channels for the transmission of medical knowledge. Gradually these threads merged: my interests in cultural exchange and in the movement of stories and practices naturally intersected with the history of science. On a deeper level, I see much of my work as intellectual or knowledge history, and that field has many points of dialogue with the history of science because the preconditions and pathways of scientific knowledge are so wide-ranging that it is hard to discuss cultural and educational practices without engaging with them.
Of course, the emergence of these ideas is also tied to shifts within the history of science itself. The boundaries of the field have gradually opened and the definition of “science” has grown more capacious. As a result, many forms of knowledge and cultural practice that were once treated as marginal can now be meaningfully read as part of scientific life—which makes it easier for my work on cultural transmission, missions, and natural history to enter into conversation with the history of science.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the state of the history of science today?
Fangyi Cheng: I don’t claim to have a comprehensive grasp of the current state of the history of science, so I’ll speak more from impression than from a systematic survey. What strikes me is that the field continually renews itself by adopting new methods and widening its horizons; it has become more open and more inviting of diverse participants and perspectives. Methodologically there has been a clear shift away from early linear narratives of scientific progress toward approaches that emphasize the circulation of knowledge, the local and contingent processes by which modern sciences take shape, and the active participation of different cultural groups. These concerns—locality, movement, transformation, and cross-cultural involvement—dovetail closely with broader historiographical trends in other subfields of history, which is one reason the history of science feels so generative and porous today.
Ole Birk Laursen: Why do we need to study the history of science?
Fangyi Cheng: Traditionally, much history-of-science scholarship aimed to explain why modern science and scientism came to dominate—in other words, earlier work often helped to construct a narrative that presented modern science as the inevitable or self-evident pinnacle of human knowledge. Contemporary history of science, by contrast, tends to decenter that teleological perspective and instead tells the broader story of human knowledge. I like to think of knowledge as a vast network of lines—like a neural map—that produces a great plurality of cultural and epistemic traditions. One of those strands eventually achieved enormous social, economic, and material success and became what we now call “science,” but that outcome was not preordained. Current research repeatedly reminds us of the contingency and uncertainty behind that single pathway: we should not treat the rise of modern science as the only legitimate or inevitable intellectual destiny. Rather, we ought to recognize the richness and diversity of knowledge forms in traditional societies and the many other possible trajectories knowledge could have followed.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the value and impact of your research today? How does it connect with contemporary debates in broader society?
Fangyi Cheng: My current work on cartography and the natural-history content of maps speaks directly to a broader revival of natural-history studies now unfolding in China. Over the past twenty years in China there has been a noticeable revival of interest in natural history. This resurgence is driven in part by growing concerns about environmental protection and in part by a perceived gap in nature education. I find this revival both important and hopeful: it helps reconnect people—especially younger generations—with local biodiversity, encourages citizen-science practices, and creates fertile ground for dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences. My research on maps and the natural-history content they carry both speaks to and can contribute to this wider movement. I study maps not merely as images but as carriers of cultural and scientific knowledge—texts in which form and content circulate, transform, and are reinterpreted as they move across cultural contexts. That approach connects naturally with recent scholarly currents that seek to demythologize cartography: to treat maps as historically contingent practices rather than as neutral, purely technical products.
As for the value and impact of this research, that is harder to state in absolute terms because “impact” depends entirely on the angle from which one looks. From a scholarly perspective, my work opens conversations between intellectual history, the history of science, and material-culture studies; it helps us see how local practices of classification and representation feed into larger scientific formations. In the public sphere, however, the voice of the humanities is often faint in an era dominated by powerful scientific and technological narratives. We try to make connections—for example, by contributing to debates about scientific ethics or the hegemonic status of certain scientific discourses—but those interventions tend to be modest and are not always heard widely.
Ole Birk Laursen: Are there any unusual stories you have come across in your research? Anything that changed your perception of dominant historical narratives?
Fangyi Cheng: What particularly fascinates me from the history-of-science angle are the many stories of explorers and collectors who, from the modern period onward, travelled into China’s borderlands and interior to gather specimens and data for botany, zoology, geography, geology, ethography, and even archaeology. Early readings of these narratives often framed them as stories of Western knowledge incorporating China—a one-way process in which modern science simply absorbed local nature. Re-reading them today, however, I’m far more interested in what was happening on the ground: how local knowledge traditions and local people interacted with, assisted, and in many cases actively shaped the work of those European and American collectors. Guides, informants, interpreters, local artisans, and indigenous classificatory practices frequently influenced what was collected, how it was named, and how it was understood.
These largely neglected local dimensions have the potential to transform dominant historical narratives. Recognizing the agency of local actors and the plural sources of knowledge complicates the old story of a unilateral transfer of scientific authority; it shows instead a network of exchanges in which modern scientific knowledge was co-produced, negotiated, and transformed. Tracing those interactions not only recovers voices and practices that been sidelined in earlier histories, but also helps us rethink how scientific authority and expertise were established in the first place.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your plans for future research?
Fangyi Cheng: I am currently developing two research projects that I hope to advance over the next few years. The first—and one of the main reasons for my visit—is a study of ancient games. I am especially interested in board games and in the histories of how particular games travelled between different civilizations. This project will examine paths of transmission, local adaptations, and the ways games participate in cultural exchange; I also expect to collaborate closely with Jacob Schmidt-Madsen on this topic.
The second project concerns the history of collecting, focused on Ordos bronzes. I am tracing how Western collections of Ordos-style bronzes were established around the world and examining the scholarly history and significance that accompanied those collecting practices. Both projects extend my broader interest in how material culture and practices move between societies and how local actors shape those movements.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the future of the history of science?
Fangyi Cheng: It’s difficult for me to answer the question of the future of the history of science from a single, overarching point. What I do see, and what I hope for, is a continual broadening of the field’s boundaries—an expansion that draws in scholars from different disciplines, methodological commitments, and research interests. Ideally, more people will find within the history of science entry points that speak to their own questions and methods, and in doing so they will use the field to rethink and loosen the conventional limits of their home disciplines. That interdisciplinary, porous quality is what I most want to see: a history of science that functions as a generous intellectual space in which diverse approaches meet, cross-fertilize, and offer new ways of understanding both past and present knowledge practices.
Ole Birk Laursen: Thank you for your time and generosity to answer these questions.