How the historical structure of local gazetteers conditioned modern science: Machinery in China, 1840–1949

Abstract This study asks why certain Western materials and practices came to be understood as modern science in China. By examining a corpus of Chinese local gazetteers ( difangzhi 地方志) representing roughly 52% of all collated titles within this genre, it argues that the gazetteer actively mediated an emerging technological reality between 1840 and 1949, thereby shaping a Chinese scientific modernity through material, geospatial and epistemic paths. Using a digital history approach, this work identifies machinery as a productive sample case to explore attention shifts within the gazetteer medium and network. It combines source criticism, text mining, textual comparison, geospatial analysis and distant and close reading to facilitate both cross-source comparison and diachronic review of information storage. These tactics demonstrate how the examined gazetteers interpreted, circulated and normalized these Western materials, practices and fields of knowledge in the modern era, with engineering as a consistent epistemic pillar underlying this attention regime over the longue durée . Moreover, the work reveals a modern geospatial hierarchy distinct from premodern patterns, establishing the newly built environment as a crucial agent in shaping how science was circulated and understood in modern China. It further offers a history-of-science perspective to interrogate mainstream digital and scientific values of exactitude vis-à-vis the alternative Chinese science culture at issue.