Being able to distinguish between the government's tax boats, travelers' “wave-riding boats,” and officials' luxurious “mizzen sailboats” was important pragmatic knowledge for those living along the Yangzi River. So was understanding whence pearls and jade, coal and charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur came, or how artisans made dyes and paints, processed salt, sesame oil, and gunpowder, and produced fine silks and elegant porcelains. These were among the numerous topics that the minor official Song Yingxing (1587–1666?) addressed in his famous The Works of Heaven and the Inception of Things (Tiangong kaiwu, pr. 1637), conventionally regarded as a landmark text in the history of Chinese technology.

However, Song himself did not consider Works of Heaven as a separate monograph on technology. Rather, he wrote it as the final part of a politically motivated magnum opus comprising six distinct titles. It was eighteenth-century scholars who first detached Works of Heaven from its five more explicitly political companion texts and celebrated its unique technical achievements. Nineteenth-century compilers later related Song's eighteen fields of practical knowledge to agriculture, statecraft, and technology, and subsequent generations of historians of Chinese science and technology have continued to interpret the text more or less within these three domains. Bucking this century-long trend, Dagmar Schäfer reintegrates Works of Heaven into Song's original vision, revealing the historical catalysts that inspired it. At the same time, Schäfer's deft rehistoricization uses Works of Heaven to illuminate Song's broader intellectual, social, and political world.

Born in 1587, Ray Huang's “Year of No Significance,” Song Yingxing's life spanned the end of the Ming, the transition to Manchu rule, and the first two decades of the Qing dynasty. Schäfer shows that his writings must be understood as a failed official's intellectual response to the end of Ming crises. The six core chapters of the book are organized around the concept of affairs: the private affairs of Song's life history; the “affair of honor” in 1636 that motivated Song to use his writings to bring a better order to the world; the public affairs that formed his career trajectory; the written affairs that illuminate his textual responses; the affairs of nature that Song articulated as complex transformations of qi; and finally, a concluding chapter on acoustical phenomenon, a specific dimension of the affairs of nature. This microhistory approach makes Schäfer's analysis a far more illuminating window onto early seventeenth-century Chinese conceptions of nature than all previous efforts to cherry pick the contents of Works of Heaven for evidence of China's technological know-how. As such it is comparable to Carlo Ginzburg's exemplary microhistory, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (London: Routledge, 1980), in its excavation of the unique conceptualizations of an otherwise unremarkable member of the local elite. Furthermore, by situating Song Yingxing's scholarship within his political-social-intellectual milieu, Schäfer allows his life story to be productively read along with those of the better-known playwrights (e.g., Kong Shangren), novelists (e.g., Li Yu), historians (e.g., Zhang Dai), and artists (e.g., Li Rihua) of seventeenth-century China.

In addition to unpacking every known dimension of Song's life and life's work, Schäfer also innovatively uses Works of Heaven as a special lens through which to view craftsmanship, craft knowledge production, and concepts about natural processes during the seventeenth century. Her book, however, is neither on the crafting of things, as the title suggests, nor even on technical knowledge in China per se. For details on technological know-how in imperial China, readers would do better to revisit Joseph Needham's monumental Science and Civilisation in China. Rather, it is about how one scholar took otherwise marginalized craft and technological knowledge and gave it greater political and cultural significance than anyone else had previously done. Schäfer shows that Song wrote Works of Heaven as the final product of a politically motivated writing campaign in response to the emperor appointing a brash military official (whose criticisms Song nonetheless agreed with) directly to a high-level metropolitan position in 1636. Technical knowledge was important in Song's campaign because it was grounded in concrete transformations of qi. Schäfer thus elucidates Song's complex thought processes by interpreting how he used discourses on qi, yin-yang, and the five phases to reconceptualize natural processes and craft production as a new foundation for philosophical reflection.

By taking this approach to the sociology of scientific knowledge in China, Schäfer brings Song and his book out of the narrower history of Chinese technology to integrate him into the broader field of Chinese history as well as the global history of science beyond East Asia. For these and other qualities, the History of Science Society awarded this book their 2012 Pfizer Award for most outstanding book on the history of science. Just as Song's Works of Heaven opens up the world of craftsmen's knowledge in seventeenth-century China, Schäfer's Crafting 10,000 Things arguably exemplifies an illuminating approach to the craft of writing on the global history of science in the present.