A Silk Roll, Nine Feet, Filed Under the Wrong Century
The Bureau’s East Asian desk has spent the better part of a season on an object rather than on a claim. In March a correspondent in Nanjing forwarded a silk roll, nine feet four inches unrolled, carrying twelve stanzas of ballad in a good clerical hand, together with a set of ruled diagrams in ink and cinnabar. The covering letter asserts that the roll preserves the working papers of a body called the Bureau of Uncertain Heavens: three officials, one lacquer cage, one workshop, patronage of the throne, dissolved after a fire. The roll is handsome and the hand is confident. It is the dating that will not sit still.
Nothing in the ballad’s setting is impossible on its face. The Ming dynasty held China from 1368 to 1644, and the reign in question, that of the Yongle Emperor, ran from 17 July 1402 to 12 August 1424 and was not a modest one. The same throne commissioned the Yongle Encyclopedia — 22,937 manuscript rolls bound as 11,095 volumes, some 370 million characters, 2,169 scholars at work on it by 1405, never printed, and fewer than four hundred volumes still in existence anywhere. The same throne sent Zheng He out of the Yangtze on 11 July 1405 with three hundred and seventeen ships and nearly twenty-eight thousand men, and did it six times before the Emperor died; a seventh fleet sailed under his grandson. A court on that scale could easily have carried three officials and a cricket cage without leaving a mark on the establishment lists. Scale is not the objection.
The objection is arithmetic. What the ballad describes — a screen struck by light in bands rather than in two patches, a thing that is neither one condition nor the other until somebody looks, a measurement that settles the matter it was sent to observe — is quantum mechanics, and quantum mechanics has a birthday. Planck resolved the black-body problem in 1900; Einstein published on the photoelectric effect in 1905; Bohr’s atom followed in 1913; and the theory was not assembled into a working formalism until the middle 1920s, by Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Born and Dirac. The Yongle Emperor had then been dead four hundred and seventy-six years. The Bureau prints the ballad in full, in its four movements, and asks the reader to keep that figure in view throughout.
First Movement: The Silk and the Brush
Our correspondent’s plates accompany the stanzas and are reproduced with them, along with those that answer to no stanza at all, which are gathered at the foot; the Bureau prints them without endorsement and without retouching. The first movement concerns two things only: a chart, and a window with two holes in it. Neither is in itself remarkable, which is precisely what makes them worth the paper they cost.
They ruled the silk in cinnabar, they weighted down the ends,
And drew upon it every road a moving thing intends.
Not one road, sirs, but all of them, laid over in a mesh —
And where the roads lay thickest, there the arrow struck the flesh.
“Every road it might have taken, drawn at once.” — inscription on the roller. The roller has not been produced.
They cut the paper window twice, two slits a finger wide,
And set a lamp behind it, and they let the lamp abide.
The floor did not show two bright bands, as any man would swear,
But nine, and dark between them, and the ninth was hardly there.
“Two openings; nine bands. We have counted them four nights running.” — workshop note, undated. Thomas Young reported the same bands to the Royal Society in 1801.
The Master walked the bamboo bridge and put it to the mist:
Is light a rain of little stones, or is it wave and twist?
The mist replied as mist replies, which is to say, as both —
And held to both until a man required of it an oath.
“I asked it; it declined to be one thing.” — marginal note in a later and less patient hand.
What the Record Actually Contains
Before the second movement it is worth saying plainly that Ming science is not a blank page onto which anything at all may be written. Song Yingxing published the Tiangong Kaiwu in May 1637, funded by his patron Tu Shaokui: agriculture, sericulture, cotton, shipbuilding, metallurgy, casting, forging, sulfur, saltpetre and gunpowder, described from first-hand observation rather than copied out of older books, and illustrated so thoroughly that the plates alone dwarf every Chinese encyclopedia before it. Copies then became scarce at home under Qing state monopolies over the very industries the book explains, and the originals that came through did their surviving in Japan. Earlier still, the Huolongjing, written between 1360 and 1375 and printed complete at Nanyang in 1412, sets out fire lances, organ guns, cast-iron land mines with trigger mechanisms, naval mines on timed fuses, and the earliest known multistage rocket, which its compilers called the fire-dragon issuing from the water.
Observation was equally well provided for, and it was a state function. The Directorate of Astronomy absorbed the Muslim Bureau in 1370 and thereafter made the calendar, reported celestial abnormalities to the throne, presided at ceremonies and fixed the auspicious days for war, marriage and building; an establishment of 1392 runs from a Director paid sixteen piculs of rice a month down to the sunrise observers on five. The Beijing Ancient Observatory was finished in 1442 — a platform forty metres square on a brick tower fifteen metres high — and the great bronzes on that terrace are what the ballad’s fourth stanza is standing among. On the ballad’s own dating it is standing there eighteen years before the terrace was built.
Nor was theory missing. The dialectical chapters of the Mozi preserve one of the earliest written accounts of a pinhole image anywhere, describing it as inverted by the point that gathers the light, and they are some seventeen centuries older than the Ming. Shen Kuo set down the same phenomenon in the Dream Pool Essays in 1088 — a bird’s shadow travels with the bird, but its image through a small hole in a window travels the other way — and in the same volume recorded that a suspended magnetised needle points a little east of due south, which is the first description of magnetic declination on record. And in 1607 Xu Guangqi sat down with the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and put the first parts of Euclid into Chinese; in 1629 the same man was put over the calendar reform that was completed after his death.
The Bureau sets that record beside the roll not to belittle the roll but to locate it. Every item in the left-hand column below is asserted by our correspondent. Every item in the right-hand column can be visited, read, or counted.
The Ballad Against the Record
What the silk roll asserts, set beside what can be dated, printed, or walked upon.
| Asserted on the roll | On the record | |
|---|---|---|
| The document | Twelve stanzas on silk, nine feet four, no colophon, no seal | Tiangong Kaiwu, printed May 1637, author and patron both named |
| The apparatus | A jade blade and a bronze ring, struck together at the second hour | The Beijing terrace, 1442; its ecliptic armilla, sextant and theodolite rebuilt 1673 |
| Light through two openings | Nine bands on a stone floor, counted over four nights | Young to the Royal Society, 1801; electrons through two slits, 1961 |
| The sealed cage | A cricket that sings and does not sing, sealed under wax | Schrödinger, Naturwissenschaften, November 1935 |
| The nature of light | Both stone and wave, on the mist's own testimony | Planck 1900, Einstein 1905, Bohr 1913, the formalism 1925–27 |
| Loss of the archive | Burned in the third watch, along with the record of the burning | Yongle Encyclopedia: 11,095 volumes made, fewer than 400 extant |
| Surviving object | None offered for examination | The observatory terrace, forty metres square, still standing |
Second Movement: The Bureau of Uncertain Heavens
The second movement is the one that gives the alleged bureau its name, and it is also the one in which the ballad’s author is at his most careful. Three men make an observation, disagree about it, and record the disagreement instead of settling it — which is either an extraordinarily modern instinct or an extraordinarily convenient one.
On the brick terrace after dark, where the great bronzes stand,
They sighted through the dragon’s mouth, a cord in either hand.
They wrote the reading down as three; a colleague wrote it four;
They wrote down both, and ruled a line, and argued it no more.
“Three, and also four. Enter both.” — observation register, second watch. The register is not among the papers forwarded.
The Emperor sent for the three, and had them stand below,
And asked them plainly what it was they claimed at last to know.
They said: the world is not one world until a man has seen.
He asked them then: and where am I, and what is it I’ve been?
“Then where am I?” — the Emperor, reported. No answer to the question is recorded anywhere in the roll.
They brought a cage of lacquered red, a cricket shut from view,
And bound the door with cord and wax, and sealed it through and through.
“Does it sing?” the Emperor asked. They bowed, and answered: “Sire,
It sings; it also does not sing; and neither is a liar.”
“It sings; it also does not sing.” — court diary. Schrödinger arrived at the same argument in 1935, with a cat in it. No plate of the cage accompanies the roll.
Third Movement: The Jade and the Bronze
Here the ballad leaves the observatory and enters the workshop, and its temperature changes. The first two movements report measurements. The third reports a manufacture, and the Bureau notes that no line of it describes a principle, a quantity, or a method that another workman could follow.
They ground a jade to mutton-fat, they cast a ring of bronze,
And hung the two a hand apart above the workshop stones.
They struck them, and the air between them shivered and went blue,
And every man that saw it swore the wall behind showed through.
“Struck at the second hour. The air took the blow and kept it.” — workshop tally, sixth month.
They carried it into the hall where the red columns stand,
And struck it once. A thing came in, and filled the hall, and spanned
From the west door to the east door, and it wore a dragon’s head,
And it was not entirely there, nor anywhere instead.
“It came in from no direction.” — deposition of a hall guard, undated and unsigned.
It settled on the altar stone, above the four lit flames,
And it was smoke and it was light and it had several names.
It did not speak. It did not move. It waited to be seen.
And that, the ballad says, is where the trouble should have been.
“It waits to be observed. We have decided not to oblige it.” — instruction posted at the altar, in a hand not used elsewhere in the roll.
Fourth Movement: What Answered, and What Burned
The closing movement supplies a dictation, a fire, and a refrain. The Bureau observes only that the three arrive in that order, and that the order is the one an account requires if it is to explain both an extraordinary claim and the complete absence of anything to test it against.
They set a scribe beneath it, and the scribe began to write,
And what he wrote was not his own, and he wrote it through the night.
The characters went gold, and cooled, and settled into black,
And when they read them in the morning, half the page read back.
“He wrote six hours and could not afterwards read his own hand.” — attending official. The sheets are described as reversed; none accompany the roll.
The annex burned in the third watch. They could not say from what.
They carried out what scrolls they could; the rest, sirs, they did not.
The register of the affair burned with the affair as well,
Which is a tidy circumstance, and one they did not tell.
“The fire began in the room that held the record of the fire.” — the annex report, which also burned.
They ruled the silk in cinnabar, they weighted down the ends,
And drew upon it every road a moving thing intends.
The silk is gone. The roads are gone. The cage is gone as well.
And what was in the cage that night there is no man to tell.
“The chart was rolled and put away in the fourth month.” — last entry in the inventory. The inventory ends there. It is the only plate in the file in which nothing is happening.
The Bureau’s Finding
The finding is narrow, and the Bureau states it without satisfaction. Every institution the ballad leans on is real and can be dated: the throne, the Directorate of Astronomy, the terrace, the workshops, the encyclopedia, the fleet. Every physical thing the ballad produces has been destroyed — the chart in the fourth month, the cage at an unstated date, the papers in the third watch — and the one document that survives to describe the destruction is the document under examination. That is not evidence of a cover-up. It is the shape a story takes when it is written backwards from a conclusion.
There is also a question of language, which our correspondent has not addressed. The ballad’s second stanza counts nine bands where an honest classical account of lamplight would have reported two patches; it is describing an interference fringe, and describing it correctly, very nearly four centuries before the double-slit experiment was put to the Royal Society. The sixth stanza seals a living thing in a box and refuses to decide its condition, which is Schrödinger’s argument of November 1935 down to the furniture — and Schrödinger, it should be said, advanced his cat as an absurdity to be rejected, not as a discovery to be celebrated. A Ming official who had genuinely arrived at these results by himself would have had no reason to phrase them exactly as a European physicist phrased them five centuries later.
The Bureau wrote to Nanjing asking to examine the roll itself, or failing that, the silk. The reply came by return, courteously, to say that the roll had been sent on to a second correspondent for photography, and that the second correspondent’s address would be forwarded as soon as it was known. The Bureau has entered the matter in its register in two conditions, and ruled a line, and will not argue it further.
Plates: the Remainder of the File
Eight plates that came with the roll and answer to no stanza in it. Printed without endorsement, in the order they were received.
