470 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



saw them through a ■window '' close set with iron hars." '' They are 

 now easily accessible. 



According to Mr. Wylie, well-informed natives state that these 

 instruments were made ckiring the Yuen dynasty, and he quotes a 

 Chinese description of Peking, in which the observatory and four 

 large instruments (two of which, from the description, can be identi- 

 fied as the two still extant) are said to have been constructed in the 

 year a.d. 1279. This date brings us back to one of the most 

 interesting periods of Chinese history, as it was in 1279 that Koblai 

 Khan, the great Mongol monarch, and grandson of Djengis Khan, 

 finished the conquest of China, and moved his residence to the new 

 city Taydo, now called Pe-King. Yery different from his ancestors, 

 Koblai was a monarch who favoured science and arts, and he sup- 

 ported and protected the astronomer Ko Show-King, who had first 

 had the control of the waterways of the empire, but whom he, in 

 1276, appointed to examine the system of chronology then in use. 

 Ko Show-King got the observatory built, and constructed a number 

 of instruments, all of which are counted up in the Yuen She, or 

 History of the Yuen {i.e., Mongol) dynasty. The descriptions, as 

 translated by Mr. Wylie, are in most cases very difficult to under- 

 stand, except in the cases of the instruments Keen e, or equa- 

 toreal, and Ling-lung e, or armillse — as these are the two standing 

 at the present moment in the courtyard of the old observatory. 

 About this identity there can be no doubt, as the above-mentioned 

 description of Peking expressly states that the Keen e and the 

 Ling-lung e were removed in 1673 from the platform, and stored 

 away at the foot of the building. Gaubil (/. c.) also says that the 

 instruments which in his time were kept "dans une salle fermee" 

 were made by Ko Show-King. 



It would only tire the reader if I were to reproduce the whole 

 of the elaborate description of the Chinese writer, particularly as 

 this is only intelligible when compared with a picture of the instru- 

 ments. What I wish to call attention to in these pages is, that we 

 have here two remarkable instances of how the Chinese people often 

 came into possession of great inventions many centuries before the 

 western nations enjoyed them. We find here in the thirteenth 

 centi;ry the equatoreal armillse of Tycho Brahe, and better still, an 

 equatoreal instrument, like those " armillse sequatorise maximse " with 

 which Tycho observed the comet of 1585, as also fixed stars and 

 planets.^ 



It is well known that armillse have been in use in China very 

 early, and probably before the astronomers at Alexandria commenced 

 using instruments with graduated circles. It is particularly stated by 

 Father Gaubil that Sse-Ma-Tsien, about the year 100 e.g., men- 

 tions some old instruments, with circles of two feet five inches 



'' Memoirs and Observations Topographical (London, 1697), p. 65. 



8 Astr. Inst. Mcchanica, fol. D 2. 



