How things are made
Seven texts by and about makers: a cook, a recorder of trades, papermakers, a commoner who made type, a young inventor and his fifty models, a mountain carved by water, and a poet who praised all trades. Read them for the details that only someone who did the work would notice.
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Step 1: 莊子·養生主 Zhuangzi: The Secret of Caring for Life
指窮於爲薪，火傳也，不知其盡也。What feeds the flame is spent as fuel, but the fire passes on, and no one knows where it ends.
Cook Ding’s knife is as sharp after nineteen years as the day it left the whetstone, because he follows the grain and slows down at the knotted places instead of hacking through them; Song Yingxing wanted scholars to look that closely at a cooking pot.
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Step 2: 天工開物·自序 The Works of Heaven and the Inception of Things: Author’s Preface
天覆地載，物數號萬，而事亦因之曲成而不遺。豈人力也哉？Heaven covers and earth bears up. Things are numbered by the ten thousand, and affairs follow from them, each brought to completion in its own way and none left out. Is this the work of human strength?
Song Yingxing mocks learned men who hold forth on ancient tripods without ever having looked at the mould for a cooking pot, puts grains first and gold and jade last, and tells the ambitious to throw his book aside; open his chapter on paper next, since paper carries every other book.
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Step 3: 天工開物·殺青（節選） The Works of Heaven: Killing the Green, on Paper (excerpt)
殺其青而白乃見，萬卷百家，基從此起。Kill the green, and the white appears; ten thousand scrolls and a hundred schools of thought are founded on this.
Bamboo soaked for a hundred days, boiled for eight days and nights and lifted on a screen of fine bamboo strips, and even scraps pulped again into what northerners called the paper of the returning soul; once there is paper, Shen Kuo shows how to print on it faster than any hand can copy.
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Step 4: 夢溪筆談·活板 Movable Type (Brush Talks from Dream Brook)
慶曆中，有布衣畢昇，又為活版。In the Qingli years there was a commoner named Bi Sheng who went further and made movable type.
A commoner named Bi Sheng, clay type baked hard, two iron plates used in turn, and wood rejected because it swells unevenly when wet: the earliest surviving account of movable type is a page of workshop detail; nearly six centuries later Pascal also found his machine by trial.
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Step 5: Advis necessaire à ceux qui auront curiosité de voir la Machine Arithmétique A Necessary Notice on the Arithmetic Machine
l’experience leur auroit fait voir qu’un instrument moins composé ne pouvoit avoir toutes ces conditions que j’ay heureusement données à cette petite Machine.experience would have shown them that a less complicated instrument could not have all the qualities that I have happily given to this little Machine.
Pascal built more than fifty models in wood, ivory, ebony and copper and carried the last over two hundred and fifty leagues of road before he trusted it, and he names the paradox every maker meets, that to make the work simple the machine had to be complicated; Shen Kuo then finds a landscape that water made.
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Step 6: 夢溪筆談·雁蕩山 The Yandang Mountains (Brush Talks from Dream Brook)
原其理，當是為谷中大水沖激，沙土盡去，唯巨石巋然挺立耳。Looking for the reason, it must be that the great waters in the valleys rushed against them and washed away all the sand and earth, leaving only the great rocks standing tall.
Shen Kuo sees that the strange peaks of Yandang were not pushed up but left standing when running water carried the earth away, and checks the idea against pillars of earth in distant ravines: a landscape made slowly, with no maker at all; Hopkins ends the trail by praising both kinds of making.
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Step 7: Pied Beauty
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Hopkins praises dappled skies, speckled trout and finches’ wings together with ‘all trades, their gear and tackle and trim’, and does not separate the made from the grown, which is the right note to end on.