Sabine Kink, M.A. 金霞筆

Research Project Collaborator and PhD candidate, Department of Chinese Studies, Sinology/Chinese Studies Section

Academic Career

• Since 2018 Research Project Collaborator, Department of Chinese Studies, University of Tübingen
• Since 2014 PhD candidate at the Department of Chinese Studies, University of Tübingen
• 2013 M.A. Sinology/Chinese Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Tübingen
• 2008 B.A. Sinology/Chinese Studies and Economics, University of Tübingen
• 1983 State Examination Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Regensburg

Man working a dragonbone pump (longgu che 龍骨車) to move water for wet-rice cultivation in Taiwan. Photographic print, 1930. Gerald & Rella Warner Taiwan Postcard Collection, Lafayette Digital Repository.

Research Focus
Sabine Kink's primary research focus lies in the history of science and technology in traditional China to which her academic training in both sciences and humanities enable her to bring interdisciplinary approaches and methods. She has a particular interest in pre-modern scientific texts and, for her M.A. thesis, she translated and analysed the Qing handbook Mianhua tu 棉花圖 (Pictures of Cotton; 1765), a detailed description of cotton production from its sowing, harvesting and processing through to the weaving and dyeing of cloth. As a doctoral candidate and one of the principal collaborators in the DFG-funded research project "Translating Western Science, Technology and Medicine to Late Ming China”she is currently investigating related convergences and divergences between East and West in the light of the Taixi shuifa 泰西水法 (Hydromethods of the Great West; 1612). Through a critical and comparative reading of diverse Western and Chinese primary sources related to intercivilizational knowledge transfer, she examines the limits of communication between the Jesuits and their Chinese interlocutors within a complex historical context.

Major Publications
Together with Prof. Hans Ulrich Vogel and Dr. Cao Jin, Sabine Kink is co-author of a forthcoming textbook, Die Falschmünzerbande vom Alten Rabenhorst im Distrikt Tongzi, Guizhou (1794); Band 1: Die chinesische Dokumentensprache der Qing-Zeit (1644-1911) in Forschung und Lehre; Band 2: Chinesische Dokumente [The Counterfeiter Gang of the Old Crow’s Nest in Tongzi District, Guizhou (1794); Volume 1: Documentary Language of the Qing Period (1644-1911) in Research and Teaching; Volume 2: Chinese Documents], which in a comprehensive way translates and analyses documents related to the largest counterfeiting case of the late imperial period. Further publications in the context of her dissertation focus on the Taixi shuifa's 泰西水法 idiosyncratic explanations of natural phenomena such as the formation of hexagonal snow crystals or the reasons for the ocean tides, and on the rhetorical justification strategies characterizing the paratexts of this work. Moreover, she has written on the Taixi shuifa's hydraulic pumps and on the hydrotechnical activities of the Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest in Qing China.

Question about the reasons for the ocean tides in chapter 5 of the «Taixi shuifa» 泰西水法, facsimile edition in «Tianxue chuhan» 天學初函 (First Collectanea of Heavenly Studies; 1626), reprint in «Zhongguo shixue congshu» 中國史學叢書 (1965), comp. by Wu Xiangxiang 吳相湘, Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, vol. 23.3, pp. 1645-1646 (fol. 5a-5b).