The project "Concepts and Modalities: Practical Knowledge Transmission" of the Junior Research Group of Dagmar Schäfer at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science focuses on how technical knowledge was perceived, transmitted and evaluated to form a distinct, yet changing, “knowledge culture”. It concentrates on issues of openness and secrecy in premodern China in the period from the Song to the mid-Qing Dynasty (10th - 18th C). Integral to this is a holistic approach that recognizes the complex factors, institutional, cultural, social, economic and technical, involved in the transmission of technical knowledge and its perception. Rather than focusing on a single discipline, such as the history of architecture or textile manufacturing, the project aims to provide a comprehensive history that takes into account practices of protecting and/or disseminating practical knowledge.

This collection of historical sources is owned by the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is made openly available as essential part of common research in the framework of the project "Knowledge Spheres in Pre-Modern China, 10th - 18th Centuries," a cooperation between the IHNS and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

China's long and continuous tradition gives the exceptional opportunity to study long-term developments of knowledge in a context different from that of European science. For this reason, research on Chinese science opens up possibilities for cross-cultural studies in the long-term development of science. The activity focuses on an exemplary case of such a long-term development, the development of mechanical knowledge in China from antiquity to the early modern period. Research is guided by a number of specific research questions, in particular the question of the interaction between practical and theoretical knowledge and the question of the interaction between domestic and external knowledge traditions over a period of more than a millenium.
The project is aiming at a digitization of historical sources of Chinese mechanics. It is jointly conducted by the Partner Group of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and assisted by Bejing Formax CO., LTD.