Histories of science in late nineteenth-century China often examine the circulation of scientific knowledge from Europe and the United States in China and the institutions and people which facilitated such circulation. This paper seeks to move beyond this dominant geographical paradigm by exploring an under-appreciated side of Chinese science in these decades: the circulation of Chinese technology and expertise within Asia. In the 1870s and 1880s, statesmen in the Qing empire sought to take advantage of the booming global demand for silk and reinforce imperial control in Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan) at a time of geopolitical instability by undertaking a program of sericulture improvement among the primarily Turkic Muslim inhabitants of the region. They built sericulture bureaus and hired Chinese experts to train Turkic apprentices in all aspects of the silk production process. One cornerstone of this program was the attempt to transplant living organisms—silkworms and mulberry trees—from eastern China's Zhejiang province into the empire's Central Asian territory. These organisms were employed by their Chinese handlers as embodied technologies whose morphology and productivity represented claims to Chinese expertise about the natural world vis-à-vis their Turkic colonial subjects. This paper pays attention to the role of these embodied technologies in the circulation of Chinese knowledge within and beyond the walls of the sericulture bureaus.
