The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon provided several interesting measurements of the human body. They’re precise and diverse and thus don’t seem to have been derived from numerical correspondences. Instead, they seem to have come from direct observations.
The skull measures 26 cun around, the chest’s circumference is 45 cun, and the waist’s is 42 cun. From the top of the head to the nape of the neck are 12 cun. From the hair to the chin are 10 cun.
Other calculations are more detailed. The Lingshu concludes that the mouth is 2.5 cun wide. From the teeth to the back of the throat are 3.5 cun, and the oral cavity’s capacity is 5 he. The tongue weighs 10 liang, and it’s 5 cun long and 2.5 cun wide.
The Lingshu then measures several organs that are invisible without cutting the body open. The stomach weighs 2 jin, 2 liang and is 2 chi, 6 cun long. It measures 1 chi, 5 cun in circumference, and its capacity is 3 dou, 5 sheng. The bladder weighs 9 liang, 2 zhu, it’s 9 cun wide, and its capacity is 9 liang, 9 he. The list includes many other parts of the body.
Human dissection was much rarer in ancient China than in Greece during Hellenistic times, when Herophilus pioneered it in Alexandria in the third century BCE. Chinese looked for dynamic cyclic flows in the body’s energetic pathways much more than they isolated specific organs. Listing capacities of organs in the Lingshu suggest that dissection was done in that case. But why average all the measurements when human bodies come in a large range of sizes?
In the third century BCE, Qin Shi Huang led a pan-Chinese standardization program. The metal contents of coins, breadth of roads, width of wheel axles, and universal measures of length and width were all specified. State-wide norms overrode interest in individual subjects.
People had constant reminders of the state’s all-encompassing norms. The people below (in Datung) were relaxing in the late afternoon outside the walls in the above photo.
The street below is in Luoyang, which was the capital of the Eastern Han Dynasty in the first two centuries CE. Many houses were in sight of city walls and towers. This was common in all Chinese dynasties, including the Tang.
The folks below were trading just outside a massive city wall in Luoyang.
People were regularly reminded that the most exemplary measurements were in relation to the whole system.
At the same time the word dashu (great number) reminded people of the heavenly regularities. The number of a person’s limbs was matched with the four seasons and the four directions. The five zang (liver, heart, spleen, lungs, and kidneys) corresponded with the five planets. The 12 conduits in the body matched the 12 main rivers that brought life to the land in China.
Many experiences thus encouraged assumptions that measurement is done in relation to the totality rather than the individual object.
Ancient Greeks usually measured surfaces of and linear relationships between objects. Pythagoras’s theorem is the most famous example of focusing on ratios between sides of objects.
Plato identified five basic solids, whose faces are regular polygons, all identical, which meet in identical fashion at every vertex:
- The tetrahedron, which is a pyramid
- The cube, with six square faces and three faces coming together at each vertex
- The octahedron, which comprises two pyramid joined at their bases
- The icosahedron, which has 20 triangular faces and five faces adjoining at each vertex
- The dodecahedron, with 12 pentagonal faces and three faces coming together at each vertex
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek in his book A Beautiful Question; Finding Nature’s Deep Design, still admires this concept of the most basic abstract shapes of distinct objects.
Around 300 BCE, Euclid detailed measurements of objects and linear relationships between them to a greater extent. Galileo and Newton followed the ancient Western tradition of focusing on objects and analyzed their motions.
Chinese and Greek ideas of what the most exemplary measurements pertain to had deep cultural roots. For Chinese thinkers, they reflected many other ideas, including categories, Confucianism, and music. Ancient Greek theater, sports, and natural environments converged to encourage people to focus on distinct objects and linear relationships between them.
Kate Crawford writes about what she calls “the limits of measurement” in Atlas of AI. She thinks people should be reflective about classification schemes rather than consigning them to corporations and uncritically accepting each classification system’s biases. The variety of cultures enables us to examine many schemes, appreciate the common experiences that encouraged them to emerge, and compare them with other cultures’ ways of classifying reality. We can liberate ourselves from mechanically following one way without questioning it, be able to adopt multiple ways of thinking, and more fully appreciate our world’s glorious diversity.