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Yan Su
Northern Song official who built a south-pointing carriage and an odometer cart, devised the lotus water clock, and wrote on the tides while serving at Mingzhou
In a workshop, a craftsman at a wooden vat lifts a bamboo-framed sheet from the pulp beside stacks of white paper and a tub of pulp, while others hang sheets to dry and work at a long table of carved printing blocks, and a water wheel turns outside the window.
Also known as Zi Muzhi · Qing Zhou Yi Dou Ren · Long Tu Ge Zhi Xue Shi
Yan Su, courtesy name Muzhi, came from Yidu in Qingzhou, though his father had moved the family to Caozhou. Orphaned and poor, he travelled to study, passed the metropolitan examination, and served as a prefectural judge at Fengxiang and magistrate of Linqiong before Kou Zhun recommended him as an investigating censor. Posted to Mingzhou, he watched the tides and produced a tide chart and two essays explaining them. In the Tiansheng reign he built and presented a south-pointing carriage, an odometer cart and a tilting vessel, and submitted a design for a lotus-shaped water clock whose accuracy the Astronomical Bureau at first questioned. He became an auxiliary academician of the Longtu Hall, retired as vice minister of rites, and died in 1040 at eighty. The History of the Song (Songshi) ranks his landscape painting in the inspired class, especially his old trees and broken bamboo, and says he left thousands of poems.
Life and times
Dates 961 CE–1040 CE