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Huang Luzhuang
Early Qing maker of instruments in Yangzhou whose cousin Dai Rong recorded his thermometer, hygrometer, telescopes, searchlight mirror and self-propelled cart
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 Yangzhou Shentong
Huang Luzhuang lived in Yangzhou in the early Qing and was born in 1656; what is known of him comes from a short biography by his cousin Dai Rong, printed in the sixth chapter of Zhang Chao's anthology New Tales of Yu Chu (Yuchu xinzhi). Dai says that at seven or eight Huang borrowed a carpenter's tools in secret and carved a little wooden man whose arms and legs moved, and that reading books on mathematics and Western machines later sharpened his skill. Dai appended twenty-seven devices from Huang's own list of curious machines, among them instruments for gauging heat and cold and for gauging dryness and damp, telescopes, a microscope and a mirror that cast light over a distance. One was a two-wheeled cart that moved when its rider worked a crank beside the axle, said to cover eighty li in a day. Nothing is recorded of his later life or death.
Life and times
Dates 1656 CE–death unknown