Via Shanghaiist we learn that the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory is relocating to Anji, in Zhejiang Province due to light pollution. The only surprise in this news is that it didn’t happen sooner: even on clear nights, a person can count on two hands the number of stars bright enough to shine in Shanghai’s heavily illuminated skies.

But if it’s not worth mourning on a scientific basis, it is worth mourning on a historical basis: That telescope and observatory is one of Shanghai’s last links to the great Jesuit scientists responsible for many of the city’s most important institutions, including many of its universities (including, indirectly, Fudan), hospitals, museums (including the much-maligned Natural History Museum), and public laboratories. In contemporary Shanghai, these origins are mostly unknown and increasingly irrelevant; but sixty years ago they were not only relevant, but pertinent: the Jesuits were the key piece in the city’s scientific establishment.

Famously, Jesuit priests had served as astronomers and meteorologists at the Ming and Qing courts, and – at the end of the Ming – they even built an observatory in Nanjing. In 1841, soon after missionaries were allowed to return to China, a Jesuit Father named Gotteland was directed to build an observatory south of the Yangtze. For reasons that I can’t dig up, the building was not completed until 1873. In either case, that building stood on the banks of Zhaojiabang Creek (yes, the filled-in site of today’s Zhaojiabang Road) in Xujiahui, and was replaced with a better, bigger building in 1901. From the beginning, the Observatory had four departments: astronomy, meteorology, seismology, and magnetic science. The Astronomy department moved out to Sheshan (21 miles from Xujiahui) in 1890, and occupied the (now closed) Observatory on Sheshan Hill. Below, a photo of the first scientific telescope in China, commissioned, installed, and used at the Shanghai Observatory (I’m afraid that I don’t have precise dates for it, though).

Those Jesuits were serious, publishing internationally regarded journals (The Sheshan Astronomical Journal, most notably), making key longitudinal observations (Shanghai was one of the world’s three original “longitudinal bases”), and serving as a key station in what was then the world’s largest private meteorological network (there were some seventy Jesuit weather stations in Asia – with Shanghai being the hub). Continue reading →