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  • A new analysis of the early geological works of LU Xun and GU Lang--Case studies on the sources of An Outline of the Geology of China and The Mineral Records of China
Jounal : GEOLOGICAL REVIEW
Author : BAI Yufang, SUN Chengsheng    
YEAR : 2023-07-15
Vol. : 69
No. : 04
Page : 1589-1605
Abstract :

During his study in Japan, LU Xun published "An Outline of the Geology of China" in Zhejiang Chao in 1903. Three years later, GU Lang and LU Xun, who went to study in Japan together, jointly published a book entitled The Mineral Records of China (and Complete map of Minerals of China). These two works were pioneering and had an important impact at the time. In particular, The Mineral Records of China is regarded as the first geological and mineral work in China. From the perspective of geological exchanges between China and Japan, through detailed textual studies, this article analyses the sources of these two works and points out that both of these two works were composed by drawing on geological works in Japna at that time. Part of the contents of "An Outline of the Geology of China" was adapted from Geology (1898) by Sato Denzou, while the contents about coal sources and the map of the coal distribution in China were derived from "The coal sources in the East Asia" (1903) by Kimotsuki Kaneyuki. The introduction part of The Mineral Records of China was expanded on the basis of  "An Outline of the Geology of China" and referred to Yatsu Akinaga's Qing's Geography (1905), Yokoyama Matajirou's A Textbook of Geology (1903) and Ishikawa Nariaki's History of the Development of the Earth (1904), while the main body was largely derived from The Map of Major Mines in Korea and Qing Dynasty which was published in Bulletin of the Imperial Geological Survey of Japan in 1902. The formation of these two works, which was a warning to the nation in the face of Western powers attempting to carve up China, reflected that Japan gradually became the main source of geological knowledge in China at the beginning of the 20th Century.