Measuring Heaven and Earth: Mathematical Rare Books in the National Palace Museum Collection (II)

Euclid's Elements, the ancient Greek work that organizes geometry, was first put into Chinese in 1607, when the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci translated aloud and Xu Guangqi wrote the Chinese down. They rendered the first six books, working from the fifteen-book Latin edition revised and expanded by Clavius. They gave the existing Chinese word jihe (幾何) a new meaning, and in time it became the standard Chinese word for geometry. The last nine books were translated only in the 1850s, by Alexander Wylie and Li Shanlan. The Elements was also included in the Tianxue chuhan, compiled by Li Zhizao. Later, under the Kangxi emperor, the Qing court compiled the Yuzhi shuli jingyun, whose first part contains an Elements, but not Euclid's own text: it is based on a geometry textbook by the French Jesuit Ignace-Gaston Pardies, published in Paris in 1671, which aims at brevity and pays little attention to logical proof.

Check the title on the label: Xu Guangqi and Ricci's translation, the Tianxue chuhan that collects it, or the Qing court's own Shuli jingyun. Then find the diagrams on the page and compare them with the geometry you learned.