For example, when in the sixteenth century an Italian Jesuit brought mechanical clocks to China—which had a long tradition of astronomical clocks driven by water, but did not organize life or work around anything more numerically specific than calendar dates—they were not embraced. Even in the eighteenth century, a Chinese reference book called Western clocks “simply intricate oddities, destined for the pleasure of the senses,”22 objects that “fulfil[led] no basic needs.”
