Girls Girls Girls – Wang Zhenyi

You're listening to Girls, Girls, Girls, the podcast rewriting history one episode at a time. I'm Bea Duncan. Hello, everybody and welcome back. You are listening to a fantastic new episode of Girls, Girls, Girls. I'm being a bit pre emptive there and saying it's fantastic. I think it will be, but we can only wait and see till the end. You are listening to me, Bea Duncan. I'm on Women's radio station and today we are talking about a fantastic woman, as always, Wang Xinyi. And she was a 17th century everything. Basically she was an astronomer, she was a poet, an equal rights activist, a geographer. We'll get into all the things she did, but let it be known, it was a lot. But as always, we're going to begin by doing a little bit of a celebration. It's slightly different this week. I'm not necessarily celebrating one particular person, celebrating an opportunity, if that makes sense. So here in the UK we have an opportunity to decide who is going to be on the new 50 pound notes. Now, in the UK we don't get £50 notes that often, they're quite rare. But it's still a huge opportunity to be able to put a, in my opinion, a woman onto it. So there are a couple of rules. The theme is science, so it has to be a scientist, they have to be real, so no one from fiction or anything. And they also have to be dead. So a couple of little criteria to cover, but that is all fine. And they say that we can suggest anyone who's contributed to fields of pure or applied science. So this is a list that they give astronomy, biology, biotechnology, chemistry, engineering, maths, medical research, physics, technology and zoology. So loads and loads of scope there for somebody incredible. Now, I've kind of been on Twitter, I've been having a look at what a lot of people are saying and there are a couple of people who are the majority of people are mentioning, but in my opinion, I think they're just a bit obvious. So obviously Stephen Hawking is one who is being pushed a lot by people. Alan Turing, those were both incredible scientists. They both overcame huge adversity in their lives and they made a massive change. But I'm going to be the little devil sitting on your shoulder and say that everyone, a lot of most people know their names, they're very famous, especially in the world of science. And in my opinion, I think that this is an incredible opportunity to get someone on a piece of currency that will last for a long, long time who people aren't that aware of just to diversify a little bit, basically. Now there is a that you can fill in and I will be putting it on Twitter, I'll be putting on Instagram, it'll be everywhere. And it's from the bank of England website. And basically it's not being done on the number of votes. You can nominate as many people as you like. So what I'm going to be doing every single week, probably on a Wednesday on my Twitter, I'm going to be posting about a female scientist in history who you can nominate. The deadline is in the middle of December, so there's going to be a lot of inspiration and a lot of fuel for you to, to nominate. But I think we've got such a huge opportunity here. We can celebrate somebody who doesn't usually get celebrated. And I think that would be absolutely incredible. We've already had Jane Austen, that was great. But let's do it again. It would be fantastic. So head over to my Twitter, I'm GGG Pod. That was three GS. And yeah, I'm going to be posting all about female scientists in history. So if you're not sure who to suggest who to nominate, just head over there and I'll give you all the inspiration that you need. So, yeah, that's who I'm celebrating. I'm celebrating all the female scientists in history and I'm celebrating this incredible opportunity. Please get yourself over there and let's make a difference because it should be great. But let's talk now about a female scientist not from the uk, from the Qing Dynasty, Wang Shen Yi. So she was a scientist, as I said, she contributed to astronomy, maths, poetry, basically every single thing under the sun she had a hand in. And she was so groundbreaking that she was even breaking feudal customs of the time. There were rules that said that women had no rights, no legal rights, no right to education. Basically they were only taught cooking and child raising. So she was breaking the law essentially by being academic, by learning things that weren't how to be a good housewife. And so she was from the kind of mid-1700s. And in that time, Neo Confucianism was basically everywhere in the Qing dynasty. So this was, this is a strain of kind of social, social philosophy and quite a conservative strain, very much about respect, but particularly pushing down women and saying that women didn't have the same rights to various things. She was so incredible. She even tutored male students, which was literally unheard of at that time. To have a woman knowing things, knowing more than men is one thing, but to have her Teaching men, oh, they would have freaked out at that. So I think she was definitely quite a cool gal. So she was born in 1768, she was in the Anhui province and her grandfather's family very soon after moved to Xuan Ning, which is present day Nanjing. She was very, very clever as a child, I'm sure you can realize that. Of course she was going to be very clever. She loved reading and her family were all intellectuals and they all stimulated her in different ways. So her grandfather Wang Zhifu was an intellectual. He was the former governor of Fengsheng county and Xuinghua District. Now he had a collection of hold on to your hats over 70 books. Now I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but back in that, that time, that was a huge collection that was practically British Library level of books that have been unheard of. So she had kind of access to this amazing collection of books where she could learn a whole lot of stuff. And he, her granddad taught her astronomy, her dad, Shikun studied medical science and he recorded all of his findings into a four volume book. And again, if you think 70 books is a lot, imagining just writing four, that would be ridiculous. And it was called Collection of Medical Prescriptions. He taught her medicine, geography, maths, and her grandmother taught her poetry. So she was basically covering all bases there with her family. And that is how she learned a lot of the things that she went on to be known for. Now in 1782 her grandfather died and the family traveled to Jiling for his funeral. And this is a place that's kind of close to the Great Wall of. And they stayed there for five years and she had unlimited freedom to go and stick her nose into his 70 books. And she read them all. She also learned I love this. So rogue. She learnt martial arts from the wife of a Mongolian general named Ah. So not only is she learned in all these amazing intellectual, scientific things, she is also pretty badass because she knows how to fight people. So I think that's really, really cool. The fact she was taught by a woman as well is even better. And when she was 16, she traveled with her family to the south of the Yatze river before moving back to the capital. Now while they were traveling, she saw so, so many new places. She went to Guangdong, she went to Hubei, Shanxi, and she learned loads of new things as you would do, I mean travel in the 1700s it wasn't common. And so to be able to travel through these incredible places, learn all these new cultures and it was A time when intellectual enlightenment was happening. There were so many different ideas, there were so many different strains of science and politics and philosophy. She was able to kind of absorb all of this so that would have been really, really, yeah a special time for her. When she was 18 she made friends with some fellow female scholars in xiangning and this was when she started focusing her learning on astronomy and maths. As we spoke about before she was reading her grandfather's books and so from that we can assume that most of what she knew was in was self taught. Obviously she did have her family helping her and her grandfather did teach her a few things about astronomy and her father about medicine etc. But yeah, she was learning it all from books and I mean, oh, I don't, I couldn't even kind of self teach myself multiplication. I don't really know how she would be able to do all of this incredible stuff and learn it all by herself. That is really, really amazing. Now one of her massive contributions to astronomy was she proved how equinoxes move and she showed that we can use that knowledge to calculate that movement. This was in a paper called dispute of the procession of the equinoxes. She also wrote two other papers, incredible names, dispute of longitudinal stars as well as the explanation of a lunar eclipse which you know that's a very kind of brief way of putting such a humongous thing that would have been in that paper. In the next half of this program I am going to be doing everyone's favourite when Bea attempts to talk science I'm going to be trying to explain a couple of the things that she did. But if you're excited for that you are going to have to wait a little bit because I'm going to go prepare myself while we take a very short break. But it is always very amusing listening to me attempting to explain people's findings. You can tell that I am not a scientist so please do wait for that because it's going to be good. And we're also going to learn more about Wang. So come back after this. I'll see you Very very short. 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We're right in the middle of chatting about incredible scientists from the 1700s, Wang Chini and when we Left off, I was about to start explaining some science. So I'm sure a lot of you who are still tuned in are just waiting for me to kind of crash and burn as I try and explain her incredible principles. Once again, bear in mind, this is me talking in 2018. And she was doing all of this in 1700s and I have no idea what she's talking about. That says quite a lot. So she was writing about planets, she wrote about the revolving of the suns and moons. She also talked about the relationships between lunar and solar eclipses. So one of her more famous experiments was studying a lunar eclipse. Now this was a phenomenon that at the time everybody, and I mean everybody thought it was caused by gods being angry or gods just trying to tell you something. So if I had to come along and go, no, actually science was ridiculously important, it was going to kind of shake everybody. Now she showed this by doing this experiment. She had a round table which was meant to be the globe. She had a crystal lamp on a cord from the ceiling beams and that was the sun. And then on one side of the table there was a little round mirror and that was the moon. She would move these objects around as if they were the sun, the earth and the moon according to her kind of calculated astronomical principles. And this was intended to show how and what lunar eclipses are, how they happen. And her findings, she wrote them all down, her observations, we've kind of looked back on them now. We, I say we, I didn't have anything to do with it. Scientists have looked back to have a look and see and it is ridiculously accurate. Her little experiment on a garden table with a crystal lamp and a mirror is basically exactly what we know about lunar eclipses now. And that is amazing. She wrote it all down in an article. The eclipse, the explanation of an eclipse, solar eclipse. And yeah, I don't, I don't know why this blows my mind so much. I just think the idea of a woman, self taught, sitting in her garden doing little experiments, the kind of thing that a child would do at a science camp, like with lamps and all this, and then it turns out that that is exactly, she was completely right. She hit the nail on the head. Meanwhile, everyone else, else around her, all these apparently learned men saying no, no, no, it's the gods, it's the gods bless her. She's probably like fighting such an uphill battle to go. I promise you this is what's happening. And no one would have believed it really at the age of 24. Oh yes, sorry. She was very young still, she 20, 20s. Honestly, it makes me feel very upset about the things that I've done in my life up until now. So the age of 24, she wrote a book called the Simple Principles of Calculation and this was about simplifying maths for beginners, which I definitely need to read. She loved the work of a mathematician called May Wending and she basically, this is classic fangirl behavior. She basically, he had a book called the Principles of Calculation and she just rewrote it. She thought it was too complicated. Obviously she understood it, but she loved him so much, she wanted more people to be able to read his stuff. So she just rewrote his book and made it a bit more simple, which is just so funny that she loved him that much. That kind of. She thought that was probably quite a nice thing to do. Anyone else would probably have been insulted by that, but, yeah, so she rewrote this whole book and she said there were times that I had to put down my pen and sigh. But I love this subject. I do not give up. That is the most relatable she's ever been. I mean, often when I'm trying to learn about studying these women who did amazing things in maths and science, trying to explain in my own words what they are talking about, I often put down my pen and I sigh. And so, yeah, she was a really incredible woman. Now, this is a little bit more in my kind of vein of stuff that I understand. Not only was she incredible at maths, astronomy, she also left behind 13 volumes of poetry and prose. And there was a Qing Dynasty scholar who was called Wang Mei, who once was quoted as saying that her poetry had the flavour of a great pen, not of a female poet. Now that, I mean, I don't need to tell you, that's really, really rude. He's basically saying, this poetry is so amazing, I can hardly believe that a woman was able to write it. But he is understandable at the time, I'll give him that. It's fine, but. But basically, I do have to see that as being, at that time, a huge compliment. So we have to kind of put aside how that would feel if somebody said that to us. Now, for them, that was magnanimous. They're basically saying, you're so good, you're basically a man. Which is ridiculous that she was able to be so good at so many things. I can't believe I'm jealous of somebody from the 1700s. So, yeah, she wrote a lot of poems. She wrote about the lives of people living in Poverty and the places that she visited around, around China when she was going around with her dad. And she often wrote about the working class women that she saw. So she had poems called things like Woman Breeder of Silkworm, another called Clothes Washing. And she also really, really wanted to talk about the corruption and the kind of disparity of wealth and the disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor. So she had a poem called, a poem of eight lines. And I'm just going to read a little bit from it. Village is empty of cooking smoke. Rich families let grains store decay in wormwood Strewed, pitiful, starved bodies. Greedy officials yet push farm levying. So yeah, she really just wanted to show people what life is really like in these other places in China. As I said, not everyone was able to, to travel, to visit these new places. She was incredibly well traveled for such a young woman in the 1700s. And so she wanted her poetry to be a form of social expression and social change, basically. She also, which is hugely progressive for somebody of this era. I mean, obviously not unexpected from her because she was a woman who was studying things she wasn't really allowed to be studying, but it's still a little bit unexpected. She was a huge advocate for the equality of men and women. And you can sometimes see with female scholars of that kind that even though they were incredibly clever and they were doing things that people didn't think women could do, they did sometimes still kind of agree. And they were also going, yeah, you know, I am an anomaly, I'm incredible. But women aren't. They should still be in the home and stuff. She wasn't like that at all. She believed in equality, equal opportunity. So this is another short part of one of her poems. It's made to believe women are the same as men. Are you not convinced? Daughters can also be heroic? She said men and women are all people who have the same reason for studying, which is just. Yeah, it's so basic. And it shows what common sense she had. Not only was she incredibly clever, incredibly well learned, she, yeah, she just was. Just had common sense. It was basic. And when you think about it, there are a lot of politicians and men at the moment today, men and women who don't even think in such common sense terms as her, she was just going, you know what? I want to study it. Men want to study it. It. We can both study it. We're both as good. It's how it works, simple. But some people find it hard, a hard concept. So a little bit about her Personal life. I do sometimes try and avoid talking about personal life when it's not exactly relevant. So I'll just drop a little bit in. She did marry someone called Jang Mei when she was 25. But I'm kind of gonna drop a little bit of a bombshell on you because I've been talking for a long time about this amazing woman, about the amazing things that she did. Poetry, fantastic light years ahead of the time that she was living in astronomy, that was incredibly accurate to even 2018 standards. She died when she was 29 years old, so let that sink in. All of that that I've just been talking about all happened in 29 years. That's ridiculous. She has been, well. Well, I wouldn't say well, kind of documented. But she does have a crater on Venus named after her, which is really, really cool. She got that in 2004 from the International Astronomical Union. They recognized that she was huge player in astronomy, and so she deserved to be given a crater. I'd love a crater on Venus, but I don't think I'm gonna get there, especially not before I'm 29. But, yeah, that was the incredible story of Wang Xin. She was really, really amazing. And as I said, fitting all of that into 29 years is just ridiculous. Overachieving, to be honest. But, yeah, I really enjoyed researching her and having a look. And even if I struggled a little bit with some of her concepts, her whole thing was simplifying it. And so I think she did a good job even in the 1700s. As always, don't forget to get in contact with me, gggpod on Twitter, or just give me an email. Girlsgirlsgirlsmail.com love talking to you guys. Give me any suggestions. You can tell me even if you don't have a specific thing. If you just have a topic you want me to cover, scientist, poet, whatever, I'm all ears. I'm always open. But if not, just make sure that you're tuning in next week. Women's Radio Station. I'm here every single Monday, and I will hopefully see you next time to talk about another incredible woman. See you then. Bye. Sa. Welcome to women's radio station, the voice of women worldwide. 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