Wang Bi’s rules for reading the I-Ching, encoded in an old mainframe. Neon Memoir: Peking–Europe, 1688–1722. | No token protocol
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Neon Memoir: one historical image a day from the Kangxi court. Zoom in, follow the sources, find a fictional copyist's notes. An Android archive, submitted to CLOCK IN and Colosseum's Crypto World's Fair.
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Peking, 1688–1722: the Kangxi Emperor learns geometry, a treaty is written in Latin, and a diagram of the I-Ching's 64 hexagrams reaches Leibniz.
In 1685 Louis XIV sent six Jesuits east as "the King's Mathematicians." Five reached China. In January 1688 Ferdinand Verbiest died in Peking. His bronze instruments stood in the observatory there. In February the French Jesuits, among them Bouvet and Gerbillon, reached Peking.
During these years:
1689: Russia and the Qing sign the Treaty of Nerchinsk. Two Jesuits interpret, and the authoritative text is in Latin.
Around 1690: Bouvet and Gerbillon teach the emperor geometry from a French textbook they translated into Manchu.
1693: the Jesuits treat the emperor's fever with cinchona bark.
1701: Bouvet sends Leibniz Shao Yong's diagram of the 64 hexagrams. It reaches him in Berlin in April 1703. Leibniz reads a solid line as 1 and a broken line as 0. His paper on binary arithmetic, which cites the hexagrams, appears in the Paris Academy's Mémoires for 1703 (printed in 1705). He'd had binary by 1679, so the diagram confirmed his idea more than it inspired it.
Bouvet saw something else in the same lines. He believed the hexagrams preserved traces of an ancient revelation, and argued that Fuxi, whom he called "the prince of the philosophers of China," may have been Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus or Enoch. From about 1711 to 1716 he studied the I-Ching on the emperor's orders.
In 1704 the Pope ruled against the Chinese Rites. From 1706 missionaries needed an imperial permit to stay. A papal bull of 1715 repeated the ban. Jesuit surveyors kept mapping the empire from 1708 to 1717, and the atlas was presented to the emperor in 1718. Kangxi died in 1722.
Same lines, two readings: binary for Leibniz, scripture for Bouvet.
Neon Memoir is an Android app: the notebook of an invented copyist at the French Jesuit mission in Peking. The history in it is sourced. The copyist is fiction.
Computer memory was once threaded by hand: mostly by women, using microscopes, says the Computer History Museum.
Each tiny ring held one bit, a 0 or a 1. An I-Ching hexagram, six solid or broken lines, would fit in six.
From an alternate 1980s: all 64 I-Ching hexagrams on cassette, each with its upside-down twin free.
The pairing is real: the 64 form 32 pairs, and in 28 the second is the first turned over, like 3 屯 Difficulty at the Beginning and 4 蒙 Youthful Folly.
Neon Memoir, Android 8+. No wallet to read. Filing: MWA wallet, devnet SOL.
Seeker: seekertracker.com/dapps/com.…
Other phones: github.com/augchan42/neonmem…
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Day 2 in Neon Memoir: a court portrait of the Kangxi emperor in informal dress. A brush in one hand; the other rests on a blank sheet.
Around 1690, Jesuits taught him geometry.
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From an alternate 1980s: Dial-a-Hexagram, I-Ching readings by phone.
Your reading is 5 需, Waiting ("clouds rise to the sky; the noble one eats, drinks and is at ease"), so please continue to hold.
Lose the phone, keep the notebook: connect the same wallet on a fresh install, and Neon Memoir can restore filed days and their notes from Solana devnet. Notes never filed stay lost; devnet resets can erase the rest.
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From an alternate 1980s: the Coin-Matic 3000 tosses your I-Ching coins and won't answer the same question twice.
It takes hexagram 4 蒙, Youthful Folly, at its word: "the first asking is answered; asking two or three times is disrespect, and disrespect gets no answer."
Neon Memoir's FILED stamp opens a six-line figure cast by Plum Blossom arithmetic from the filing's time, a reading of the figure, and the memo with a Solana devnet explorer link.
Each filing has its own page.
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Why would a Jesuit in 1701 think Fu Xi, the I-Ching's traditional first author, might be Hermes, Zoroaster or Enoch? Renaissance scholars held that some ancient sages had known Christian truths before Christ, and if Fu Xi was one, China's own classics were evidence for Christianity.
In ordinary binary whole numbers, 101 and 000101 have the same value: five.
Our place-value diagram shows why. Extending the number to six places adds positions worth 8, 16 and 32. Their digits are zero, so their contribution is still zero.
Pliny says Zoroaster was the only person who laughed on the day he was born. Dates offered for him run from 6347 BC to about 500 BC, and in 1701 a Jesuit suggested he might be Fu Xi, the I-Ching's traditional first author.
From an alternate 1980s: Home Oracle, a computer show.
In 1703 a letter from China brought Leibniz Shao Yong's I-Ching diagram, and he read its order as his binary: Kun 0, Qian 63. That history is real. Computers that run on hexagrams are not.
In 1666 the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher read the signs on an obelisk in Rome as a long sentence about seeking one Egyptian god's protection from another. They only spell a pharaoh's name.
From an alternate 1980s: 03:47, and the city's night operator asks whether to keep the north district lit.
The answer is 36 明夷, Darkening of the Light. In the I-Ching: 'the light goes into the earth.'
Day 7 in Neon Memoir: d'Anville's map of the capital's province, from the Jesuit survey for the Kangxi emperor. Its scale bar draws 250 Chinese li as long as 25 French leagues.
Scan: Göttingen University Library.
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By tradition, Fu Xi drew the I-Ching's first figures. In 1701 Bouvet put a conjecture to Leibniz: Fu Xi was Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus or Enoch. Critics called it figurism.
From Neon Memoir's sources.
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From an alternate 1980s: an advertisement for Oracle 64, a home computer that answers with the I-Ching.
It draws 51 震, Thunder: "thunder comes, fear upon fear; then laughing words." Then the phone rings.
At the Kangxi court, Bouvet and Gerbillon teach geometry in Manchu. In Bouvet's account, the emperor repeats one proof at least twelve times.
Another page of the world behind Neon Memoir.
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Sefer Yetzirah, an early Jewish book, counts the ways seven Hebrew letters can be arranged, stops listing at 5,040, and tells the reader to "go and reckon" the rest. The archive reckoned all twenty-two: 1,124,000,727,777,607,680,000.
Leibniz sketched a clock you could read by touch. Four hollow or raised points encode the hour. This animation follows his design, using Lloyd Strickland’s transcription and explanation.