The Renais­sance did not, strict­ly speak­ing, occur in Chi­na. Yet it seems that the Mid­dle King­dom did have its Renais­sance men, so to speak, and in much ear­li­er times at that. We find one such illus­tri­ous fig­ure in the Han dynasty of the first and sec­ond cen­turies: a states­man named Zhang Heng (78–139 AD), who man­aged to dis­tin­guish him­self across a range of fields from math­e­mat­ics to astron­o­my to phi­los­o­phy to poet­ry. His accom­plish­ments in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy include invent­ing the first hydraulic armil­lary sphere for observ­ing the heav­ens, improv­ing water clocks with a sec­ondary tank, cal­cu­lat­ing pi fur­ther than it had been in Chi­na to date, and mak­ing dis­cov­er­ies about the nature of the moon. He also, so records show, put togeth­er the first-ever seis­mo­scope, a device for detect­ing earth­quakes. A visu­al expla­na­tion of Zhang’s design appears in the Sci­ence­World video above. His seis­mo­scope, its nar­ra­tor says, “was called hòufēng dìdòngyí, which means ‘instru­ment for mea­sur­ing sea­son­al winds and move­ments of the earth,’ ” and it could “deter­mine rough­ly the direc­tion in which an earth­quake …