Dream Pool Essays

The Dream Pool Essays (Meng Xi Bi Tan, in full Brush Talks from a Dream Brook) is an encyclopedic book by the Chinese polymath and statesman Shen Kuo, published in 1088 during the Song dynasty. Shen compiled it in forced retirement on his estate near modern Zhenjiang and named it after the estate. Its observations range over medicine, mathematics, astronomy, optics, engineering, metallurgy, early archaeology and fossils, from which Shen reasoned that climates had changed. It holds the first record of a compass used for navigation and the first description of Bi Sheng's movable type printing. Originally 30 chapters, it was reorganised into 26 in an edition of 1166.