Archival sources
When she knew that she was dying, Zhenyi asked her husband to hand over her manuscripts to her best friend Madam Kwai for preservation. Six years later, these manuscripts were passed to Madam Kwai’s nephew, Qian Yiji, a famous scholar, who compiled the five volumes of Simple Principles of Calculation and wrote its preface in which he described Zhenyi as ‘the number one female scholar after Ban Huiji’ (in Peterson 2000, 345). Finally, her manuscripts were given to Zhu Xuzeng, a collector in Nanjing, but some of them were lost, following the trail of women mathematicians’ troubled and wandering archives. What remains today are the Collection of the Defeng Pavillion. , as well as the Jingling Series of her nine volumes of prose, single volume of poetry, and three volumes of ci poetry, but her extant work has not been translated in English, or in any other European language, so Zhenyi’s work is a project for the archives of the future par excellence.
References
Peterson, Bennet, Barbara. 2000. ‘Wang Zhenyi’ in Notable Women Of China: Shang Dynasty to the Early Twentieth Century, edited by Barbara Bennett Petrson with He Hong Fei, Han Tie, Wang Ziyu and Zhang Guangyu, 341-346. New York: M. E. Sharp.