5 Yuan Song Yingxing

Song Yingxing (宋应星) was a Ming dynasty polymath whose encyclopedic work Tiangong Kaiwu, published in 1637, documented agricultural and industrial techniques ranging from silk production to gunpowder — the first Chinese text to treat technology as a subject worthy of systematic scholarly attention. The Qing dynasty largely suppressed the book; it survived primarily through copies that circulated in Japan and only returned to wide readership in China during the 20th century.

This issue belongs to the People's Bank's ongoing commemorative series honoring figures in Chinese science and technology history, authorized through the late 1980s and into the 1990s.