Were there any instruments for measuring temperature in ancient China?

Ice bottle, the most primitive thermometer in China.

Lu Chunqiu: "See a bottle of water ice, and know the coldness of the world."

As early as the pre-Qin period, China had a "bottle" that could observe the temperature change: the bottle was full of water, and if the water froze and the temperature was below zero, it entered the cold winter; If the ice melts, the temperature will rise. This kind of bottle is called "ice bottle" or "water bottle", which is the most primitive thermometer in China and regarded as the embryonic form of modern thermometer.

What shape measuring tool is an ice bottle? Modern archaeology has not yet found the real thing, but according to the literature, it was used in the pre-Qin period in China. There is a saying in Lv Buwei's Lu Chunqiu's Detailed Survey of the Present: "A bottle of water sees ice, which shows the coldness of the world and the hiding of fish and turtles." The general meaning of this sentence is that when you see the water in the bottle frozen, you know that the weather is cold and the fish and tortoise are hiding. This is a technique that the ancients used the morphological changes of "water ice water" at different temperatures to infer the temperature rise and fall.

A similar statement is also recorded in Liu An's "Huai Nan Zi Shuo Shan": "Look at the ice in the bottle and know that the world is cold."

Whether the "bottle" mentioned in Lu's Spring and Autumn Annals and Huainanzi is a kind of "thermometer" is not specified in this paper. Perhaps because of this, the original thermometer "ice bottle" has not been paid attention to and recognized by modern academic circles, and it has been mistaken for an ordinary living vessel.

The author thinks that if it is an ordinary vessel, why not say "ice in a bowl, ice in an altar and ice in a pool"? Combined with the early western thermometer is also a kind of slender bottle, it is conceivable that the ice bottle in the pre-Qin period is not an ordinary thing. If we further contact the last sentence of "Huai Nan Zi Shuo Shan", we can know that it is dry and wet, and small (bright) is big, which can prove that the ice bottle is the original thermometer.

Thermometers made by missionary ferdinand verbiest during Shunzhi period of Qing Dynasty.