He who understands the earth is a wise man, and he who understands the heavens is a sage. Knowledge is derived from the straight-line shadow, and that is derived from the right-angled joint. The combination of the right angle with numbers is what guides and rules the ten thousand things. (Needham, 1959, vol. 3, p. 23)
A tomb relief of the second century shows the Chinese deified king Fu-Hsi and his consort flaunting a carpenter's square and a quipu as their royal insignia “to govern all within the four seas.” (Needham, 1954, vol. 1, p. 164, fig. 28)
The ancient Chinese thus described the fundamental role of astronomy and geodesy in understanding the universe and accorded to geodesy the role of establishing order on Earth. The word “geodesy” is Greek and means “partitioning the Earth surface.” The carpenter's square and the quipu symbolize the basic geodetic tasks of localization and mensuration, of settling the queries “where?,” “in what direction?,” and “how far?”
Geodesy today is but...
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Fischer, I.K. (1989). Geodesy: Historical introduction . In: Geophysics. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-30752-4_52
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