| Sumario: | Protestant missionary Alexander Wylie arrived in China in 1847. In 1852, he published the first historical survey about mathematics in China ever published in a European language. In it, Wylie draws readers' attention to two remarkable achievements, which he discusses on the basis of Mathematical Writings in Nine Chapters, a work published by Qin Jiushao in 1247. These achievements were the use of "Horner's method" to determine "the" root of algebraic equations, and a method to solve systems of linear congruences. For Wylie, the importance of these results stemmed from the fact that they had been obtained in China long before anywhere else. In this article, I examine some contexts in which such "priorities" were prized and how they were established. I then return to both pieces of knowledge to examine them from a different perspective. I show how both were related to a specific way of practicing mathematics and an associated research program, both of which were cultivated in a tradition rooted in the canonical literature in mathematics. This case study thus allows us to examine the intertwining of practice and knowledge in scientific activity. Highlighting these facts allows us to grasp facets of these two pieces of knowledge that have not yet been considered. Put differently, approaching mathematical knowledge in the context of the practice in which it was produced highlights what is lost when historians account for it in a decontextualized fashion. Through this study, I argue for the relevance of a notion of context that takes into account ways of practicing science, which, after all, the actors themselves shape in relation to the questions they pursue. The perspective adopted allows us to understand how, for ancient actors, the two mathematical results under consideration were related to each other. The nature of this relationship leads us to ask whether both the textual format adopted in Mathematical Writings and Qin Jiushao's multiple references to the Classic of Changes were correlated with the new layer of meaning that a contextualized approach of the kind I follow uncovers.
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