province, a place of great beauty which he named "Dream Brook" ("Mengxi") after he visited it for the first time in 1086. Shen Kuo permanently moved to the Dream Brook Estate in 1088, and in that same year he completed his life's written work of the Dream Pool Essays, naming the book after his garden-estate property. It was there that Shen Kuo spent the last several years of his life in leisure, isolation, and illness, until his death in 1095. Scholarly achievements Shen Kuo wrote extensively on a wide range of different subjects. His written work included two geographical atlases, a treatise on music with mathematical harmonics, governmental administration, mathematical astronomy, astronomical instruments, martial defensive tactics and fortifications, painting, tea, medicine, and much poetry. His scientific writings have been praised by sinologists such as Joseph Needham and Nathan Sivin, and he has been compared by Sivin to polymaths such as his Song dynasty Chinese contemporary Su Song, as well as to Gottfried Leibniz and Mikhail Lomonosov. Raised-relief map Joseph Needham suggests that certain pottery vessels of the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) showing artificial mountains as lid decorations may have influenced the development of the raised-relief map in China. The Han dynasty general Ma Yuan (14 BC – 49 AD) is recorded as having made a raised-relief map of valleys and mountains in a rice-constructed model of 32 AD. Shen Kuo's largest atlas included twenty three maps of China and foreign regions that were drawn at a uniform scale of 1:900,000. Shen also created a raised-relief map using sawdust, wood, beeswax, and wheat paste. Zhu Xi (1130–1200) was inspired by the raised-relief map of Huang Shang and so made his own portable map made of wood and clay which could be folded up from eight hinged pieces. Pharmacology For pharmacology, Shen wrote of the difficulties of adequate diagnosis and therapy, as well as the proper selection, preparation, and administration of drugs. He held great concern for detail and philological accuracy in identification, use and cultivation of different types of medicinal herbs, such as in which months medicinal plants should be gathered, their exact ripening times, which parts should be used for therapy; for domesticated herbs he wrote about planting times, fertilization, and other matters of horticulture. In the realms of botany, zoology, and mineralogy, Shen Kuo documented and systematically described hundreds of different plants, agricultural crops, rare vegetation,