The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist

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by Simon Winchester


  Joseph Needham never fully worked out the answers. Perhaps it was because he was too close to the topic, seeing many trees but not enough forest. And though he makes an attempt at offering some answers in his final volume, he never seems fully convinced of his own arguments and never fully explains his reasons. It has been left to others to take up the challenge in his place.

  The sum of their conclusions is that China, basically, stopped trying.

  The Chinese could have achieved so much. Had they, for example, been equipped with “the European mania for tinkering and improving,” as the sinologist Mark Elvin put it, they could probably have made an efficient spinning machine in the seventeenth century. It might have been trickier for them to make a steam engine, “but it should not have posed insuperable difficulties to a people who had been building double-acting piston flame-throwers in the Song dynasty. The crucial point is that nobody tried.”

  Just why the Chinese stopped trying is a question sinologists will argue and debate until the Great Wall crumbles into sand. Some say it is because there was never a mercantile class in China to which clever young Chinese could aspire. For centuries the summit of a student’s ambition was always to join the bureaucracy, rather than to enter a nonexistent world of competition and improvement—and absent this driving force, complacency ruled, incentive atrophied, and mediocrity became the norm.

  Some others point to the immense size of a state that for long periods of its history was culturally unified into one vast, homogeneous bloc. Europe, by contrast, has always been packed with jostling and warring peoples and states who have collectively experienced hundreds of years of competing ambitions. If Italy needed to produce a better cannon than the French, then its technologists were cajoled into trying to do so. If British navigation equipment was more sophisticated than that invented by the Germans, it had a powerful advantage at sea, and Germany would have been bound to try to better it.

  But there was no such intramural competition in ancient China, except perhaps during those periods when the country was racked by conflict and civil war. More commonly the soldiers in Urumchi used the same weapons as those in Guangzhou, and a Manchu farmer used the same kind of plow as his opposite number in Kashgar. Plenty of technology existed abroad—but the Chinese had so little need to compete that there was no driving pressure to make things better and better over the centuries.

  Others blame the endless climate of Chinese totalitarianism—whether imposed by emperors or by the Communists—that also acted to sap the will of the entrepreneur and the innovator. Étienne Balazs, a Hungarian scholar who was perhaps the greatest twentieth-century student of Chinese government, wrote once:

  It is the State that kills technological progress in China—not only in the sense that it nips in the bud anything that goes against or seems to go against its interests, but also by the customs implanted inexorably by the raison d’État. The atmosphere of routine, of traditionalism, and of immobility, which makes any innovation, or any initiative that is not commanded and sanctioned in advance, suspect, is unfavour-able to the spirit of free inquiry.

  Still others, in the way of academics, insist that the question itself is flawed—and that rather than asking why modern science did not develop in China, one should be asking why it did develop in Europe. Asking for an explanation of a negative, they say, sets one on a pointless mission.

  Whatever the reason, the phenomenon may be seen in due course as more of a hiatus, more of a hiccup in China’s long history, than a permanent condition. Today’s China has now so profoundly changed yet again—has become so rich, energetic, freewheeling, awesome, and spectacular—that the situation which engaged Joseph Needham and the small army of sinologists who have followed in his footsteps may itself well have come to a natural end.

  It seems abundantly clear that creativity, true inventiveness, is starting to flow in China once again, with the new prosperity of the country. No longer is China the sinkhole of decay and desuetude that it was as recently as twenty years ago. Nowadays, in every field—in science and technology on the one hand, in literature and the plastic arts on the other—the new China is entering a time of intense activity and entrepreneurial energy.

  If this continues to be the case, then perhaps some people will conclude that the “Needham question” never really needed to be asked in the first place. Perhaps China did dim its lights for three or four centuries. Maybe the Qing dynasty, and the half century of turmoil that followed it, will never go down in China’s history as a golden era, will never be another Tang dynasty or another Song dynasty. But for China that hardly matters: the country has so immensely long a history that a few hundred years when things were shabbier and duller than usual will, in the broad sweep of things, hardly signify. Scholars will continue to gnaw at the problem—but in that the intellectual dry spell now seems unlikely to spread into China’s future, their quest may turn out to be quite fruitless.

  A more interesting question will be this: how quickly and competently will the new China now manage to capitalize on its early, historical promise? Needham expressed the greatest confidence that in time it would. And he always knew that the great strength of his books lay precisely in their ability to catalog what that early promise was, and so to indicate to a fascinated world just where and how the new China and the new Chinese will now seek their best advantage. The books present a road map—to show where China has been, and where it is going next.

  The third volume of Science and Civilisation in China—the first “real” volume, issued in 1959, in which Needham begins to describe the early practical successes of Chinese science—is devoted to mathematics and, in large part, to China’s age-old fascination with the stars. Needham quotes as his epigraph an eminent Viennese sinologist, Franz Kühnert, who wrote in 1884 that

  another reason why many Europeans consider the Chinese such barbarians is on account of the support they give to their Astronomers—people regarded by our civilized Western mortals as completely useless. Yet there they rank with heads of Departments and Secretaries of State. What frightful barbarism!

  Maybe, say some people, Franz Kühnert made a mistake, meaning astrology rather than astronomy. But it doesn’t really matter. The essential point remains the same. From antiquity, the Chinese were enthralled by the heavens and by heavenly phenomena, and they came to know, map, and chart the stars and planets in exceptional detail, centuries before any watchers of the skies in the West. The star charts that Needham was to study at the Dunhuang caves figure prominently in his studies: they show how obsessed China was with the universe, with the big picture, with the broad sweep of history and geography. The charts show that they were a people who, as Needham had been advised to conduct himself so very long ago, were able to think big, to “think in oceans.”

  There is a place in the far west of the country, the desert, where today, and quite unexpectedly, one finds the Chinese doing exactly that. It is a place to which Needham traveled when he was on his way to the Dunhuang caves, driving his wheezing truck along the old Silk Road. These days the Silk Road is a modern four-lane highway for much of its early length. But then after 1,000 miles or so the Great Wall, which runs beside it on the northern side, begins to peter out. The roadway narrows, then gets more rough. The Gobi Desert sweeps to the road’s very curb, and with jagged mountain ranges to the south and the empty desert ahead, the Silk Road can at this point suddenly look and feel just as lonely as it did in the old days, when Arab cameleers and Mediterranean traders would tread its path, on their way to Medina and Antioch and the outside world.

  And then, two hours beyond Rewi Alley’s village of Shandan, one comes on a town that looks decidedly neither of the desert nor of the far frontier.

  It is called Jiuquan, and it is known in popular legend as the place which grew the first rhubarb, and as the town where an early Jesuit explorer, Bento de Goes, was robbed and died destitute at the beginning of the seventeenth century. There is no evident history at Jiuquan now—no plaque
celebrating rhubarb, no grave for Father Goes—but there is a town as modern and gleaming as any example of American exurbia. In the gray and gritty wilderness of the southern Gobi Desert there are suddenly scores of tall new buildings, each the experiment of some wildly adventurous young architect. There are wide boulevards, soaring overpasses, and, perched above acres of scrubby wasteland, construction cranes busily hauling up yet more apartment skyscrapers for a population that, to judge by the ghostly nature of the place, has evidently still to arrive.

  Jiuquan is a space center—one of China’s three most important launch pads for satellites, buried deep on the flat, sunny fringes of the Gobi Desert. It was first occupied in 1958—just thirteen years after Needham passed by.

  In those ultrasecret times this was the site of the first tests of surface-to-surface missiles for the strategic artillery divisions of the People’s Liberation Army. The first nuclear-capable missile was sent into the stratosphere from Jiuquan in 1966. These days the pad, far out of sight of the road, launches satellites commercially, claiming a 100 percent success rate. In October 2003 the people of Jiuquan sent Yang Lingwei, the first Chinese astronaut, into space, and helped make him a national hero. For the first half century of its life Jiuquan was off-limits to all except its employees and party patrons; now, since Yang’s fourteen successful orbits, the town and the launch center have been opened to tourists. But these tourists are Chinese nationals only. No foreigners may come. Not yet.

  Joseph Needham would have wished to spend time at Jiuquan—if for no other reason than to see the sign that rises on a giant billboard at the entrance to the town. It is written in huge scarlet characters, and in enormous letters, in both Chinese and English. It proclaims a sentiment to which Needham readily subscribed, from the moment in 1948 when he first began writing his book, perhaps even from when he first went to China in 1943, perhaps from when he first met Lu Gwei-djen, and she introduced him to her language, in 1937.

  The sign, simply and starkly, states: “Without Haste. Without Fear. We Conquer the World.”

  After its 5,000 years of patient waiting, watching, and learning, this is at last China’s appointed time.

  And Joseph Needham would not be dismayed by that; nor would he be the slightest bit surprised.

  Appendix I: Chinese Inventions and Discoveries with Dates of First Mention

  The mere fact of seeing them listed brings home to one the astonishing inventiveness of the Chinese people.

  —JOSEPH NEEDHAM, 1993, PUBLISHED 2004

  From Science and Civilisation in China, Volume VII, Part 2

  Abacus

  AD 190

  Acupuncture

  580 BC

  Advisory vessels

  3rd century BC

  Air-conditioning fan

  AD 180

  Alcohol made from grain by a special fermentation process

  15th century BC

  Algorithm for extraction of square and cube roots

  1st century AD

  Anatomy

  11th century AD

  Anchor, nonfouling, stockless

  1st century AD

  Anemometer

  3rd century AD

  Antimalaria drugs

  3rd century BC

  Arcuballista, multiple-bolt

  320 BC

  Arcuballista, multiple-spring

  5th century AD

  Asbestos woven into cloth

  3rd century BC

  Astronomical clock drive

  AD 120

  Axial rudder

  1st century AD

  Ball bearings

  2nd century BC

  Balloon principle

  2nd century BC

  Bean curd

  AD 100

  Bell, pottery

  3rd millennium BC

  Bellows, double-acting piston-tuned bronze

  6th century BC

  Belt drive

  5th century BC

  Beriberi, recognition of

  AD 1330

  Blast furnace

  3rd century BC

  Blood, distinction between arterial and venous

  2nd century BC

  Blood, theory of circulation

  2nd century BC

  Boats and ships, paddle-wheel

  AD 418

  Bomb, cast-iron

  AD 1221

  Bomb, thrown from a trebuchet

  AD 1161

  Book, printed, first to be dated

  AD 868

  Book, scientific, printed

  AD 847

  Bookcase, vertical axis

  AD 544

  Bookworm repellent

  Bowl, bronze water-spouting

  3rd century BC

  Bread, steamed

  Bridges, releasable

  4th century BC

  Bridges, iron-chain suspension

  6th century AD

  Bridges, Li Chhun’s segmental arch

  AD 610

  Bronze, high tin, for mirror production

  Bronze rainbow teng (camphor still)

  1st century BC

  Calipers

  AD 9

  Camera obscura, explanation of

  AD 1086

  “Cardan” suspension

  140 BC

  Cast iron

  5th century BC

  Cast iron—malleable

  4th century BC

  Cereals, preservation of stored

  1st century BC

  Chain drive

  AD 976

  Chess

  4th century BC

  Chimes, stone

  9th century BC

  Chopsticks

  600 BC

  Clocks, sand

  AD 1370

  Clocks, Su Sung’s

  AD 1088

  Clockwork escapement of Yi Xing and Liang Lingzan

  AD 725

  Coal, as a fuel

  1st century AD

  Coal, dust, briquettes from

  1st century AD

  Coinage

  9th century BC

  Collapsible umbrella and other items

  5th century BC

  Comet tails, observation of direction of

  AD 635

  Compass, floating fish

  AD 1027

  Compass, magnetic needle

  AD 1088

  Compass, magnetic, used for navigation

  AD 1111

  Cooking pots, heat economy in

  3rd millennium BC

  Crank handle

  1st century BC

  Crop rotation

  6th century BC

  Crossbow

  5th century BC

  Crossbow, bronze triggers

  300 BC

  Crossbow, grid sight for

  1st century AD

  Crossbow, magazine

  13th century AD

  Dating of trees by number of rings

  12th century AD

  Decimal place value

  13th century BC

  Deep drilling and use of natural gas as fuel

  2nd century BC

  Diabetes, association with sweet and fatty foods

  1st century BC

  Dial and pointer

  3rd century AD

  Differential pressure

  Disease, diurnal rhythms in

  2nd century BC

  Diseases, deficiency

  3rd century AD

  Dishing of carriage wheel

  Distillation, of mercury

  3rd century BC

  Dominoes

  AD 1120

  Downdraft

  1st century BC

  Dragon kiln

  2nd century AD

  Draw loom

  1st century AD

  Drum carriage

  110 BC

  Diked/poldered fields

  1st century BC

  Ephedrine

  2nd century AD

  Equal temperament, mathematical formulation of


  AD 1584

  Equilibrium, theory of

  4th century BC

  Erosion and sedimentary deposition, knowledge of

  AD 1070

  Esculentist movement (edible plants for time of famine)

  AD 1406

  Ever-normal granary system

  AD 9

  Fertilizers

  2nd century BC

  Firecrackers

  AD 290

  Firelance

  AD 950

  Flame test

  Flamethrower (double-acting force pump for liquids)

  AD 919

  Folding chairs

  3rd century AD

  Free reed

  1000 BC

  Fumigation

  7th century BC

  Furnace, reverberatory

  1st century BC

  Gabions

  3rd century BC

 

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