Joseph Needham and "Science and Civilisation in China"

 

Joseph Needham is certainly one of the most interesting people I have ever heard of, and the enormous series of books on the history of Chinese Science are some of my favourite reading materials. I will try to explain why, for both of these. 

Needham (1900-1995) was a voracious polymath, who seemed to fit more into his life than seemed reasonable. By his thirties he was a published and renowned biochemist and Fellow of the Royal Academy, but during World War Two he was sent into occupied China to try to salvage and rescue the uprooted Chinese scientists from the Japanese-occupied East of the country. 

While engaged in this work, he realised quite how deep, early and significant were the achievements of Chinese technology and science (Gunpowder, Paper and the Compass are well-known imports to the West from China, but these are only the tip of the iceberg). He proposed a book to Cambridge University upon his return, which would explain this missing history to Western audiences, but as soon as he and his collaborators started, they realised, as they say in 'Jaws' that they were going to "need a bigger boat..". The existing 17 books are in the picture above. I think there are ten more due, after more than 50 years of work.

I have read several of these volumes over my summer camping trips in Walberswick and they may be arcane but I find them fascinating. They are academically sound, full of footnotes and the original Chinese terms, but the surprise is in just how much was achieved by the technologies of the Middle Kingdom before we arrived to make it part of the 'modern world'. It must have been painfully obvious that Western subjugation of China in the 19th century used the very gunpowder in our gunboats that the Chinese had invented. Technology transfer has never been painless. 

I will give a couple of examples of surprising facts that emerge. In the volume on military technology you find that when the Mongols finally overcame castles of the Assassins in their invasions of the 13th century, they were supported by troops of expert Chinese mercenaries who fired the long-range giant crossbows that could hit the castles directly from half a mile away. Also, Chinese siege defenders were the first in the world to use chemical weapons, by having a second door within their city gates, which could be dropped, followed by burning plants, to incapacitate the attackers. Also, as an Irishman I have to pass on the factoid that the Chinese were the people who invented the wheelbarrow.

My favourite visual is this one from the Sichuan brine fields at the end of the 19th century. This is a Sichuan brine field and it looks just like Texas.

Sichuan is hundreds of miles from the sea, and as salt is essential in daily life, there was an enormous benefit to exploiting the salt brine that lay in huge volumes under parts of Sichuan. Drilling, using bamboo drilling rigs, allowed wells as deep as 500m by the 1700s and down to 1000m by the early 19th century. The nicest refinement in this was that while drilling deep for the brine, the drillers encountered gas, which was then piped to the surface to fuel the large iron pans in which the brine was evaporated to salt.

And if I at all can, I am going to acquire another volume of this admittedly spoddy, but hugely satisfying publication, to see me through treatment and to fill my head with more fascinating facts. Watch out.