History of Gunpowder in China - More Needham

 I already wrote a month back about the huge series of books which I have gorged on over the years: "The Cambridge History of Science and Civilisation in China". It is very specialised reading - I sometimes find that I am the first person who has borrowed a book for five or ten years - but I love it and would like to explain why.

The series came about after Joseph Needham, a Cambridge Professor and notorious polymath, came back from China where he had been sent during World War Two to rescue and support Chinese Scientists and Scientific knowledge from the advancing Japanese. After four years there, during which time he travelled widely and acquired huge numbers of ancient Chinese scientific and technical texts, he became immensely interested in why Chinese science and technological development had fallen behind that of the West, when - as he found out through his travels and studies - the Chinese had clearly been more advanced in many areas from a very early date. This question became known, in fact as the 'Needham Question'. 

The huge edition I am reading is all about the origins and history of gunpowder in China. It was assumed by most European historians that China could not have really originated the first guns and cannons and - even though there is ample evidence - it was not until the early twentieth century that it was clearly accepted that the Chinese were ahead of the West in all gunpowder areas by a matter of at least a century or two.

What I find really interesting are some of the reasons that China did reach these inventions first. One surprising answer is that there was a huge belief in the (impossible) aims of alchemy in China and there were for thousands of years, adepts trying to turn lead into gold or produce elixirs of immortality. The benefit was that thousands of alchemists down the centuries became very skilled at separating and purifying elements and distinguishing one from another by various tests. This meant that saltpetre, one of the key components of gunpowder, was accurately identified by about 200AD.  

Another 'benefit' was that China had a very centralised and bureaucratic system of government. Rather than stifling technological progress, this meant that if something was of use to the state is was paid for and produced in large numbers. There is a letter from a local administrator from about 1280, complaining that there were only 200 state-manufactured iron gunpowder bombs in a particular city, when there should have been 20,000 there! This meant that the technological application of scientific ideas was highly prized.

This particular area of technology - gunpowder in all its forms - was also highly developed because at many times in China there were enormous wars between rival kingdoms or incoming/outgoing Dynasties. There were battles in the Middle Ages in China with 200,000 troops taking part!

And as for The 'Needham Question' - has there been any solution? Well most attempted answers point towards the different governing structures of China and the West. Whereas here in the West there were many fairly small rival kingdoms and plenty of merchants and bankers with money to stake, things were much more centralised in China. Nobody but the Emperor was really in charge or could really act independently, so there was less incentive or need to develop things independently. And if the emperor banned something, it stayed banned. 

I will leave this particular book with a picture from a very early scroll from about 950 AD. It shows demons trying to distract a Buddhist adept, and one of them is holding what turns out to be a very early form of flamethrower - called a 'fire-lance' in Chinese. It is a bamboo tube filled with low-nitrate gunpowder, and when it was used the tube would send a jet of flame and sparks at your opponent for about five minutes, by which time he had usually fled. I may have a head full of lots of unnecessary facts already, but I prize the right to fill it with a whole lot more!