3 January 2009

The astonishing Dr Joseph Needham - Part 1 of 3

These days everybody knows that the Chinese invented practically everything hundreds of years ago. What people don't realise is that this understanding is so new, in the early 1950s nobody, not even those in China, were aware of this amazing fact. Then Dr Joseph Needham of Cambridge embarked on an exploration of China and the beginning of his massive work Science and Civilisation in China and in 2008 Simon Winchester's book Bomb, Book and Compass reminded the world of this achievement. Today in part 1 we talk to Simon Winchester but also hear once more the programs made in the 1970s with Needham himself.

Transcript
Robyn Williams: This is The Science Show on ABC Radio National and we begin this portentous year with a really unusual experiment. We shall look at a 21st century phenomenon, China, through 20th century eyes, then go back even further and wonder what's really been behind the Chinese modern miracle, and why it happened at all. And we shall look at a marvellous man, an outrageous man, someone who changed history. Joseph Needham has been the hero of a book published last year, written by Simon Winchester. Bomb, Book and Compass is a terrific read, and it reaffirms what we thought before, that this Morris dancing, promiscuous Cambridge don was a one-off, and that his contribution was so huge, it actually wakened a giant from a 500-year slumber. Here in the first of three programs, we begin with Simon Winchester and how his adventure with Needham took off. Simon Winchester: About 16 years ago I think, I was doing a book about the Yangtze River, and when I was back in New York writing it up having spent about a year travelling along it, I came to the part about the three gorges, which in those days, were a ferocious stream, but of course now ever since the building of the dam has turned into an enormous lake of sewerage. However, when it was a ferocious stream, which was three hundred miles long, how did sailing junks get up itwhich they clearly did, from Wuhan to Chongqing, there was a very lively trade. I wanted to see pictures of sailing junks, from the Ming and the Qing dynasties, because they would have had to be very light and capacious and strong, to manage to get up against these terrible waters. And someone said to me in London, who knew about ships, well the obvious book to look at is volume 4 part 3 of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, and I had never heard of either. So by chance the next day I was in a book store in Connecticut, one of these book stores where the owner knows everything, and I saidMike McCabe his name wasMike have you ever heard of a book called Science and Civilisation in China? And he looked

at me as if I was something the cat had dragged in and he said, you do mean Joseph Needham, and I said I think I do, and he said, have you never heard of Joseph Needham and I said no I haven't, and he said you ought to be ashamed of yourself, the most important Englishman ever to have lived in China. He produced this monster book, 17, 18 or 19 volumes, called Science and Civilisation in China. We never get complete sets, they're still in print but, they'd be terribly expensive, but we do occasionally get single volumes and I think I've got one now and he went down into his study, into the basement like the white rabbit and he came back up blowing the dust off an enormous tome, volume 4 part 3. So it was fate, it was exactly the book I wanted, $75, and I sat in the car outside looking at this, which was nearly a thousand pages, devoted to China's relationship with water, so it was about lighthouses, and rudders and sails, and anchors and navigation and the use of the compass, and the drawings that I wanted of the Qing dynasty, and I thought who on earth was this man, not just what an amazing book, but who was he? And not only did he create this one book, but if the bookseller was to be believed, there were seventeen or so other volumes, devoted to astronomy, and botany and ceramics, and engineering - he must have been a remarkable fellow. Robyn Williams: He certainly was a remarkable fellow, and the question was, was he writing something that was dry as dust or was if full of beautiful prose, was it done with verve and vigour? Simon Winchester: Well that's I think what most amazed me. Not only was this compendium that I looked at, stunningly full of remarkable arcane information, but it was beautifully exquisitely produced, with evidently, the work of a person of great learning because there were references to all sorts of other cultures in Arabia and Hindustan and Africa. He seemed to draw on a lifetime of knowledge and a great literary tradition, so it was in all manner of ways a splendid book. Robyn Williams: Well at the end of your book, you give a list of the inventions, some of the amazing breakthroughs which happened long before in China than they did elsewhere. My big question to you is, in about 1952 before Needham published his books, did anyone really know this stuff that we now take for granted? Simon Winchester: Not only did no one know it in the west, but no one really knew it in China either. I mean it was all there for the knowing, in that if you spoke and read Chinese which Needham did after he learned it from his mistress in 1938, he started attacking the archives, and speaking to people, and found out incrementally, this huge list of achievements. But no one in Britain knew. No one in the west knew it. The assumption was, the date you mentioned, the early '50s, China, was as Emerson had said, this booby nation, good only for ceramics, silk, rhubarb and tea really. The thought that they had ever been central to the manufacture of human civilisation was just ridiculous as far as the west was concerned. We, the west had made it. That was obvious! Well it was wrong, because Needham, very slowly, very steadily painstakingly assembled this list which began with his observation of the top grafting of a plum tree. He realised after examining that, that the Chinese had been grafting fruit trees six hundred years before the first ever recording of grafting in ancient Greece. And this really set him on the path and in short order he had discovered three things which

Francis Bacon had said most clearly defined modern human kind which was use and manufacture of gunpowder, the use of the compass and printing with movable type. None of these things did Francis Bacon have the faintest clue where they came from. Needham established they were all Chinese. So grafting, printing, gunpowder, compass, and then it went on and on: the stirrup, blast furnaces and suspension bridges and the chain, and... Robyn Williams: And perfumed toilet paper. Simon Winchester: Indeed! 1341! Large sheets for the ordinary man and small ones for the delicate shaped bottoms of the aristocracy. He was an amazing discoverer of the arcane. Robyn Williams: Simon Winchester whose book on Needham was published last year. Now we go back to 1979 and Needham himself. Three programs made by John Merson, from the ABC Science Unit, tracing Chinese history, and the astonishing story of invention and discovery; how it grew from Chinese culture, and then stopped. This is how John Merson introduced the story way back then. John Merson: It is rather ironic that China in the twentieth century should be seeking modern science and industrial technology from the West, when up until the sixteenth century, the situation was quite the reverse. Francis Bacon, one of the prophets of modern science, writing in the seventeenth century, listed the technology which he considered essential to the scientific and economic revolution that was transforming Europe: gunpowder, the compass, the clock, paper and printing, along with the skills of the European shipbuilders and navigators. Yet these particular technologies we now know to have originated in China, and to have come to Europe along with silk, porcelain and even spaghetti, through Arab, Turkish and Latin traders, from Roman times until the Europeans found the sea route to the East in the sixteenth century. What is interesting about the movement of technologies from one culture to another is that their impact is often so unpredictable. In the case of Europe, the effects of Chinese inventions and artefacts were often far more profound than they were in China itself. Ironically it was these same technologies, transformed by the scientific and industrial revolution, that were to rebound on China during the nineteenth century when the guns and cultural values of European imperialism were to bring an end to the cultural sovereignty of the Chinese empire, an empire that had maintained itself for over 2,000 years. Yet, by the thirteenth century China was the world's most advanced civilisation. They had the most productive agriculture in the world, and potentially enough science and technology for an economic revolution similar to that which occurred in Europe in the eighteenth century. And yet, in China, there was no 'take-off' to use the economists' jargon. The question of why China did not develop like the West is one we will be returning to often throughout this series. Let us begin by looking at some of the basic social and economic factors which determined the political institutions and philosophies of ancient China. I called on Dr Michael Lowe from the School of Oriental Studies whom to explain the remarkable longevity and stability of the Chinese Empire. Michael Lowe: I think one has to start by drawing a contrast between the obvious success and continuity of dynastic empires in the East, whereas in the West, on the whole you have a failure to produce any unity of the same sort. You have the Holy

Roman Empire, but in political and dynastic terms that doesn't really match up. It's a difference which I am quite sure does derive from a basic view of life which finds itself formulated in China at quite an early stage. You can take account of two philosophies, very generally known under the terms Taoism and Confucianism, of which Taoism sees nature as the centre of being, and sees the aim of man as being to get himself into conformity with natural processes and natural rhythms. The Confucian outlook sees man as the centre of existence, and regards man's duty and his pride as being that of organising communal work and ordering communal activity so that it will be for the benefit of all mankind. The situation in the Chinese empires has been one in which government and institutions have relied on both these types of philosophy. They have in fact succeeded in compromising between the two principles in a peculiarly Chinese fashion. I think you see it in the way in which the whole universe is regarded as a unity in which ethical values, the activities of the physical world, the processes of nature, political forms and organisations, human fortunes, the fate of dynasties, all follow one and the same set of principles, one and the same view of the cosmos. John Merson: It's a little like saying the European tendency to make a separation between mind and body, and in the process you're philosophical world view would be to create a transcendental hierarchy concerned with the spirit, and the world of matter and phenomena, tied up with different sorts of laws. The Chinese seem to have unified these two into a sort of hierarchy which interrelated much easily than the Western view. Michael Lowe: I think this is quite right. The whole attempt in China has been to set up a philosophical system and to see therein the political ordering of man as an integral part. In the West I think you've had this constant tendency to split church and state. In China there's been the constant attempt to unify the two together. In China for example, from quite an early stage, you have the development of the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven which unites, temporal authority and permanent authority. You've got to wait quite a long time in the West before you get the Divine Right of Kings emerging, and the Divine Right of Kings when it crops up first, is there as a divisive force, rather than as a uniting force. It's there to assert the authority of the Emperor as against the Pope, long before it's ever taken over by Stuart kings for their own particular purposes. John Merson: The difference in philosophical orientation which Michael Lowe has just explained was clearly not just some mental aberration on the part of the Chinese. There were sound economic reasons for such a world view, for Chinese culture was built on the prerequisites of one of the world's most complex and successful agricultural economies; one that supported a population far greater than that of Europe. It's a point that was brought home to me when I visited Professor Jean Chesneaux at the University of Paris. Jean Chesneaux: The life of the peasant is built on the same relationship between the future, present and past. The task of the peasant is to make the future as consistent as possible with the past, and then there is a repetition day after day of this same calendar of activities, taking care of the animals, opening the house - a repetition day after day. And also a repetition year after year of the time of the harvest, and the time of tilling the land. All this means repetition. The whole vision the Chinese had of historical timing, what I call man's awareness of their insertion into the time dimension, is based on this assumption; that the most important duty of mankind, is to check that the future is a repetition of the past. This is the whole idea of Confucianism. That's for instance the

reason for which the curriculum on which was based the examinations used to select the most able officials in the empire. This curriculum had no provision at all for any kind of technical or administrative training. The same person could be a good general, an able financial administrator, a judge, or a prefect supervising education or public works, and provided that you knew about the past, you could take care of the future. It is a cyclical view of the evolution of mankind. John Merson: The perennial demands of the agricultural year linked so intimately with the seasons led, as Jean Chesneaux suggested, to the Chinese regarding time itself as being cyclic. That is an orientation that is in marked contrast to the linear perspective that has been so much a part of our Christian cultural heritage in the West. Here's Dr Lowe again. Michael Lowe: I think in the West you've got this linear view, of time as seen as leading up to the birth and phenomenon of Jesus Christ or leading therefrom, and the whole progress of man being explained as leading towards a particular goal. You've got a completely different view of time in China, where the whole concept is one of a cycle. The universe is regarded as manifesting one of a particular series of situations which recur one after the other, according to established principles. You get this in various metaphysical systems, that of the I Ching, the book of changes, with its sixty-four symbols for sixty-four different situations which follow one another, and then the cycle repeats. You get the whole idea in the metaphysical system in the five elements combined with Yin Yang, which interact together according to five phases. Five phases is, a much better explanation than five elements. You can see it in nature, you see the natural world obeying these cycles, you see the seasons obeying them on earth, you see the movements of the heavenly bodies following one another in a cycle, the Chinese see individual lives following a similar cycle, and dynastic stories, following the same rules. Rise, decay, fall, replacement and so on, through time everlasting. John Merson: If you've ever read any Chinese histories you will have noticed that historical time is marked off by dynasties, beginning usually with the Shang about 1500 BC and ending with the Qing in 1911, a span of almost three and a half thousand years. There was of course no unitary dating system in Chinese history as we have in the West. It was the Venerable Bede in the European Middle Ages who began dating historical events from the birth of Christ. In China, historical time began with the foundation of each new dynasty, and as Dr Lowe has suggested, these dynasties were seen as following a cycle, and like any living organism, there was always a rebirth and a new dynasty entered the same cycle. There was no obvious sense of progress, and in fact, there was if anything a desire to get back to a condition of life which prevailed in the Zhou dynasty, around 1000 BC, which Confucius idealised as part of his polemic against the failings of his age. Imperial dynasties in China seem to last on average about 200 to 250 years, and it is interesting to note that there may well have been good reasons for dynasties to follow the same cyclic pattern. Recent meteorological research has shown that climatic changes could have something to do with the regular rise and fall of imperial dynasties in China. Here is Dr Clive Gates from the CSIRO in Canberra who is a leading authority on the history of Chinese agriculture. Clive Gates: China is situated in an area where there is an interplay of two major world influences, namely, the hot monsoonal moisture-laden air from the southern China Sea, and the influence of the Siberian westerlies which come in from the north. Now these

interplay over China and they have been shown by meteorologists to vary in their pattern over long periods, and so there will be perhaps sometimes a hundred or two hundred years of below average rainfall, and then a similar period of above average rainfall. That is a very dynamic factor in the history of China because it is a strange thing, but logical when you come to think of it, but the more spectacular dynasties have tended to coincide with the better periods of weather, and the more disruptive periods have tended to coincide with the poorer periods. John Merson: And that has caused the great dynastic changes, has it? Clive Gates: Yes. Mind you, the Chinese themselves look to dynastic changes about every couple-of-hundred-years intervals and strangely enough these changes seem to tie in quite a deal with changes in climate that occur round about those fifty to one hundred years prior to these changes. Jean Chesneaux: When a new dynasty came into power it had three priorities. First, to re-establish the proper order in the natural and agricultural field; namely to restore the dykes and canals to good order. The water conservancy system came first. Second, to restore the proper harmony between society and the cosmos through the calendar. The calendar is an extremely important mediating factor between the natural state of orderthe stars, the sun, the moon and the earth-and man's activity. The calendar is a reflection of the cosmic order on man's organisation of time and, therefore, to appoint a commissioner of astronomy to restore a calendar in its proper balance with the calculation of years and months was an act of state, an act of political power, a priority for the new state. And third, to appoint a commission of historiography, composed of historians whose duty would be properly to record the story of the previous dynasty so as to assess its successes and its weaknesses in order to make this fallen dynasty, which had just been replaced by the new regime, enter the regular span of the previous dynasties, also to take its place on the roll in order to make the historical system of reference for future generations stronger and broader. Their aim was to make the future consistent with the past. John Merson: It was a very conservative society . Jean Chesneaux: I should not say conservative, I should say self- perpetuating. You see it was a self-perpetuating system which worked. They did it for thirty centuries. John Merson: Let us now look in more detail at the second of the three priorities of the imperial government mentioned by Professor Chesneaux-the production of the calendar and the responsibilities of the department of astronomy. I asked Dr Jose ph Needham, the author and editor of that remarkable series of books Science and Civilisation in China, to explain the role of the imperial bureaucracy in the development of Chinese science and, more particularly, observational astronomy. Joseph Needham: You have to remember that China was basically an agrarian civilisation and there were literally millions of farmers who needed to know when to plant and what to plant, and at what time, and when to harvest and so on. So the calendar was extremely important, and in fact it was issued by the imperial authority century after century in the same way as coins were minted, with the ruler's effigy on them in the West and in other parts of the world. The calendar was the important thing.

If you accepted the calendar it was equivalent to accepting allegiance to the Chinese emperor. John Merson: This is what became known as the Asiatic Mode of Production; the great dependence on canal systems, on water for rice growing, and the centralisation of power in the emperor, all factors in determining the social structure of ancient China and, in turn, determining the nature of its science as well. Joseph Needham: There is no doubt whatever that there was a predominantly bureaucratic character about Chinese society. In fact, many people often speak of bureaucratic feudalism in China as opposed to the aristocratic military feudalism of Europe. One of the very first things one has to get into one's mind about the difference between China and the rest of the world was that there was never any military aristocratic feudalism in China; broadly speaking no fiefs, no primogeniture, no landed property in the sense of the Western world. There was this bureaucratic state, and obviously that had a tremendous influence on the development of science, because the Chinese were able to do things which no other people in the world could have done at the times when they did them. I'll just give you one example, and that is a meridian survey which was set up round about 720 AD. It was under the auspices of the astronomer Royal, Nangong Yue, and a very brilliant Tantric Buddhist monk, Yi Xing, who was the greatest mathematician and astronomer of his time. They measured sun shadows and altitudes and other data on a line of something like about 2,500 km long. Their uppermost station was up in Mongolia, on the borders of Russia, or over the border in what is now Russia, and they went right down south as far as Malaya, so that there you had an extraordinary concerted effort-bureaucratic if you like, but set up in a way which no other people could have done in the eighth century. John Merson: What was the purpose of this study though? Joseph Needham: The purpose was really to determine the nature of the earth-whether or not they worked out the curvature of the earth from it is not quite certain-but they were extremely interested to know what the difference in sun shadow was for a degree of latitude and things of that sort. John Merson: This bureaucratic character of Chinese government allowed a remarkable tradition of observational astronomy to develop. The first recorded observation of the birth of a super nova near the star Antaris is recorded on a Shang dynasty oracle bone that dates from about 1300 BC, and from that time on, Chinese astronomers were making observations and keeping accurate records of events in the heavens. So meticulous were these observations that contemporary astronomers wanting to confirm some theory about the recurrence of meteors or other such phenomena have gone back to these ancient Chinese records. Yet this tradition of fastidious observations and records wasn't born out of some general scientific interest in astronomy. Astronomy in China, like history, was political, a matter of very particular concern to the emperor and the bureaucracy that surrounded him. Here is Dr Christopher Cullen, an historian of Chinese science from Cambridge University. Christopher Cullen: We can look indeed at the role of the official astronomer in China, and by the way, the mere existence of official astronomers is one of the great differences between China and the classical Western world in which the astronomer was

perhaps associated with religious activities but was mostly an amateur. We can look at the role of the astronomer in China very much in a political sense. There is one edict which seems to refer to an official determination that state secrets of such importance as astronomical ones should be guarded, that members of the Astronomical Bureau were to hold no communication with officials from other offices, and so on. This matter was to be looked to by the censorate, equivalent to the KGB. By memorialising about astronomical portents, you could indirectly make political criticisms that it would not be safe to make by direct means. If we look at the later Han dynasty, which runs from roughly 1 AD to 200 AD, a scholar named Beilenstein has made a study of statistical significance of these records which reported astronomical patterns to the emperor. He has found that there is clear evidence that the official astronomers and others too who were sending in memorials of portents were not reporting in a simple, objective manner. Beilenstein found evidence that people were using the reporting of astronomical portents as a means of saying to the emperor 'your conduct is to be disapproved of'. If you find a large number of earthquakes, meteors and solar eclipses memorialised, you can be fairly sure that you are dealing with an unpopular reign. Certainly one can say that astronomy was a much more important thing in terms of the priorities of government in China than it was in the classical West, and that it was regarded as a matter of most vital necessity for the state to keep an eye on what was going on in the heavens, and to a certain extent, almost to manifest the rightness of the imperial rule by proper prediction of such things as could be predicted, hence the necessity for publishing accurate calendars, so that you could say exactly what was going to occur in the celestial field above. John Merson: It is interesting in the light of what Christopher Cullen has said about portents to consider the significance that many Chinese peasants attributed to the Tang Shan earthquake that devastated northern China in 1976, six weeks before the death of Chairman Mao. But let's leave portents and consider some of the other fields of science, and the role of the state in fostering their development, for as I have said, China up until the sixteenth century was far in advance of Europe in its application of science and technology to the service of the state. But there's a problem in talking about 'sciences' in ancient China when there weren't people one could describe as being scientists in the modern sense of the word. Here is Dr Joseph Needham again. Joseph Needham: In order to call yourself a scientist you have to live after what one might call the 'professionalisation' of science, which didn't take place in Europe in modern science until after the beginning of the seventeenth century. Then by the time you get to the eighteenth century there were certainly people-for instance Joseph Priestly or Antoine Lavoisier who would have certainly called themselves hommes de science and so on. But you can't expect that in pre-scientific revolutionary times, so I don't think you can talk about it but they went by other names, that's all. You could speak about the Imperial Astronomer, in fact we always translate Da Shiling as 'astronomer royal' which is really quite close to it, and then there would be the mathematicians, the 'suanxuejia', who were like the boys in the back rooms of the various government departments, or provincial governors, so if somebody was faced with the problem of a great hydraulic work, clearing out a river or building a canal between two points, then the mathematicians would be called into play. They were technicians, really, in the government service and they were certainly called suanxuejia, 'mathematicians', but were not professional as they would have been after the rise of modern science. Then you have the doctors. The physicians were a very recognisable

group right down from early times, certainly from the middle of the first millenium BC; to that degree you had professionalisation. Then another thing is that some sciences were orthodox and some were heterodox, so for example, astronomy and mathematics were very respectable. A Confucian scholar would be quite happy to specialise in one or other of those. He might realise that it wouldn't take him very far up the ladder of promotion in the civil service; but he could be a respectable person if he were in such fields. Where you got to the heterodox side of things was in other departments like, for example, 'fengshui'. These were the geomancers, the 'gentlemen from Can Zhou' who used the magnetic compass to ensure the most fortunate siting of temples or family tombs. There was a deep-seated belief that unless the 'fengshui', literally 'wind and water', was right, you would be dogged with ill-luck of every kind and in the case of your tomb, for example, if it were not oriented correctly, your descendants would not rise to high office in the civil service. We believe that this 'as connected with a very profound and very fine aesthetic appreciation of buildings and tombs in traditional China. I think no one can live in China without realising the value of this in the countryside. The siting of buildings and structures of all kinds is marvellously done in relation to the scenery. Of course, the outstanding example of a heterodox science would be alchemy or early chemistry, because that was the province of the Taoists and they were the ones who were very important for that and for its development into pharmacy as well. The imperial medical service does come quite early. You get qualifying examinations for medical practitioners as early as the fifth century AD under the Northern Wei dynasty, and in the eighth century you get the establishment of the first national medical college and the provincial medical colleges. Every provincial capital had its own medical college which was supported by the government, and we have every reason to believe that this idea of examination for qualification of medical practitioners was one of the gifts of China to the world because it came through to the Arabs, and the hospitals in Baghdad, round about the eighth century or ninth century, and then from there no doubt to Italy, where Frederick the Second in the thirteenth century instituted examinations for proficiency before the chaps were let loose on the public and so on until modern times. John Merson: You may have noted that the distinction has consistently been made between the ideas of the Taoists and those of the Con fucianists. Michael Lowe earlier made the point that these two poles of Chinese philosophy had themselves reached a remarkable balance in Chinese culture. Perhaps 'harmony' would be a better way of describing it. None the less, they did represent distinct schools of thought and as Dr Needham has mentioned, the Taoists seem to have been very important in the rise of alchemy and chemistry in China, and of course it was a Chinese alchemist somewhere in the fifth century AD who first discovered the formula for gunpowder. Joseph Needham: Confucianism, the Rujiao as it is called in Chinese, I suppose you could say was the earlier, but not really because the Confucians and the Taoists grew up together, and they were always at loggerheads. The Confucians, the followers of the sage, Master Kong, who lived towards the end of the sixth century BC, were primarily concerned with society in this world, and they felt that they knew what it would take for all people to live in harmony and happiness together with the absolute minimum of strife. They therefore were very influential throughout Chinese history. Confucius himself became the patron saint of the bureaucracy, because of all the various things for which he can be criticised, there is one thing he can't be criticised about, and that was his maintaining that all young men who could profit by an education should have it. He

was absolutely democratic from the point of view of educational opportunity. And it was probably for that reason that be became afterwards the patron saint of the bureaucratic state. The bureaucratic state didn't really start until the first emperor Qin Shi Huangdi in 220 BC. Of course there had been a lot of bureaucracy in the feudal states which had preceded the first unification of the empire at that time. Soindeed right down to my own time in China for instance: when I was there during the war, the annual sacrifices in the Confucian temples were still going on, and I had the opportunity of attending one at Maitong in Guizha, during the war years. The point is that there was never any priesthood in Confucianism, there was no theology because the ideas of the Confucians about gods and spirits were extremely sceptical. You remember the master himself said 'honour the gods and spirits but keep as far away from them as possible; have as little to do with them as possible', so you might say the spirit of Confucianism was sceptical and agnostic, and nevertheless, extremely determined where social welfare was concerned, and prepared to inculcate a strong resistance to any ruler who did things which were evil from the Confucian point of view. John Merson: Against the Confucian orthodoxy there was of course the Taoist tradition which was in a sense almost in opposition to it; could you explain this? Joseph Needham: The Taoist philosophers were quite in opposition to the Confucian philosophers because, in a nutshell, the Taoists felt in their bones that until man knew more about how nature worked, they would not be able to legislate really well for human society. The Confucians had no interest in that. They were not primarily interested in nature at all, they were thinking all the time about human society but the Taoists wanted to investigate nature, they wanted to study it and to contemplate it; they retired to their mountain forests and temples, and made all sorts of investigations, and that's why you get the beginnings of alchemy among them, the beginnings of botany, of pharmacy, and many other things. They had their own view about how to organise human society, which was extremely different because they said that it ought to be done on a spontaneous basis. You will remember that the two great watchwords of the Taoists were 'ziran' something that happens naturally by itself, and 'wuwei' namely, not forcing things, but allowing things to take their course according to nature, and not trying to go against the grain of nature. They even went so far as to say that if people would let themselves go and obey the dictates of their own natures, then everything would work in harmony together. People were so spoilt and bent from forcing themselves to do things they didn't really want to do. If everybody did what they wanted to do there would be spontaneous co-operation, spontaneous happiness and the world would be a really good place to live in. You might say that this is altogether too optimistic and perhaps it was, but nevertheless that was the Taoist vision as opposed to the Confucian tradition of regimentation. John Merson: It's a bit like the conflict between classical and romantic tradition in Western civilisation. Your description of the Taoist is very much like the Rousseau view of man. Take away the chains of social institutions and people behave benignly; nature is itself a benign force; whereas against this the Confucians say no, man needs to be controlled and constrained by social institutions. Joseph Needham: Well up to a point I'd entirely agree with that. I think it is quite a good interpretation of it. The only thing is that everything is so different in eighteenth

century Europe from what it was in fifth century BC China. You can't say it was exactly like that, but in general I think there is something in that. John Merson: From the formation of the first Empire in China in 221 BC the scholarbureaucrats were the dominant force in Chinese political and cultural life, and as Joseph Needham has suggested, they tended to follow the Confucian preoccupation with ethics and social order. In China there has always been an emphasis on the clan and the family. The Confucian principle of filial piety was one of the touchstones of social relations, and even in the traditional legal system, the individual was always seen as subsumed within their family. So much so that it was not uncommon for one's brother or cousin to be punished for a crime one had committed oneself. Yet though there wasn't the same emphasis on the individual as one finds instituted in English law, at least from the time of Magna Carta onwards, there was, among the ruling elite, a belief in self-cultivation. For not only was the scholar-bureaucrat supposed to be an able administrator, magistrate and engineer, he was also expected to be a musician, poet and philosopher. The expectations of this ruling elite was therefore not unlike that of the sixteenth century humanist ideal of 'the universal man'. It is this somewhat romantic image that earned these scholar-bureaucrats the praise of Voltaire and other members of the French Enlightenment. The ideal of self-cultivation was a value shared by both Confucianists and Taoists alike. It was perhaps best reflected in the attitude of the scholar-bureaucrat to the arts, and more particularly to painting and music. Here is Dr Pierre Ryckmans, a specialist in Chinese painting from the Australian National University in Canberra. Pierre Ryckmans: The main purpose in Chinese culture in all its aspects, whether Confucian or Taoist, was to achieve harmony. I think harmony is the key word of Chinese traditional culture and civilisation. Whether this harmony was the Confucian outlook of achieving the harmony of man in society, man with society, man with other men, together with a set of rules, etiquette and ritual which provide a nice oiling for the smooth working of human relationships, or the problem of man dealing with himself and the universe directly which is the Taoist approach, both were grounded in the same background which is cosmological. In Chinese cosmology, basically the idea is that at the root of everything there is the absolute, which is expressed conveniently, in a negative way, as 'nothingness'. It would be better translated as 'not havingness'. What we call 'being' in Western philosophy is what the Chinese call 'nothingness'. This 'nothingness' materialises in the one principle and the one principle itself divides into two antagonistic elements which in turn produce the infinite diversity of phenomena. John Merson: Was that the Yin Yang notion? Pierre Ryckmans: The Yin Yang notion is one way of putting it. The symbols of the I Ching (Book of Changes) is another way of putting it. They are various expressions of the same global cosmological view. So the main research, the main purpose of human life is, through the diversity of phenomena, to find a common unity, to find a common denominator of it all, and to put oneself in unity with it, in harmony with it, and here of course while this can be exposed and discussed by philosophers, it can be embodied, actually enacted, by painters-and hence the privileged status of painting. John Merson: Why is that?

Pierre Ryckmans: Painting as the Chinese see it is essentially painting landscape. While painting landscape, the painter is not copying one aspect of the world, he is not copying creation, he is working like the Creator. He himself is the creator of a microcosmic universe, just like the cosmic creator is the originator of the macrocosmic universe. So what the painter must achieve is to act along the same rhythm with the cosmic creator, and to accomplish a microcosmic creation parallel and similar to the macrocosmic creation. This parallelism is achieved at various levels, for instance, at the level of the subject of the painting. A landscape in Chinese is never called a landscape, it is called 'shanshui' which means 'mountains and rivers'. No landscape is conceivable in Chinese painting where one of those two elements would be missing. You need to have both the mountain and the water, which answers to the philosophical terms of male and female, active and passive, fullness and emptiness and so on. At the plastic level of forms it is the interplay of the painted parts and the empty parts, the black parts and the blank parts in which also exist active dialogues, this dialectic of fullness and emptiness. Even at the level of instruments you find it also. Painting is the product of the marriage between the brush and ink, brush representing the mountain, the male, active element, ink representing water, the female, passive, negative element and the couple brush-ink corresponding itself to the couples mountain-water, fullness-emptiness. So all these things combined into what you find the landscape painting is on the smaller scale, universal creation, and hence this kind of sacred religious function of the painting which allows the artist to achieve this communion with the world. This is the reason why great Chinese painters never paint for a living. A painter who would make a living out of his paintings would not be considered as a painter. He would be a mere vulgar craftsman and be despised. The painter paints in order to become himself. Painting is a means of self-cultivation. So we can even say that the act of painting is more important than the paintings themselves, and some artists even pushed it to that extreme. I know one case of a late Qing artist who used the practice of destroying his paintings. When he had done one painting he would destroy it immediately to underline the fact that the important thing was not the painting, but the act of painting. The painting itself is just a kind of graph, the record of something which happened, like when you have an earthquake and the seismograph gives some graphic outline of what happened. John Merson: What Pierre Ryckmans has said of Chinese painting is equally true for music, as Professor Colin Mackerras from Griffith University explains in relation to the Chinese zither, an instrument most commonly used by the scholars. Colin Mackerras: The music of the Chinese zither is intended to be evocative. It is not absolute, in the sense say of a symphony where the listener works out what it means to him. The composer may not say specifically what it does represent as in the case of the work like the Jupiter Symphony of Mozart. Now, in the case of the Chinese zither, it was evocative and you did say on every occasion what it was supposed to represent. The other thing about the zither is that it was very important to have the right hearer. There is a very famous story which survives of this. A noted ancient player of this instrument called Bo Ya was playing the zither one day and he thought of high mountains as he played. He had a very close friend who was listening to him, and who always listened to him as he played, and his friend replied 'what a magnificent melody that is, it evokes the feeling of high mountains'. In other words, he didn't have to be told what idea came over from the player, through the music to the listener, because both were sensitive people and both understood the situation. Now later on, so the story goes, Bo Ya imagined a flowing stream as he played, and his friend immediately picked this

up and commented how broad and flowing it was, just like flowing waters. The idea is that the hearer is just as important as the player, the hearer can understand what it is that is being said to him through the music. The story goes that when, some time afterwards, the friend died, the player broke his zither and tore up the strings and never played again, because he deemed the world not worthy to be played to. Pierre Ryckmans: These, the highest flowers of Chinese culture were achieved at high cost for the mass of the people. They were indulged in, enjoyed and practised by a very small minority. If you look at these things from an inside point of view, from inside that minority, then we come very close to the idea of the future world as defined by Marx; when Marx was speaking of the situation of arts in the future communist utopia, he says that there would be no artists-in the future world everyone would be an artist. Similarly in the limited sphere of that gentry there was no idea of being an artist, or a professional expert, employed in any kind of narrow, specialised task. One was a man, full stop. To be a complete, full, rounded man, you'd be a painter, a statesman, administrator, a philosopher, a poet, all those endeavours had to be combined. Well, of course, the trouble in ancient China was that this ideal of total, complete, unspecialised humanity could only be realised by a tiny handful of people, those who had had access, through their education and successful examination, to the ruling posts, to the posts of command of the country. This kind of humanistic ideal was closely tied to a certain social and economic reality which was the reality of an agrarian state, and a state ruled by a small scholarly minority. John Merson: Pierre Ryckmans from the Australian National University in Canberra. Finally, another ancient composition for the Chinese zither, Wild geese descent on level sands. Robyn Williams: You've been listening to the first in our 3-part series on science and civilisation in China, made over thirty years ago by John Merson who is now at the University of New South Wales. Next week, in part 2, we look at some specific sciences, like medicine, and we hear more from Simon Winchester, whose bestseller, Bomb, Book and Compass, tells the story of Joseph Needham, and the transformation of China in recent years. Underlying all this is the mystery of why everything seemed to stop, five hundred years ago. Why did the industrial revolution take off in Europe and not in the east? That's next week. I'm Robyn Williams.

10 January 2009

The astonishing Dr Joseph Needham - Part 2 of 3

Transcript
Robyn Williams: The Science Show. Hello I'm Robyn Williams. You're on ABC Radio National. And this is part 2 of Science and Civilisation in China, one of the most remarkable stories in history, and a portrait of one of the most remarkable men. You see, before the 1950s, hardly anyone knew, as we take for granted today, that the Chinese had invited virtualy everything, hundreds and hundreds of years before the west. Rudders, stirrups, printing, bridges, grafting parts of trees to each other, toilet

paper; different sizes of paper for men's bottoms, and women's bottoms, and so on and on. But then Jospeh Needham went to China in the 1940s during the war, and sped around the countryside, everywhere, finding it all out, and revealing the secret, in his colossal books, which began coming out in the 1950s. In a few minutes we'll hear from Needham himself, recorded thirty years ago. But before we do that, here's Simon Winchester, whose best seller in 2008, Bomb, Book and Compass, reaffirms Needham's contribution. How come, such a very unlikely man? Robyn Williams: OK, so how did a chap who went in for Morris dancing, promiscuity, Jesus and biochemistry, he was a biochemist at Keys College, not the kind of background you'd expect for this formidable exercise in history and Chinese, neither of which he was trained in. Simon Winchester: Indeed! Well you hit the nail on the head when you asked about promiscuity, because that's really what led him to it. I prefer to use womanizing because I think he wasn't so much licentious and libidinous, it's just endlessly curious about the human condition and if a lot of those humans were women, so much the better! But in 1937, when he was laboring away with his wife in biochemistry, he was an embryologist, his wife was a specialist in the mechanics of muscles, what happens when muscles contract, suddenly because of the turmoil in China with the Japanese invasion in 1937, there arrived in Cambridge this young, fiercely clever, diminutive and very pretty, Chinese girl called Lu Gwei-Djen to study for her PhD under his wife, Dorothy Needham. Joseph fell for her. And she responded. This man was tall and loud and boisterous and he looked like Harry Potter on steroids. He was a very attractive man in his comparative youth, he was then 37. They began an affair and when it was consummated, a day which you can follow through every twist and turn of the detail, it was 17th February 1938, after the consummation, she taught him his first ever character in Chinese. And he wrote later he said it was seeing that character, it was the character for cigarette, when you've done the deed, I suppose it's the obvious thing to write, he said it was as though a door had opened onto an utterly alien universe, and I stepped through it and I was never the same again. I entered the glittering crystalline world of Chinese idiographic writing, and I fell hopelessly in love with it, and the place from which it came. Robyn Williams: You mentioned the Japanese in China. We now see China as a collusus. But in fact, just a few decades ago, in the '30s, it was completely disastrous wasn't it. You cannot overstate the horror and the misery that was existing then. Simon Winchester: You're absolutely right and this had really begun earlier than that. It's a long story because technically it began in 1792; after the loss of the American colonies, George III had decided to send a mission to China, under a man called Lord McCartney. McCartney arrived at this haughty magnificence of the Chinese court. Who are you? said the emperor, there was this vulgar man with lots of hair and a big nose and smelled of an old wet dog. Well you've come to see me? Well go and stand alongside the Burmese and you can wish me a happy birthday. And of course we gave a few presents to the emperor, the chairman, and he didn't want any of them. When we gave him Wedgewood china, he said this was impertinent, we've been making much better china than this for thousands of years. And when they gave him a beautiful carriage from London, he noticed instantly, that the two coachmen, if riding on it, would have their heads higher than his, the emperor. He couldn't possibly accept that. So he said

very grandly, we have no use for your country's manufactures. Be gone! And so the McCartney expedition was sent back with their tale between their legs, And this really peaked the anger of the British. Lord Palmerston in the early part of the nineteenth century, which is why essentially we went to war over opium in 1839, which resulted in the succession of Hong Kong because we had much better weaponry than the Chinese. So the British took Hong Kong and the other treaty ports, then the French, we all have Hainan Island in the south, the Germans took Shandong in the east then the Japanese took Manchuria, and then the Japanese said to heck with this, we're going to take all of east Asia, and blend into this huge co-prosperity sphere, as they called it in Tokyo, and launched a major attack on a China, which was already internally weakened, because the empire had fallen in 1911. Warlordism was rampant, corruption was all over the place, Mao, the communists and Chiang Kai-shek the nationalistists were battling, so as you quite rightly it was a complete and total shambles. Robyn Williams: And he arrived there as a kind of diplomat during the war and just slightly after, and one thing I don't quite understand, he began to behave like Indiana Jones. You know, someone who'd been Morris dancing, quaffing port at Keys college and who was zooming all over China, up to his neck in mud sometimes in torrents, surrounded by stuff that many young men couldn't survive. How did he manage to do this?! Simon Winchester: He just had irrepressible enthusiasm, endless curiosity and this imbued with a sense of wonder. He loved it! He travelled thirty thousand or forty thousand miles! He once joked with Mao that he had travelled far longer than the long march. I think Mao was a bit put out about that. But he didn't walk! He travelled in a broken down old Chevrolet ambulance. He went right up from Chongquin, where he was based because that was the capital at the time, in Sichuan province. He went up to the caves of Dunhuang which was a seven-month journey through the Gobi desert. He went to Fujo in the east, that's near Shanghai and Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese. He went down to the Burmese border, and then he went up to Sian and Beijing and the north once the Japanese had been kicked out in 1945. And on all of these adventures, you're absolutely right, there were car crashes and he was flooded and disasters with the engines. I'll never buy a Chevrolet after reading this! And he met the most extraordinary people and as well as performing his official British government duties, which was to help keep alive the refugee universities that had assembled in the west of China to get away from the depredations of the Japanese, he collected all this information about what China had achieved first. And people, when he came back to Keys College in 1948, the people he had met so liked him, that they sent unimaginable quantities of material to him, including, two copies of the longest encyclopedia ever written, which one of the emperors commissioned during the middle Qing, during the 1820s I think it was, in which the edict from the emperor to his scribes was simply, write down everything that is known. Robyn Williams: And they did! The big question which we'll foreshadow, and which you don't quite answer in the book, is, given all that brilliance, over those hundreds of years when China produced virtually everything, a few hundred years ago something stopped, and Europe invented the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution and the scientific revolution. Why didn't the Chinese? At what point did Needham know that was the big question?

Simon Winchester: Which is eponymously, the Needham question, and it underpins the writing of the book. Well before he left actually, he had already discussed these matters with Gwei-Djen, who by this time, 1943, was teaching at Columbia University in New York. And there's an indication I found on a piece of paper, a letter of invitation he had from the BBC, it says, Chinese science, why not develop? So he was thinking, why did Chinese science never develop beyond about the sixteenth century? Why, he was able to establish, that there was, and he was able to look at early Chinese mathematical treatises for instance, that there had clearly been a Chinese Euclid. And there had already been a Chinese Archimedes. But there was never to be a Chinese Galileo. There was never to be a Chinese Einstein. Why he kept wondering! What stopped China and why did the engine of creativity pass to the west? Why is all modern science a creation of the west, and not of this county that had this vast tradition? He never really answered it in volume 7 part 2 which he wrote at 94 years old in 1994, he had a stab at it. He said really, it's easier to answer why there was so much creativity in the west. Rather than why there was so much less creativity in the east. He said, well, it was self evident that Europe at the time was hundreds of competing fiefdoms, all at war with each other, and that kind of business spurs technological innovation. If the Dutch are at war with the Spaniards and the sword makers of Toledo make a particularly fine blade then it behooves the sword makers of Amsterdam to make an even better one. And similarly mercantile competitions spurs technological innovation as well. There was no intramural competition in a China that under the late Ming was essentially one monolithic country. There was that. But at the same time he realized that the system of governance in China was such that it was the ambition of even the cleverest of Chinese (men) not to become a doctor, or an engineer, or a ceramicist or anything like that, but to become a bureaucrat. So that he could run China with a Mandarin's cap along the same lines that it had always been run. And so that kind of an ambition meant that there was a sort of ossification a stability within China that produced no, as you say, no industrial revolution, no capitalism; it just stayed utterly stable while Europe suddenly with all this fierce competition became a great hotbed of innovation. Robyn Williams: Simon Winchester. His biography of Joseph Needham is called Bomb, Book and Compass, and it came out in 2008. And so to John Merson's 1979 series which we've adapted for The Science Show. How revealing is it to look back now, at what we once thought of as the emerging Chinese tiger. And how strange perhaps to hear these thoughts in 2009, as we watch that country take on the future in a way that will affect all of us. China has become, you see, the fulcrum on which all nations will balance, or crash. Here's John Merson, not long returned from ten years in London back then, but be assured, he comes from Queensland. John Merson: Last week, several of the speakers referred to the ideas of Yin Yang and the five elements as being central to the traditional Chinese view of nature and the cosmos. So to begin the program, I asked Dr Joseph Needham to explain the origins of the idea. Dr Needham you'll recall is the author and the editor of the series, Science and Civilisation in China. Joseph Needham: There was a kind of philosophia perennis, a perennial natural philosophy in China from early times onwards, developing and never superseded, really, until the time of the coming of modern science, which you could say began with the Jesuits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then of course going on to modern times. But so far as traditional Chinese science, technology and medicine were

concerned, there was always one essential natural philosophy which dominated in various ways the different fields. If you ask what that was, of course it was based on the conceptions of Yin and Yang and the five elements, and also many ideas connected with the 'qi', of which the nearest approach to a translation you can make is a pneuma, something like vapour or spirit. The basic conception of Yin and Yang was that the world, the universe in fact, consisted of two fundamental forces which we might describe as positive and negative, and in a way they were not so far wrong because positive and negative electricity today is one of the fundamental things about physics and about our knowledge of the world and the universe. It started out by the idea of the sunny side and the shady side of hills. The Yin was the shady side, the Yang was the sunny side, and later they extended out very widely, Yang meaning everything that was bright, sunny, hot, male and all that kind of thing, while Yin was the dark, moist, female side of the world. I don't think this ever failed to play a part in natural philosophy in China, right through the ages and down to the time when modern science came, and atomic theories which changed everything. John Merson: Did this have any parallels in other cultures at the time? Joseph Needham: I don't think so. Perhaps we ought to have said at the beginning that the Chinese thought-world didn't really go in for metaphysics in any sense that one can put to it in the West, like among the Greeks, Aristotle, or later philosophies in Europe. The Chinese were not at all metaphysically minded, but they definitely had this natural philosophy which ran through everything. I mentioned a minute ago the five elements, and there again is something rather interesting because they were not the same as the four elements of the Greeks; instead of the famous earth, fire, air and water, they had jin, mu, shui, huo and tu, metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. I would say that one of the greatest characteristics of the typical Chinese view of the world from the proto-scientific point of view was their extreme disinclination to separate spirit and matter. That runs through everything in China, and is absolutely contrary to the sharp separation between spirit and matter which you get in Descartes for instance, the Cartesian separation of the two which was no doubt extremely important in the origins of modern science; but it was very antipathetic to Chinese ideas. John Merson: For another perspective on this distinction between Chinese and Greek natural philosophy here is Professor Nathan Sivin an Historian of Chinese Philosophy and Science, from the University of Philadelphia. Nathan Sivin: In the two societies for which we have a great deal of information about the beginnings of science, the European and the Chinese, we can see that just about every possibility of human thought was at least played with before the people worked out a characteristic form. In both societies we can see attempts to understand how change takes place and how the world keeps more or less equal to itself through change in two different ways. One is by thinking of all the change as a change in state of something that is always there. So for instance with Anaximenes you can think of a table as air that is condensed to the point that it is hard and you can hear it when you knock on it, and you can think of the table when it is burnt as simply changing into a more rarified kind of air. So you are not faced with the potent metaphysical questioncertainly potent for the Greeks-of how you go from something that isn't wood to something that is wood. Another way of thinking about change and the constancy that underlies it is thinking in terms of life cycles. You find that thinking to some extent

among the Greeks, you find it much more in China, and it tended to become predominant there. People were aware that there is the cycle of birth and growth and maturity and decay and death, that every living thing follows. They believed, as Europeans did until very recently, that this was not only true for the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but for the mineral kingdoms as well. So whether you think of the cycle of a mayfly that lasts a few hours, or of the cycle of a cinnabar that takes four thousand years to mature in the bowels of the earth, there is a common shape that defines the constancy that underlies all the change that seems to be going on at random around us which really isn't random at all. In other words, the Chinese tended to be aware of processes and the way processes fit together and the way smaller processes were related to larger processes. The sorts of philosophic concepts that they used to talk about them were ways of looking at the parts of processes, so that Yin and Yang for instance were words that could be used to break down a whole process into its two parts, the fast part and the slow part, or the part that brings about change and the part that accepts change and acts as the body on which change takes place, the light part and the heavy part and so on. They were ways, in other words, of analysing a process into its parts, not to show how those parts were opposed to each other, but showing how they worked together in the order of time, how they were complementary. John Merson: Yin and Yang of course expand into the social definitions as well, in terms of food, in terms of male and female, in terms of a vast range of categories, don't they? Nathan Sivin: When these categories were defined, there was no idea, just as there wasn't in the West until rather recently, that science was one thing, and the rest of human enterprise was another, so it was natural, just as it was for Aristotelians, for an understanding of change in nature to fit with an understanding of change in society and in an understanding of individual growth. The other set of concepts that we can find in all the sciences that grew up in early society was Wuxing which for some time has been translated as 'five elements'. That tradition grew up when the Jesuit missionaries went to China and were trying to find aspects of Chinese culture that they could assimilate to their own so that they could show the Chinese that European culture was better at doing its thing. They were very intent on showing the superiority of European science in the seventeenth century by proving that four elements are better than five-just at the time, of course, when the four elements were dying in Europe. That is, Yin Yang and the five phases were not exactly were not just analytical entities in the modern sense, they were used for analysis, but they were also used synthetically at the same time to show the relationships of parts and how they made up a whole. They weren't static classifications, they were ways of explaining change. They were dynamic. John Merson: Now let's consider the way in which the Chinese physician used the ideas of Yin Yang and the five elements to explain a more specific process in nature-the reason we fall ill, and the action of chemical medications. Here's Professor Ho Peng Yoke from Griffith University in Queensland who is a specialist in Chinese medicine and alchemy. Ho Peng Yoke: Different parts of the human body are associated with these five elements. For example, in medicine, the heart, small intestines and the tongue are associated with fire; the kidneys, bladder and the ears with water; the liver, the gall bladder and the eyes with wood; the lungs, the large intestine and the nose with metal;

the stomach, the spleen and the mouth with earth. Harmony between the two forces of Yin and Yang in every part of the body, according to traditional Chinese medicine, spells good health, while disharmony or a due preponderance of one over the other could cause sickness, and in extreme cases they would cause death. So the task of a traditional Chinese doctor is to try to restore the harmony of the affected area by prescribing medicine, or by some other means such as acupuncture, or by some surgical operation. John Merson: It is interesting that when you look at the development of Chinese medical practices, and Chinese science in general, you see a lack of a theoretical base which modern science has, a methodology, yet it had an empirical base, it was experimental . . Ho Peng Yoke: Yes. Take the case of copper sulphate which the Chinese used as an eye remedy, of course it is useful, we know that copper sulphate can be used as an eye remedy, but the Chinese explanation of how it works is rather comical. If you look at the pharmacopoeia you find that the explanation is as follows: Copper sulphate is green in colour and green belongs to the wood element. Now I come back to the five elements I mentioned earlier on. The liver, as I mentioned, is associated with wood, and wood is green in colour so they say that the green colour was associated with wood and with the liver and the liver with the eye, so the argument goes, therefore copper sulphate is good for the eye, hence it is a good remedy. John Merson: In effect, on purely empirical grounds, it is good for the eye, but the argument is irrational in terms of what we know now about chemistry and physiology and there were other examples like this. I think the case of acupuncture is an interesting example. Here you had a method by which pain could be relieved, the functions of various organs could be affected, but the rationale of how it worked goes no way towards explaining what was really taking place. How did they arrive at the knowledge of the connection, say, between copper sulphate and eyes, when in fact their theories about how it worked were nothing like the truth. Ho Peng Yoke: I think all this knowledge was gained through experience. They just happened to find out that copper sulphate was good for the eyes, then they tried to find an explanation after that. Of course it doesn't follow that anything green is good for the eyes. I think what the Chinese did was not to use the theory to find out new things, but to try to use the theory to explain anything they found. And if it didn't explain what was observed, they'd try to find something else. John Merson: It is interesting that the Chinese physicians were able to arrive at such an effective treatment without recourse to the sort of theoretical models common to modern medicine and science. Acupuncture is a remarkably complex technique of blocking the nervous impulses reaching the brain which was developed in China at a very early stage, without any systematic understanding of brain physiology or anatomy. I asked Dr Joseph Needham to explain how it works in modern physiological terms. Joseph Needham: Acupuncture is a system of implanting very sharp needles into the body in different places according to a very highly systematised array of points on the surfaces of the body, connected by lines or channels where the 'qi' was thought to circulate. It is a very old system, going back to the middle of the first millennium BC,

and it was gradually developed in the course of time. There are many specialised textbooks on it, right down to our own time. The Western world started to sit up and take notice of it I think about twenty years ago, and it was only when it was discovered in China that acupuncture anaesthesia could permit major surgery to be done on people while they were perfectly awake and able to co-operate with the surgeon, that the rest of the world began to sit up and take notice and felt that something should be done about investigating acupuncture. John Merson: It has been suggested by some observers that the effect of acupuncture is psychological. I think you have, in your research, pointed out that this is not true, that there is a physiological process involved. Can you explain what you mean? Joseph Needham: We certainly believe that there is a physiological effect, but on the other hand, I wouldn't say that it hasn't got a psychological component, in fact, I should go so far as to say that every form of therapy, every kind of healing which man has ever used, has psychological implications and components, so I think that is always present, but that there is a physiological basis for acupuncture we are certainly convinced. John Merson: What is the evidence for this? Joseph Needham: Modern physiological laboratories, not only in China but also in the rest of the world, have elucidated the impulses which go up the spinal cord from the needles when they are stuck in at the periphery. You see, they stimulate nerve endings on the surface of the body, at the edges of the body as it were, and the impulses are relayed up the spinal cord. It is quite easy to visualise it if you think of the nervous system as a telephone exchange. It is a vast mass of millions of telephone cables, the neurons reaching up and down from the brain to the edges of the body. If you can imagine a situation where you can block the impulses coming from a pain area, you could have a kind of exchange where they could never get anything but the engaged tone, all lines busy. Block the pain impulses getting through to the cortex then you would be home and dry and that is what, broadly speaking, is the meaning of the gate theory, which is one way of explaining how acupuncture works. John Merson: The Chinese have been using this for centuries: how do they see it? You are talking about it in contemporary scientific terms but how did the Chinese explain the way it worked? Joseph Needham: They didn't explain it in terms of modern scientific theories, of course, because once again it is quite obvious that if one has firmly fixed in one's mind the idea that modern science didn't start until the time of Galileo, it is no use trying to look into Chinese history for scientific theories of modern type, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have any theories. They did have a theory about the action of acupuncture needles, because part of their medical theory was the idea that the Yin and Yang balance in the body was upset, or balance between the different organs or viscera was upset, and there were perturbations in the circulation of the 'qi' around the body. John Merson: Before going on to consider further the reason the Chinese gave for how one contracted illness, let's take another of their medical techniques. Variolation, a precurser to immunisation, was developed in China as early as the tenth century AD and crossed into Europe from Russia and Turkey in the eighteenth century. It is the principle

which Jenner expanded into the modern method of vaccination. What is fascinating about the Chinese approach is that it fulfills the modern requirements of detoxification, again without having an adequate theory of such things as antibodies and pathogens. Here's Dr Lu Gwei-jen a biochemist and historian of Chinese medicine, from the East Asian History of Science Library at the University of Cambridge. Lu Gwei-jen: Since the tenth century physicians knew that they could prevent smallpox spreading, by variolation. Variolation is a term we use for human inoculum, for instance the smallpox virus which came from other patients. The pustule content was taken from the patient, and then the doctor would dissolve the lymph scabs in water to form the jnoculum. He would then carry it in a silver or porcelain tube in his pocket for a few weeks which had the equivalent effect of modern detoxification. The inoculum was then put on a piece of cotton wool which was placed in the nose of the person to be inoculated, and in that way many, many children were saved from having smallpox. Nathan Sivin: The cosmos for people in traditional China was a kind of vast symphony that composed itself. It didn't have a creator and it didn't have a god to run it, but its rhythms were always perfect because every part of it was in tune and playing together. Now the body was a little cosmos of the same kind, the two were always related. The body had rhythms that corresponded to the daily and yearly rhythms of the cosmos. They always had to be constant. When they fell out of constancy then the body got sick. You could, for instance, very easily get sick if there was an unseasonable change in the weather that placed great demands on your ability to adjust, because normally the body rhythms were finely tuned to those of the seasons. You could get sick through an excess of emotion too, because the emotional rhythms were seen as tied to the cycle of the seasons. John Merson: Restraint was expected of people and I suppose that if you were going to have a general philosophical orientation with this emphasis upon harmony, the harmony of family, the harmony of the universe, the harmony of nature and your relationship to nature, then I suppose that anything that would upset the steady and seasonal progression of events would be considered as a form of illness. Nathan Sivin: That sounds more Japanese than it does Chinese because after all the cycle of the seasons has all the possibility of diversity in it. You might say that one of the reasons why Chinese society was able to remain stable for so long was that it allowed for so many possibilities of expression and so many possibilities for action. In a way the hermit living in the woods was being as conventional as the Confucian officials. He was just fitting into a different convention. In the same way what mattered was doing things in their time. It wasn't that you had to hold yourself in, but that you found the proper time to let yourself out, so that in spring according to the Chinese view there was a good deal of appropriateness in exuberant emotion, just as it would be grossly out of place in winter when things were slowing down. Every possibility for emotion, every possibility for physical behaviour, every possibility for functioning within the body had its place in this scheme. What mattered was the rhythms of their coming out. It was the doctor's job to understand where the break was between the economy of the body and the economy of nature, and to find a way of bringing them back together. So that in that sense, you can understand the theory as a way of tying understanding of the body to understanding of all of nature and man's relation to it.

John Merson: Did the doctors have a sense of pathology, a sense of the way in which people contracted specific diseases? Nathan Sivin: It was on the one hand not a germ theory in that it never looked at single causes. On the other hand it wasn't exactly psychosomatic either. We tend to think of the germ as being the cause of tuberculosis, say, at least when tuberculosis was a very widespread disease, because that's the cause we can isolate, that we can look at under a microscope. It is interesting that the psychosomaticists are the people who have taught us most about how limited a view that is, without at the same time saying it is all in your brain. That's because you can find behavioural patterns, not just patterns of thought, but patterns of living and behaving, that tend to be common to people with tuberculosis. They tend to be patterns that discourage regular hours, that discourage regular diet, that make it difficult to lead a comfortable life with enough sleep. On the one hand you can think that some of those symptoms are perhaps due to compulsive personality, which is the way psychosomaticists tend to think about it. You can also think about it in terms of poverty which sets up those conditions for many people in the world who have tuberculosis. Those are causes just as well, I mean after all, until very recently the tuberculosis bacilli were in everybody's body in the world, or nearly everybody's, and the fact remained that some people got the disease and others didn't. So although you would have to think of them as a cause in one sense (that if you didn't have them you wouldn't get tuberculosis) they weren't a cause in the other sense, that is to say that if you did have them you would get tuberculosis. So if we look at their thought in a much more general way than merely scientifically, the Chinese didn't tend to think about reducing the complex causation of every event in the world to a single cause that could be looked at under the microscope and talked about to the exclusion of the others. They wanted to know everything that made something happen. That's dangerous too, in a way, because once you start looking at everything, there's no place to stop, you end up as Whitehead did, looking at the whole state of the universe. John Merson: One feature of Chinese medical practice which we mentioned at the beginning was the use of chemicals in the treatment of disease; copper sulphate, you will recall, was a common eye remedy. Now this tradition of using metals as well as herbal compounds in the composition of drugs is a development which originated in China around the first century BC and didn't reach Europe until around the thirteenth century. But it is not until the time of Paracelsus, the great fifteenth century alchemist and physician, that you first see mercury being prescribed for the treatment of syphilis which was then endemic in Europe. Here's Joseph Needham again, to explain the importance of Chinese alchemy in the development of medicine in the West. Joseph Needham: Recently we have been dealing with one astonishingly deep influence of China on Europe, which nobody would ordinarily suspect, and that is the whole idea of chemical medicine. The point is that the Hellenistic proto-chemists as we call them, the people in first and second century Alexandria, were not really interested in chemical medicine. They were very interested in imitating gold and silver and precious things, or even believing that they had made them from other things, but the idea of a chemical elixir of longevity, or even material immortality, didn't play much part in the Hellenistic thought. On the other hand it is quite central to China from very early times onwards. You can trace it back to Zuo Yan, one of the naturalist philosophers in the fourth century BC, but it's very clear in 133 BC, when Li Shaojun asked the Emperor Wu of the Han to support his researches into elixirs and other means

of obtaining great longevity. From that time it doesn't look back and there is the direct connection with the making of gold from other things, already started at that time. We found to our great interest that this idea of a chemical medicine passes over from China throughout the rest of the Old World, it spread out during the Middle Ages. It reached the Arabs, for example, at the end of the seventh century AD, probably passing across central Asia through those states like Sogdia and Bactria, on the edge of Persia, and then it got to the Byzantines in the eleventh century, and finally to the Latins, our own ancestors, in the thirteenth. There you find Roger Bacon, for example, whom I was tempted to describe as the first European to talk like a Taoist. One of Bacon's books was called De Rate Adate Adexium Senum Tactus, 'How to Retard the Afflictions of Old Age', and there he said that if only we knew more about chemistry, we should be able to increase the length of life of man enormously. Of course he couldn't say 'forever' as the Chinese were prepared to believe, but he did have the examples of Methuselah in the Bible and 969 years wasn't doing too badly, and he thought that we could get there if we knew more about chemistry. John Merson: The role of alchemy in China is intriguing for it has two aspects to it. One was the concern with producing gold from base metals, and from the gold then producing an elixir of immortality, which, by the way, poisoned numerous emperors and scholars throughout the long history of the practice. The second approach was a mystical one, whereby the contemplation of chemical processes put one in touch with the essential principles of change, embodied in the ideas of Yin, Yang, and the five elements mentioned earlier. Firstly, the elixir of immortality. Professor Ho Peng Yoke again. Ho Peng Yoke: The objective of Chinese alchemy was to find an elixir of life which would bring about physical immortality. A person who has taken such an elixir will not go through the process of death and he will live forever in a state where he will have perpetual youth, and he would have powers to enable him to move around the mountains at will, and he will stay in another world, but he could come back to this world if he liked. Now the Chinese did not have the notion of a soul like the Christians or the Muslims in other parts of the world; they thought that death was avoidable medicine. In fact, the elixir was prescribed in the same way as medicine, so there was a close link between medicine and alchemy. The Chinese also believed that one metal could transform into another metal quite readily in the natural state. For example, lead could change into a golden type of colour, into silver, into gold, and for that matter sulphur could also change into gold, but it would take a long long time. However it was possible by some artificial process, in other words by means of alchemy, to hasten the change, so that Chinese alchemists could try to change the base metals into gold, and that was the first objective. After making gold they could change the gold into the elixir of life, which is quite unlike alchemy in other parts of the world. In Europe the making of gold was the primary objective, in China that was only secondary, it was only a means to an end. Nathan Sivin: The alchemists on the whole were interested in various ends that did not have to do with the understanding of what we would identify as chemical change. Some alchemists were interested in making an elixir of immortality that would make people immune from decay, just as gold was immune from decay, and that could also be used as a medicine to cure all illness. Other alchemists were interested in building little laboratory models of the cosmic process so that the great cycles of the cosmos, that took

thousands of years to work out in nature, could be recapitulated in a year in the laboratory so that they could contemplate them. John Merson: Here again, we return to the point that was made earlier by Pierre Ryckmans, with regard to art in China. The object of painting and music in traditional Chinese culture was not to produce some artifact but was primarily the means of getting oneself into harmony with the cosmic process. The same mystical objective was true of the alchemists in their contemplation of chemical change, but it is with the use of elixirs of immortality and longevity that one comes across something of a paradox. For if the Taoists, who were the philosophers most concerned with the development of alchemy, were essentially concerned with putting themselves in accord with nature and natural processes, why were they so concerned with producing elixirs of immortality? Surely the principle of wuwei. of going along with nature, which Joseph Needham has mentioned, would have led them to accept the inevitablity of death with some equanimity. Why should they of all people have been concerned with the pursuit of physical immortality which seems to go against the very acceptance of nature and natural change? I put this question to Joseph Needham. Joseph Needham: Since the immortality which the Taoists wanted was distinctly under the aegis of their religion, the question might arise as to how it could have been reconciled with the cultivation of that calmness of mind, and serenity undisturbed by any external circumstances, including death, which were so prominent in philosophical Taoism. But it is only a seeming paradox. Inheriting, perhaps, a traditional Confucian prejudice, we probably tend to make altogether too sharp a distinction between Taoist religion and Taoist philosophy. Now longevity was obviously a technique, and material immortality simply a greater one. No successful technique could go against the grain of nature, in order to work it must go along with it. The real question at issue here is whether extending human life indefinitely was going against nature, and the answer is that it was not, because nature's time scales were variable, and in a word if you could find the right medicine, the right drug, the right chemical substance, which nature itself had created, you would be able perhaps to go on for many decades, perhaps many centuries, perhaps forever, on the surface of the earth. John Merson: There are supposed to be some quite horrific stories of the attempts to induce immortality. Some of the emperors and many of the leading nobility ended up poisoned, as a result of trying to gain longevity. Joseph Needham: Yes, that is perfectly true, and not only that: I sometimes think that the strangest paradox of all was the fact that the oldest chemical explosive known to man was discovered by the Taoists, precisely in the course of their efforts to attain longevity or immortality drugs. It was in the middle of the ninth century AD when they stumbled across the formula of saltpetre, potassium nitrate and sulphur. They burnt down their cottages where they were working, and that perhaps was the greatest paradox of all. John Merson: This is, of course, gunpowder. Joseph Needham: Yes.

John Merson: So it is gunpowder that comes out of the pursuit of harmony, but perhaps it is worth noting that gunpowder when it was first used in China around the fifth century AD took the form of fire crackers to frighten off evil spirits. It was some centuries before it was used in warfare. Let us now turn to the third of the three sciences I mentioned at the beginning, astronomy. We have already discussed the importance of astronomy for the calendar and for the emperor's maintaining his 'Mandate of Heaven'. For it was believed that heaven showed its pleasure or displeasure with the emperor or the state of the empire by sending portents. It was the business of the Department of Astronomy to make accurate observations of the heavens and record any events which could be interpreted as a portent. From this requirement of the state grew a sophisticated tradition of observational and predictive astronomy. But as with alchemy, the Chinese didn't seem to be as concerned with explaining the events, so much as with interpreting them in the service of the state and its political cosmology. Here's Dr Christopher Cullen, an Historian of Science, and a specialist in Chinese astronomy. Christopher Cullen: One can make a separation in China between the ideas of the astronomer about the physical layout of the universe, and his ways of talking about the movement of stars, planets and the sun. He held various theories, some of which were extremely interesting and ingenious, about the physical makeup of the planetarium in which he found himself. But the way he predicted what was going to happen when he looked at the planets did not depend on geometrical reasoning from a mechanical model, in the way that the Greek astronomers seem to have done at times; the Ptolemaic Universe could be used as a gigantic analogue computer, designed to predict the motion of celestial bodies. What he did was to study it algebraically and arithmetically, and set up numerical procedures for predicting the celestial motions, and these numerical procedures were largely separate from his physical theories as to how the universe was made up. John Merson: Why didn't the Chinese not, with this very intense systematic observation of the universe, really get it right according to our present understanding? Christopher Cullen: Let's look at what 'getting it right' would have involved. 'Getting it right' I take to mean attaining a physical theory of the universe which enables you by looking at that physical model of the universe and the way it behaves, to predict what you are going to see. For them, 'getting it right' would have involved, of necessity, a theory of the sphericity of the earth. One of the things that has very much surprised me in studying this question is how little trace of any hint of the idea of the earth being spherical occurs in the whole history of Chinese thought on this matter, right up to the time when they are confronted with the idea of the spherical nature of the earth by the Jesuits bringing in modern science. They were always stuck with an earth that was basically flat. Naturally, this was the primitive point from which I suspect that every single theory of the universe must start, because the earth is so obviously is fIat all around us. You only have to look to see that it is so. The legendary accounts of the earth are that of a flat earth covered with a sort of solid lid of heaven. After this we get a theory of the earth in which there may be a slight bulge to it, its shape perhaps a little like an umbrella, and over this there sits, a little way above it, an umbrella-like heaven of the same shape. This bulge, however, is not significant in any versions of these early cosmographical theories of this time. The bulge is absent. The final 'official' theory of the universe, which one finds prevalent from the first century AD onwards has a spherical heaven but it has a flat earth inside it, covering its horizontal diametral plane,

with the result that the universe only looks right if you believe yourself to be right at the centre of this flat earth inside the heavenly sphere. You can tell which observers this model is supposed to work for because the axis around which this heavenly sphere rotates once daily, carrying the sun and the other heavenly bodies with it, happens to be inclined precisely at the latitude of the Chinese capital. This is a sort of giant planetarium, theoretically contrived so that the official Chinese astronomer sitting at the centre of the earth, being of course at the capital of the Middle Kingdom 'Zhongguo' (the Chinese name for China), so that this astronomer in his privileged central position, will be able to imagine a physical model which will predict what he actually sees. So that was as far as they got for 'getting it right', I'm afraid. John Merson: So it would seem that though the Chinese developed empirical methods of predicting the events which occurred in the heavens, the assumption that China was the Middle Kingdom, and the cultural and physical centre of the world, formed an ideological framework, or orthodoxy, into which all observations and theories had to fit. But the same could be said of European astronomers, at least up until the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For why was it that the Chinese astronomers observed the birth of new stars or novas as they are called, while European astronomers failed to notice them, or record their occurrence? Next week, in third program in this series, we'll be looking with more detail at the question of why it was that China the most advanced civilisation in the world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, failed to develop its scientific and technological resources compared to the rapid rise of science and industry in Europe from the fifteenth century onwards. Robyn Williams: John Merson presenting this series. He's at the University of New South Wales. And yes, next week, what everyone calls, The Needham Question: Why did everything take off in Europe but not in China. And why, in the past two decades, has the giant revived. JohnMerson is at the University of New South Wales, Simon Winchester who's back next week wrote the 2008 best seller, Bomb, Book and Compass. I'm Robyn Williams, see you then.

17 January 2009

The astonishing Dr Joseph Needham - Part 3 of 3

Joseph Needham died in 1995. His contributions to the understanding of Chinese history and innovation are now recognised as one of the great achievements of the 20th century. Is the spectacular industrial growth in China in part due to Needham's revelations? The recordings we hear this week of the man himself are unique and broadcast once more with a new appreciation of his work.

Transcript
Robyn Williams: This is The Science Show on ABC Radio National. Hello from me, Robyn Williams, and today the final in our series, Science and Civilisation in China, a kind of Doctor Who time travel, with Simon Winchester talking in 2009, and his hero,

Joseph Needham recorded way back in the 1970s. And all the while, we're contemplating a China over thousands of years: serene, everlasting, almost unchanging. Then suddenly quiescent. Until just about when John Merson made this series in the 1970s, China shook itself, stood up and became a behemoth once more. But today, the Needham question: Why did China go to sleep for half a millennium, while Europe took off? One answer, first from Simon Winchester, then another from Needham himself. Simon Winchester: There was no intramural competition in a China that under the late Ming was essentially one monolithic country. There was that. But at the same time, the system of governance in China was such that it was the ambition of even the cleverest of Chinese (men) not to become a doctor, or an engineer, or a ceramicist, or anything like that, but to become a bureaucrat so that he could run China with a mandarin's cap, along the same lines that it had always been run. So that kind of an ambition meant that there was an ossification, a stability within China that produced no industrial revolution, no capitalism, it just stayed utterly stable while Europe, suddenly, with all this fierce competition, became a great hotbed of innovation. Robyn Williams: So you could actually say the Japanese, as a comparison, with the same Confucian tradition, where Sir must be obeyed, and the only way you get new ideas is waiting for the professor to die; now that Confucian regard for the top man persisted in China as well and could be seen as the overwhelming force. Simon Winchester: Yes. The phrase that Needham coined for it was the system of 'bureaucratic feudalism', where there was this rigid authority and a very rigid bureaucracy which aimed for eternal stability. But of course after the Meiji restoration in 1857, the Japanese lost that and went away and then Japanese innovation started bubbling up. But, and I think it's an important 'but', looking at what's happened in the last very few years, it's clear that this stability, this ossification has ended, and Chinese inventiveness is roaring back with a vengeance. And that was when Deng Xiaoping took the brakes off, essentially, in 1981, by saying to get rich is glorious. Lenin and Marx and Engels would be rolling in their graves when he said, no, no, forget the two each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities, let's just keep in a command system of notional communism in Beijing, but let the people make as much money as they want. The result is that the Chinese universities are now brimming with brains and ambition and money, and the number of inventions, let's say looking at the number of patents that are being filed by the Chinese now: 2007 -- 23% up on 2006. China is now the fifth biggest applicant nation for patents in the world and is presumably soon going to be number one; they're back with a vengeance. So if between let's say 1650 and say 1985, that's 335 years, they didn't do very much; well, so what, in a way. In the vast scheme of Chinese history, 5,000 years, that's less than 8%. Robyn Williams: A bit of a pause. Simon Winchester: Just a hiccup, just a bit of a pause, you're absolutely right. So the Needham question in that case is almost slightly moot. It'll clearly be the matter of another tedious PhD thesis, many all around the world, but I think it's no longer as

important, because the Chinese didn't fall off the edge of the world for ever. They just had a little rest. Robyn Williams: Let me ask you a final question about China itself. Given its monumental achievement, one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century, there's no question its reputation is enhanced, the book makes this clear above all. What difference would it have made to China's situation now which is preeminent, which is so successful which is going at a momentum which is almost inconceivable, would they still be like that, can you guess, had Needham not given them this boost of selfconfidence, fifty year ago? Simon Winchester: I think that's a wonderful question. Who can forget the opening ceremony of the Olympic games, with all the tableaux of how proud we are of the things we have made. A friend of mine in Beijing, a Chinese scientist, said, you do realise, don't you, that that ceremony could not have been put together had your Joseph Needham not written the book which told us how great we were. The Chinese know him, every educated Chinese knows, he's called in China Li Yuese. If you as anyone in Beijing, or Chunqing, or Kunming or wherever, have you ever heard of Li Yuese, they'd say of course. I had a Chinese delivery man in Washington DC the other day bringing me food from Mr Chen's Organic Chinese Restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, and I said I'm writing a book about Joseph Needham and he looked completely blank, and I said Li Yuese and he said Li Yuese, the most wonderful English man ever to have lived in China. He gave us the confidence to know exactly who we are. I saw a sign outside the Chinese Space Centre in a town called Jiu Quan in Qansu province, which said in English at the bottom of this list of achievements in space: 'Without haste, without fear, we will conquer the world'. These people have an enormous sense of self-confidence now they don't mean militarily they will conquer the world they mean a cultural conquest, to roll back the thought that McDonald's and Burger King and the American corporate Hollywood culture is the dominant force that should exist in the world. No! It should be Confucianism, it should be the mannered ways of the Chinese, and I think they believe it. I think it would be a good thing to have some counter-balance. Not a military counter-balance but a counter-balance to American hegemonism. And I think Needham would be delighted. They are delighted that Needham existed. He's a great hero in China. Robyn Williams: But would he go back to Chongqing, and be pleased when he looks around and sees this amazing contrast, this mess this noise, this vast population twice the size of the population of Australia? Simon Winchester: I think he was wise enough to realize that the vulgarity, the pollution, and the excessive consumerism, would eventually be checked. As it will be. I know the Chinese leadership certainly all of a sudden have taken pollution, environmental problems very seriously indeed. And having the command economy they can do anything they like; as they showed during the Beijing Olympics. We all thought it would be polluted, those silly American athletes came on with their facemasks, there was no need it was like Bondi beach on a December afternoon. So they can do with China what they wish and they are going to turn it, I have no doubt, into a place where consumerism becomes more reasonable, pollution is reduced, I think Needham would be proud.

Robyn Williams: Simon Winchester, whose bestseller, Bomb Book and Compass, Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China, was published last year. And so to the so-called Needham question. Some say, unlike Simon Winchester, that it was more than just a nap, a time off, that took China away from the industrial revolution. Here's John Merson in 1979. John Merson: In the program last week, we discussed Chinese natural philosophy and cosmology and their role in the development of medicine, alchemy and astronomy. The point was made by several speakers that while Europeans were still living in the Dark Ages, the Chinese had developed a sophisticated tradition of science and technology. In fact, it could be said that up until the thirteenth century, China was the most advanced scientific and technological civilisation in the world, a civilisation whose artifacts and inventions had revolutionary effects when they reached Europe. And yet from the fifteenth century, Europe began to outstrip China, so much so that by the nineteenth century, China seemed in comparison to the West to be poverty-stricken, backward, and even decadent. Why China's economy and culture stagnated in comparison to that of Europe is the issue we will concentrate on today, but before embarking on that specific problem, let's consider some of the technologies which came from China and had such a profound effect in Europe. We can't deal with all of them by any means for the list is extremely long, ranging from spaghetti and the wheelbarrow through to the magnetic compass and chemical medicine. I therefore asked Dr Joseph Needham to discuss some of those technologies which were important for Europe's economic growth and scientific development. Joseph Needham: It certainly was a great surprise to me to find that for six hundred years before the first invention of more or less accurate mechanical clocks in Europe, the Chinese had a tradition of hydro-mechanical clockwork which embodied an escapement. The escapement you know has been called the soul of the mechanical clock. It is a mechanical device which divides time into lots of very small equal intervals. It's the ticking that we hear if we put the wristwatch to our ear, and this started not in the fourteenth century in Dante's time like it did in Europe, but in Yi Xing's time in the beginning of the eighth century in China, possibly a lot earlier, but there can be no doubt at all that Yi Xing's clock which was experimented on and set up in the College of All Sages in the capital (the Tang capital of Chang'an which is now called Xi'an in the west of China) in the early eighth century. After that, many of these clocks were built, generally in palaces and public buildings and provincial governors' residences and so on. John Merson: Was this use of the clock significant in terms of scientific observation? One thinks of the importance of time and accurate observation of time in the development of Western science for instance. Joseph Needham: It is just as important as temperature and until you could measure those things modern science couldn't begin. The Chinese certainly used time measurements, for example, timing eclipses from onset to determination, and that sort of use they certainly made of it. John Merson: There are, of course, other examples of technology which travelled from China through the Arabs and had a phenomenal effect in Europe, things such as gunpowder, the stirrup and various simple technologies which in Europe had enormous

cultural and economic consequences, but in China their impact seems to have been much less. Joseph Needham: Yes, that is perfectly true. That has been shown in instance after instance. The ones you mentioned are very good examples. The beginnings of the stirrup for boots, for riders, for knights on horseback, are first found round about 300 AD in China, and then later on the stirrup surprised the Byzantines when they were fighting against the Avars and similar central Asian tribes round about the eighth or ninth century. Then the same is quite true of gunpowder, because that, as we've mentioned before, was a ninth century invention in China, the first chemical explosive known to man. It was used for warfare from almost exactly 919 AD when it was first used as the slow match in the flamethrower in China, and then round about 1000 AD you get bombs and explosive shells, not fired from guns, but lobbed over by trebuchets or catapults; then you get the fire rocket, and you get the firearms, so then everything developed there, and we believe that the barrel gun also did. In Europe it was first found just about 1320 AD, and it had enormous effects. It is a most extraordinary thing to reflect that the whole system of feudalism in medieval Europe depended to a considerable extent upon the knight in armour, for whom stirrups were absolutely indispensable in his use of the lance, and it is therefore extraordinary to reflect that just as Chinese invention helped very greatly to set up feudalism in Europe after the decline of the Roman Empire, so in the same way another Chinese invention came to Europe and helped to break it down. Everyone knows that the coming of gunpowder to Europe was one of the things that heralded the end of the Middle Ages. It always amuses me to recall that only a hundred years later, in 1440, the artillery train of the King of France made a tour of the castles held by the English in various parts of France, and battered them down at the rate of one a month, which would have been utterly inconceivable only forty years earlier. It couldn't have been done. So there, in a way, you had enormous social changes in Europe, brought about by inventions from the other end of the Old World. But it is true to say that in China there was relatively little change. The bureaucratic feudalism, the reign of the Emperor of all under heaven, Tianxia, the Emperor's rule implemented by his enormous civil service, remained at the end of all that time much as it had been before. John Merson: Another great invention of course which had enormous repercussions later in Europe was paper. Joseph Needham: I think you are perfectly right. Paper was another of these inventions which didn't affect China so much but had revolutionary implications in Europe. Paper goes back rather further than people have usually thought. It is generally assumed to have been discovered in the beginning of the second century AD, but actually it goes back a good bit more to about the second century BC according to more recent discoveries. In the desert in north-west China bits of paper have been preserved. No doubt it increased the efficiency and function of the civil service and of the Chinese bureaucracy, as also did printing when it came into being in the late Tang, perhaps in the ninth century AD. But there again, it meant really, more than anything else, that the social range of the young men who applied for the imperial examinations, who sat them and got into the civil service and so on was rather increased. There was a larger spread of intake into the civil service, but it did not fundamentally upset the whole civilistion while in Europe, obviously, paper and then, later, printing were earthshaking in their

consequences. I think it is just a measure of the stability of the Chinese feudal bureaucratic society as opposed to the constant instability of Europe. John Merson: This stability of the Chinese bureaucratic society was in many ways a double-edged sword. On the one hand it allowed for consistent government patronage of the sciences which in turn led to many of the discoveries and inventions discussed by Joseph Needham. On the other hand, this stability generated by the Confucian scholarbureaucrats' control of government and its administration led to the development of a rigid orthodoxy built around an examination system which controlled the entrance to all positions of power and influence, so that although ingenious inventions were made and heterodox ideas were generated, they had little effect on the culture when compared, say, to the impact of Greek learning in Europe during the Renaissance. For in China, as Dr Lowe pointed out in the first of these programs, there was no separation of church and state, of secular and spiritual authority. Both were embodied in the emperor and his imperial bureaucracy. This may well have contributed to the stasis reached by China around the sixteenth century, but it is only part of the answer for, even under this system, China had, by the twelfth century, reached levels of economic development not reached in Europe until the very dawn of the industrial revolution. So let's turn to a consideration of some of the economic factors involved in this issue. This is Dr Mark Elvin, an historian from St Antony's College at the University of Oxford. Mark Elvin: There is no doubt in any reasonable person's mind that medieval China, around the year 1100 shall we say, was the world's premier civilisation in terms of economic technology, and probably also in terms of science. It was an age of immensely productive agriculture, it was an age when the water transport staggered Marco Polo, native of the greatest seaport in the Mediterranean. It was a time when the paper money inflation, a dubious sign of modernity perhaps, was already all too familiar to Chinese peasants, because the cash economy had permeated through to the lowest levels of society. It was an age of great and splendid cities, probably five of which came close to or even surpassed the million mark. It was an age in which Chinese fleets were in many ways the most advanced in the world with their iron nails, their compasses, their stern posts or axial rudders, their bulkheads and many other refined features. It was an age when China alone in the world had printing and it was an age in which China advanced to the very threshold of mechanised power-driven industry. I can still remember my astonishment on coming across, in one of the volumes of Joseph Needham, the rough drawing from an encyclopedia of 1313, of a big spinning wheel, driven by water power, which was purported to be able to turn many spindles, and, do what we had thought that Arkwright in the eighteenth century had effectively been almost the first to do in the West. I spent some time later reconstructing this machine and, to my great delight, sticking to the text and consulting with a Dundee firm of engineers, I produced a reconstruction which, they said, humming and hawing a bit, would actually work. So China was, as of the early fourteenth century, not very far away in some critical respects from the England of the very early industrial revolution. And yet this most advanced society of the Middle Ages was in some ways the sick man of the world by the middle of the nineteenth century. That is a paradox which I think demands explanation. John Merson: What do you see as the factors for its declining rather than progressing? Mark Elvin: There are many. The first very obvious point that an economic historian

would want to make, regarding technology rather than science (which is a more refined and more evasive question), is that the age of the great medieval revolution was an age of demographic expansion into South China. There was a Chinese frontier and it had many of the dynamic effects that the American frontier had for America. It was an area of natural resources that new techniques could quite easily tap and make productive. The river valleys of South China with their terraced agriculture produced a large surplus of food for the great cities, a surplus which fed back into trade which stimulated manufactures and underlay all sorts of leisure activities, and if you look at the graph showing the distribution of population of north and south China, you see, in this period, an enormous shift: perhaps three quarters of the population in China around the year 1 AD were living in the north. By the time you get to the end of the medieval revolution, around 1300, the proportions have been reversed and three quarters are living in the south. Now this enormous movement south, this tapping of the resource frontier, fed a perpetual dynamism into the Chinese economy, and it was around the time that this ran out that stagnation began to set in. Of course, stagnation also began to set in with the Mongol invasion, and yet under the Mongols there were technological encyclopedias published and there were inventions made. So it can't be wholly attributed to the effects of the Mongol occupation. Let us shift our focus now from the medieval period where there was this enormous expansion, this enormous productivity, this fertile inventiveness, to the later period and focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where you can see something of a paradox. We have one of the world's great mercantile peoples with the keenest noses for profit, the most indefatigable application to hard work, the nicest judgment of what an economy of effort will bring, and we see very substantial mercantile fortunes being made. Tens and hundreds of thousands of ounces of silver were common for cotton merchants in Shanghai; the great silk merchants owned millions of ounces of silver as their working capital, easily sufficient to finance the rather simple early industrial inventions that we associate with the beginning of industrial takeoff. If you look in the pages of the memoir concerning the Chinese put out by the Jesuits in France on the basis of their Beijing missions in the eighteenth century, you get this extraordinary sensation of an immensely practical people. It is indeed the Europeans who are the fantasists. If you look at Chinese technical encyclopedias, they are stripped-down, bare, functional. You compare them with the theatres of machines and instruments found in Europe and you find the Europeans are the fantasists-all these perpetual motion machines, Archimedean screws that lift water that turns the water wheel, that turns the Archimedean screw that lifts the falling water up again, and many other similar delightful fantasies. Again the prodigious way in which resources-stone, metal and wood-are used in these drawings contrasts with the almost bicycle-like spareness of the Chinese drawings. I might say it was the Europeans who had the saving fantasy. The Chinese were perhaps too practical, too little able to look beyond the immediate value of an invention. But going a little further, one may indicate two or three points in which China is different from Europe. I am going to leave aside here for the moment the question of the role of science in the early industrial revolution because it is after all very controversial. The first point is the one you began with, the relationship of the man with money to the purchasing of the means of production, productive resources. In China the wise merchant, the wise entrepreneur didn't own machinery. He was, as it were, a kind of landlord with many tenants, or perhaps he was more like a man with a stable of horses. He had a large number of small artisans to whom he may have advanced money for working capital, he may have gone round inspecting their products,

giving them advances and so forth, but he didn't own spinning wheels, he didn't normally own looms. It would have been very foolish of him to do so, it would have tied up liquid capital in one particular form of operation, and in the swiftly changing Chinese mercantile world, adaptability was the key to success. If you had your money in a loom, you couldn't the next day have it, for example, in a consignment of tea to take advantage of a tea shortage somewhere. So there was this absolute separation, in all but a tiny handful of industries, this absolute separation between the selling of the product and its financing, and the management of its production. Therefore the people with money were never interested in techniques directly. That of course is too sweeping, but it is a remarkably solid generalisation taken across the board. Indeed it got worse, because in the seventeenth century the great estates, which had been managed by interested members of the gentry who took a keen interest, like squire farmers, in the techniques of agriculture, tended to break up. Thereafter you find the literate and able person almost exclusively living in the cities, not even taking a civilised and informed interest in running his own estate. The matter actually gets worse, and then of course there was never a similar situation in industry. That is the first point-the separation of literacy, resources and marketing on one side, and actual production on the other. The second point, and this is a subtle one, is that China had in many ways filled up almost all the arable land. Land that could easily be made arable was already by now densely settled and using what was in per acre terms the most productive agriculture in the world. It was a very advanced agriculture but there was no more potential left in it, there was no more hope of pushing up the production function, without putting in modern inputs. Had they had concrete to line the irrigation ditches, had they been able to use chemical fertilisers or pesticides, had they been able to use a small internal combustion engine to drive a small rotary plough in the wet paddy fields, that would have been a completely different game: the yields could have gone up, as indeed they have gone up in modern times. But the traditional agriculture had virtually reached a ceiling and this was very important. Just to give an example, suppose some Chinese genius had invented the spinning jenny, or better still, Arkwright's spinning methods, where would he have got his supplies of cotton from? There was no land in China that could have produced the extra supply of cotton that would have justified a great expansion. It was all being grown with crops, some of them cotton indeed, but very close to the traditional limit. So the sources of supply were choked off and China was already, in the middle of the eighteenth century, importing a lot more cotton from India than the British were importing from the Levant. John Merson: Another factor which may also have contributed to the failure of China to develop its economic and industrial potential was the role of the merchant in Chinese society. In European economic history it has been clear that the decline of feudalism led to the rise of the town as a dynamic new centre of cultural and economic life. There was also a shift of economic power from the feudal landowners to the great merchant families, such as the Medicis in Italy, who were so significant in the patronage of the new arts and learning throughout the Renaissance. Now in China, although merchants were often as wealthy as those in Europe, merchants as such could not gain political power through wealth as they could in Europe. There was also a second factor which militated against wealth accumulating in the hands of single families over generations, which was so important for the rise of capitalist institutions in the West. China had, from very early times, strict laws against primogeniture, the inheritance of wealth and property by an individual. All property and wealth was divided equally among heirs,

although some wealthy families from the Song period onwards did get round this by setting up clan trusts. Nonetheless, the Confucian bureaucracy, which held control over the economic policies of the empire, did not pursue policies which could favour the position of merchants or the growth of mercantile power which might upset the harmony of the state and even threaten their power and prerogatives. Though the merchant was, from the point of view of Confucian orthodoxy, to be looked down upon, merchant families used their wealth to finance talented children through the rigours of the Confucian examination system, and by their entering the bureaucracy, gained for the family political influence as well as social respectability. In many cases the status of merchant families became obscured by some members being officials while others were engaged in trade, so the line cannot be too firmly drawn. Nonetheless, the overall policies of the imperial government were certainly not designed to give advantage to the merchant class, as did the mercantilist policies of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Yet, a Ming emperor in the fourteenth century did send a naval expedition to explore much of south east Asia and India, and it even reached the east coast of Africa, long before the Portuguese traders penetrated the region. But these expeditions were opposed by the imperial bureaucracy and were eventually stopped. China didn't colonise or seriously attempt to exploit the economic resources of the countries around her. Her economic policies were primarily built around agricultural production and the organisation of state monopolies in commodities such as tea, salt and timber. In fact, all commodities which were considered to be the products of mountains and waters were exempt from private ownership and were controlled by the state. So was this perhaps another factor in China's economic stagnation? I put the question to Mark Elvin. Mark Elvin: Certainly China was too big a state and too little of it was on the sea coast for it ever to have pursued a mercantilist policy. It wouldn't have made sense. Had China, like Europe, not been a unity but a congeries, a mass of smaller states, the size of Chinese provinces, I think one would certainly have seen Fujian, had it been the state of Min, as it was a thousand years previously, vigorously pursuing mercantilist policies. One can find mercantilism in the acquisition of bullion for the state's treasuries, and in trade policies, even in the Five Dynasties period during the tenth century when China was broken up into European sized states, so I think that your point about policy is justified, although perhaps for somewhat different reasons China was not interested in pursuing policies designed to benefit its merchants. But the first question that you raised is really the most interesting of all, that of overseas expansion. After all, China, as of 1100, looked a proper candidate for overseas expansion, not little landlocked Europe. The fleets with which the Mongols, having taken over China, attacked Japan and attacked Java, were, of course, Chinese fleets, and as everybody who has studied China knows, it was a Ming navy under the Three Jewel Eunuch Zheng He which in fact reached the east coast of Africa before the Portuguese did. But China after about 1400 turned decisively away from the sea. The great navy of the Song, Mongol and early Ming times was allowed very quickly to degrade and become a shabby shadow of its former self. The reasons for this I think are quite simple but quite surprising. China, in the Ming period, had to maintain a navy just so long as it had to use the sea route up the Chinese coast to transport the grain of central China, the Yangzi region, up to the capital of Beijing to support the officials and the soldiers there. When the Grand Canal was rebuilt and taken over the spurs of the Shandong hills, it was possible to transport all this grain, about four million Chinese piculs (a picul is about a hundred and thirty three pounds) every year, by inland waterway, without the hazards of bad weather, and above all without the hazards of pirates, and so the Ming navy was no longer required, and so

it was run down. It was a very expensive operation, lots of ships were lost every year, it wasn't popular and China turned in upon herself. And there is one other reason which goes along with this. Bitter experience in the late Song had suggested to Chinese rulers that large seaports on the periphery of the empire turned outwards, full of foreigners with their funny ways, were politically dangerous. They could undermine loyalties, they could produce strange and dangerous allies at times of stress. It was much safer for the purposes of political control to close off and control foreign trade under a tributary system where everything was politically safely tucked into place, with no free enterprise. So China turned away from the world at this critical moment, and it lost that vital stimulus to imagination, to enterprise, indeed to new technologies. Think of the role for example that the problem of the determination of longitude played, just to take a small but interesting example in the West. It lost all this and it lost the supplies of raw materials. For example, the cotton industry in Britain could never have made the progress it did if it hadn't been able to tap the Spice Islands, South America, and eventually the southern states that were to be the United States, for its supplies. China had no such opportunity. John Merson: The vital stimulus brought to Europe by the expansion of trade, exploration and colonisation, was not merely confined to commerce. It had an important influence on the intellectual horizons of European culture. For the merchant adventurers who journeyed to Asia and the New World of the Americas brought back not only interesting new commodities for the market places of the great ports of Lisbon, Antwerp and London, they also brought back new information, new knowledge about the world which would overturn the traditional cosmography and challenge the authority of the church and its ancient learning. For China, the voyages of the great eunuch Zheng He, compared to those of the great European explorers, did not have the same effect of displacing the authority of traditional institutions and ideologies. This is perhaps because in China there was not the same politically powerful class of merchant patricians who wanted change and who were prepared to embrace the new ideas about progress heralded by such men as Galileo and Francis Bacon. In China, the lack of any real challenge to the political and intellectual authority of the Confucian bureaucracy meant that new knowledge and skills could not build into new institutions as they did in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. This is particularly true in the case of science. This is Professor Nathan Sivin, an historian of Chinese science. Nathan Sivin: We tend to think of modern science as a set of new ideas, whether scientific or technological; but they were a great deal more than that, they were a set of new institutions as well. Some people have wondered why Galileo spent so much of his time doing what one would do just as well to call public relations. Why, for instance, did he write in Italian rather than in Latin? Why did he seem to be interested in talking to the patricians rather than the educated school men of his time? It seems to me there is a good reason for that. A hundred years earlier there was one outlet for great careers for ambitious and talented people in Europe, and that was in the Church, or else in the small bureaucracies that were growing up around the courts of the independent states. For Galileo the problem was not simply how to understand nature, the problem was also how to give the person who is devoted to the understanding of nature the authority to define how nature works. According to the understanding of the Church in his time, the scientists could gather the data, could show what the direct consequences of the data were, but the job of explaining the significance of data was really up to the philosopher,

and the philosopher was part of the Church. For Galileo the line had to be drawn, and that was the line, of course, that he was caught on. He was taken to task rather severely for trying to take on a personal authority for dictating the texture of reality which the Church felt it reserved the right to determine. For Galileo there had to be new careers, there had to be an understanding that authority belonged to the natural philosopher, who was a new kind of philosopher at that time and so eventually we find the modern scientist (who didn't exist except as a more or less isolated amateur in Galileo's time). Eventually it was possible to make careers for people exploring nature in a new way. In the West at that time, the possibilities of understanding nature were in an unstable social environment, an environment that had been made unstable to a large extent by the Reformation in Europe, to a large extent by an explosion of new knowledge and the possibilities of human effort that had come in the first place from the rediscovery of the classical tradition; in the second place from exploration-what people were learning about other societies. So that when new knowledge and the new age of understanding came in, what people at the centre of society thought about them didn't matter very much. Now let's go back to China. It seems to me that if you want to look for a scientific revolution anywhere, just as would be the case with any other kind of revolution, you don't look at the centre, you look at the margins. In China the only people who were in a position there, in a much more stable society, to respond to the Western scientific ideas were in the centre, so, that when the Jesuits in the early seventeenth century were introducing modern mathematical astronomy, the people who were responding-and they certainly did respond, learning to use the new ideas that the Jesuits introduced very quickly-were those whom anthropologists today call 'culture bearers'. They were people who felt a personal responsibility for maintaining their own tradition, and when they thought about new ideas, they thought about their value in maintaining what was already there. It was very much the situation you would expect if the only people around to respond to Chinese technology had been schoolmen in Europe. By any sensible definition, what happened in the seventeenth century in China was a scientific revolution. The only useful definition we have for a scientific revolution defines it in terms of new ways of asking questions about nature, new theoretical entities that you use to ask them, new tools that you use to ask them with, new procedures with which to use the tools, and all of those developed in China with the introduction of astronomy by the Jesuits. But with all of those new ways of thinking about the cosmos and the bodies moving in the heavens (the Chinese knew that they had new consequences, and they said again and again in their writings on astronomy 'we've learned from the West, not only what happens in the sky, but why it happens') it was only natural for them that the application of that new knowledge was to go back and revive their own astronomical traditions and to begin developing them just as far as they could. So it was, paradoxically, a conservative revolution. John Merson: The entrenched conservatism of the imperial bureaucracy and its control over intellectual life in China provided a check on heterodox ideas and reinforced the principles of government laid down by tradition. In this, China was acting like most other civilisations outside Europe. So to attribute the stability of Chinese empires purely to the conservatism of its ruling class would be too simplistic. The European Church and aristocracy like any other ruling class were just as conservative. Bearing that in mind, let us now return to the economic issue of why China didn't industrialise when it certainly had the technological capacities to do so well before Europe. Here's Professor

Dwight Perkins, Chairman of the School of Economics at Harvard University, who has tried to come to terms with this complex issue. Dwight Perkins: We have to divide the industrial revolution into two stages. The first stage in Europe involved improvements in textile technology, iron and steel, and finally the ability to produce cheap steel and the steam engine; much less dependent on science. Some people refer to the inventions as being the products of tinkers. China made a very large number of those innovations-and in fact many of them were made long before they were made in Europe-and yet they didn't lead to any kind of industrial revolution in China. Some of the explanation is economic. The fact was that China had a huge labour force, was probably much poorer than Europe at that time, probably had a per capita income a third that of Europe. This surplus of labour meant that the incentive to have labour-saving techniques was much less. But there were two other factors as well. The 'demand side' is often argued as being crucial. There just wasn't the same level of demand for steel that there was in Europe by the nineteenth century, so that when they developed some innovations in the Song period, for example, when the government demand went down, the production of steel atrophied and actually declined rather than continued. In textile technology I think the labour side is more important. The steam engine is a puzzle although the need for the railroad in areas where you had good water transport maybe not so crucial. John Merson: To what, then, would you attribute the'failure of science in China, particularly with regard to its application in terms of technology? Dwight Perkins: Well, I think it is partly an intellectual failing: for all the sophistication of Chinese culture, the intellectuals did not develop the crucial breakthroughs. Why they didn't may have something to do with the Chinese value system; the best people were busy studying the Chinese classics, busy preparing themselves for government bureaucratic jobs. Joseph Needham talks about the relationship between a belief in a single god and a belief in a rational order in the universe which gave people in Europe an incentive to find out what that rational order was, and in turn led them towards mathematical techniques in the explanations of the universe. In any case, partly it is an intellectual problem. Partly it is also an economic problem in the sense that there just wasn't an incentive for labour-saving techniques. There was also the whole spirit of Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, particularly in England, where there was a tremendous accumulation of inventions, all coming at once. Anything could be solved if you could just work at it a little bit longer. The Chinese inventions came few and far between, often hundreds of years apart; there was no accumulative impact at all. Any given innovation by itself would not have made for an industrial revolution, but a whole cluster of them coming together sent Europe off on a big surge. Europe itself, however, would have arrived at levels we would have considered very poor if it hadn't been for science. People like David Ricardo, for example, writing in the early nineteenth century had a very pessimistic view of the likely future of the industrial revolution. They saw it mainly as piling up capital within a relatively limited technology, and that under those circumstances there was a danger of going back into a stationary state and so on. I think that was probably not an unreal picture, given the situation in the early nineteenth century. If you ignored what was going to happen in the later nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. The Chinese, in a sense, never even got to the point of the early nineteenth century; they were never able to get their per capita income rising on a

sustained basis which might create the demand for a new technique. Their commerce was really built on taxes and rents. The cities were not the natural homes of merchants. The city areas were the product of the political system. Leading magistrates and the emperor himself were located in the city, the rich tending to settle around the emperor, around the magistrate, and at the bottom all their servants, all needing to be supplied. There had to be merchants to supply them, and the cities were a net drain. They survived by being able to take tax revenue and by being able to take rent from the countryside. They gave very little back to the countryside, and therefore the size of the cities depended on how high the rents were and how high the taxes were. Once they reached the limits of what could be squeezed from the peasants, that's as far as they went. They didn't really have an economic dynamic of their own. John Merson: There's clearly one question that hasn't been satisfactorily answered. Why didn't China maintain its existing rate of economic growth, a continuation of the sort of developments that had made it such an advanced civilisation in the thirteenth century? For even if there wasn't the impetus for industrialisation, why was it that China actually began to stagnate around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? Some historians have attributed this to the Mongol invasions of the fourteenth century. This may well have contributed to the stasis, but there is another explanation which involves the theory known as a 'high-level equilibrium trap'. Here to explain the theory is its originator, Dr Mark Elvin. Mark Elvin: The basic conception lying behind it is that technical inventions tend to appear when there is either pressure on a system, a kind of stress, or an opportunity where somebody with a new invention can make a great deal of money. And so the crux of the answer really is, there were no opportunities in China, China was largely closed to the outside world, there was a trickle of Nankings going out in export but not a significant amount, and because of this lack of expanding opportunities brought about by filling up of the arable land, and the very great population, and the perfection, not in traditional terms the backwardness, of agriculture; we hear in England about all the inventions of the agricultural revolution including the seed drill which the Chinese had had since Han times, almost 2,000 years. Without exception, the Chinese had everything. They had intercropping, rotations, multiple cropping, and most elaborate fertilising systems; there was nothing really in the area of plant management that late eighteenth century Britain could have taught them. They didn't have the room, the grazing land for developing a really good mixed agriculture, because there were too many people, there wasn't room for stock, except for scavengers like pigs. That then is the essence of it; it was China's advance in traditional terms which in many ways made it hard to generate those opportunities, those surges of demand which present challenges to ambitious men. John Merson: Could you just briefly explain by contrast the way in which these factors operated for advantage in Europe and in terms of the great take-off of European industrial society, and the general rapid economic growth which occurred throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Mark Elvin: Well, I think it can be put very simply and schematically. Many of the advances made in Britain in the eighteenth century in agriculture were no more than the kind of thing that you had in China for a long time, and it was only at the beginning of the eighteenth century that British wheat yields began to approach those in China, and

those in China stayed very high in world terms until the middle of the twentieth century. Take canals: the Chinese were building canals since the Han. The first Grand Canal, linking the Yangtze with the Yellow River, dates from the very early seventh century AD, and the perfection of the network of feasible canals, apart from the last stretch of the Ming Grand Canal northwards, was probably in place by around the year 1000 or 1100. Canals were an interesting example of the breakthrough that the British made in the eighteenth century, where the Chinese had more than 1000 years of advance upon them. So there were many of these advances which could give a great boost in Britain where, as it were, the Chinese had used up all the stimulus (if one can talk in such simple terms) long before. There was no cascading effect. I think domino effect, or cascade effects are very important, and the Chinese had to wait until modern Western technology could be imported to begin to get this sort of cascade effect again. John Merson: Dr Mark Elvin. Robyn Williams: Mark Elvin an historian at St Antony's College Oxford, interviewed by John Merson in the 1970s. John Merson at the time was in the ABC Science Unit and Joseph Needham who died in 1995, was still working away at Keys College in Cambridge. His rooms by the way, went afterwards to Stephen Hawking. So as we look across at the new colossus of China today, it's intriguing to ponder how very much Needham had to do with its reemergence, having told them, 'Yes you can! Because once you could!' Simon Winchester's best seller on all this is called, Bomb, Book and Compass, Joseph Needham and the great secrets of China. It's published by Viking and you can hear the entire interview with him on the very final In Conversation program, Thursday 22nd January 2009, at 7 .30pm ABC Radio National. Simon Winchester on Needham, China and the scandal, which was left out of the present series.