Bomb, Book & Compass: Joseph Needham & the Great Secrets of China

  A list of Chinese endeavours – one version is to be found in Appendix I – illustrates how in almost every aspect of their lives the people of old China seem to have been imbued with a deep desire for cultural improvement – for making life easier, better, and more truly civilized than it is anywhere else in the world. In that one sense the cumulative consequence of Needham’s list is incontrovertible: by inventing a stirrup, a compass, a sheet of printing paper, a wheelbarrow, or a suspension bridge, the Chinese were always bent on making life steadily more comfortable for themselves.

  Yet at the same time there was invariably a downside to this unending achievement – at least, so far as outsiders were concerned. The very fact that the Chinese achieved so much and so quickly (fifteen major inventions a century, as Needham once calculated) appears to have created a sense of self-satisfaction and superiority – a kind of national smugness that led Emperor Qianlong to remark so famously to Lord Macartney, ‘We possess all things… I have no use for your country’s manufactures.’ And this self-congratulatory complacency, this hubris, inevitably contributed to the problems that caused the empire in time to flounder and fall, and that led to the poverty and backwardness that characterized China for so long.

  But China is neither poor nor backward any more; and it is one of the ironies of history that the success of modern China derives in large measure from this very same sense – which aggrieved westerners like Lord Macartney might say was a peculiarly and infuriatingly Chinese sense – of self-certainty, of an unshakeable confidence about its position at the centre of the world. And all this certainty derives from the sturdy foundation of civilization that China built for itself so very long ago. Needham catalogued in the finest detail the robust antiquity of that civilization, illustrating the reason for all the self-confidence and self-assurance – the unique degree of self-knowledge that helps to make China China.

  For silk, tea, bureaucracy, and the early invention of the compass as such do not make China what it is. What makes China different is the case-hardened sense of inner certitude that this vast array of invention has given to it.

  Joseph Needham acknowledged and confirmed all this, and yet he fretted for decades over one single aspect of China’s inventive history that seems at odds with the main story: the curious fact that after centuries of scientific and technological creativity, everything in China suddenly ground to a halt.

  The Chinese of the distant past – the ancient Chinese who lived before Europe’s Christian era, the old Chinese living when Europe had its Dark Ages, and the medieval Chinese en masse of the twelfth and thirteenth European centuries – did essentially all the inventing. Come the sixteenth century, when the Renaissance was fully under way in Europe, the creative passions of China suddenly seemed to dry up; the energy began to ebb away and die.

  Ever since that moment – AD 1500 is regarded as the approximate turning point – nearly all modern scientific advance transferred itself to where it remains today, becoming the nearly exclusive preserve of the West.

  This intrigued Needham from the time he first discussed it with Lu Gwei-djen in Cambridge in the late 1930s. It haunted him so ceaselessly, and it pervaded so much of what he later wrote, that it was to become his memorializing eponym: it became known as the ‘Needham question’.

  Why, Needham asked – if the Chinese had been so technologically creative for so very long, and if they invented so much in antiquity – why did modern science develop not in China but in Europe and the West? Why was China unable to hold on to its early advantage and creative edge? Why was there never a true industrial revolution in China? Why was there no firm embrace of capitalism? Why, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was China a nation known principally for being backward, hostile, and poor? How did the brilliant early nation evolve into Emerson’s later ‘booby nation’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  — Joseph Needham, 1993, published 2004

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

  Abacus AD 190

  Acupuncture 580 BC

  Advisory vessels 3rd century BC

  Air-conditioning fan AD 180

  Alcohol made from grain by a special fermentation process 15th century BC

  Algorithm for extraction of square and cube roots 1st century AD

  Anatomy 11th century AD

  Anchor, non-fouling, stockless 1st century AD

  Anemometer 3rd century AD

  Anti-malaria drugs 3rd century BC

  Arcuballista, multiple-bolt 320 BC

  Arcuballista, multiple-spring 5th century AD

  Asbestos woven into cloth 3rd century BC

  Astronomical clock drive AD 120

  Axial rudder 1st century AD

  Ball bearings 2nd century BC

  Balloon principle 2nd century BC

  Bean curd AD 100

  Bell, pottery 3rd millennium BC

  Bellows, double-acting piston-tuned bronze 6th century BC

  Belt drive 5th century BC

  Beriberi, recognition of AD 1330

  Blast furnace 3rd century BC

  Blood, distinction between arterial and venous 2nd century BC

  Blood, theory of circulation 2nd century BC

  Boats and ships, paddle-wheel AD 418

  Bomb, cast-iron AD 1221

  Bomb, thrown from a trebuchet AD 1161

  Book, printed, first to be dated AD 868

  Book, scientific, printed AD 847

  Bookcase, vertical axis AD 544

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  Bowl, bronze water-spouting 3rd century BC

  Bread, steamed

  Bridges, iron-chain suspension 6th century AD

  Bridges, Li Jun’s segmental arch AD 610

  Bridges, releasable 4th century BC

  Bronze, high tin, for mirror production

  Bronze rainbow teng (camphor still) 1st century BC

  Callipers AD 9

  Camera obscura, explanation of AD 1086

  ‘Cardan’ suspension 140 BC

  Cast iron 5th century BC

  Cast iron malleable 4th century BC

  Cereals, preservation of stored 1st century BC

  Chain drive AD 976

  Chess 4th century BC

  Chimes, stone 9th century BC

  Chopsticks 600 BC

  Clocks, sand AD 1370

  Clocks, Su Sung’s AD 1088

  Clockwork escapement of Yi Xing and Liang Lingzan AD 725

  Coal, as a fuel 1st century AD

  Coal, dust, briquettes from 1st century AD

  Coinage 9th century BC

  Collapsible umbrella and other items 5th century BC

  Comet tails, observation of direction of AD 635

  Compass, floating fish AD 1027

  Compass, magnetic needle AD 1088

  Compass, magnetic, used for navigation AD 1111

  Cooking pots, heat economy in 3rd millennium BC

  Crank handle 1st century BC