The man who loved China
author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country.No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair.He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire. He searched everywhere for evidence to bolster his conviction that the Chinese were responsible for hundreds of mankind's most familiar innovations—including printing, the compass, explosives, suspension bridges, even toilet paper—often centuries before the rest of the world.
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What Hacker News says
- I really recommend The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester. My brother picked it for a family book club and I was blown away. Amazing story and person.
- The technologies developed in ancient China are staggering, the more so as they'd been largely fogotten by / rendered invisible to the Chinese themselves.
A find of the past few years has been Joseph Needham's truly epic Science and Civilisation in China. Begun in 1954, still in production -- the series is not yet completed, 7 volumes, 27 books. Simon Winchester (also author of The Perfectionists, mentioned in this thread, has an excellent biography, The Man Who Loved China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...
- In my experience, history is a far more robust guide than hand-waved speculation or assertion.
China did invent the modern world (mostly), by the way. They just decided not to go the full way, though for reasons not entirely clear.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_...
Simon Winchester's biography of that epic work's creator, Joseph Needham, is highly engaging, and also recommended. It's a lighter read than most the other works I've recommended so far:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/man-who-loved-china-joseph-ne...
- As many have noted, this piece does plenty of axe-grinding, conclusion-stretching, and fact-spinning, as well as simply getting a fair bit wrong. But for all of that it does convey a fundamental truth: there was a hell of a lot of established civilisation going on outside the general scope of Western History -- principally the Mediterranian basin.
In particular, China was home to a huge, advanced, and highly active culture. I'm only slowly becoming aware of this myself through recent reading. As I've just commented, I only discovered in the past year the work of British biochemist-turned-sinologist Joseph Needham. His Science and Civilisation in China, proposed as a brief 5-6 volume work in the early 1950s, continues to be developed to this day. Just reading the titles of the 24 completed volumes gives a sense of the scope of invention and discovery covered. There are at least two more volumes forthcoming.
http://www.nri.cam.ac.uk/science.html
Simon Winchester's The Man who Loved China gives the background for this story, and is highly recommended.
Again: while the particulars here are distorted, the underlying truth isn't: there was a phenomenal civilisation in China during the time of the Roman empire, and it easily rivalled, and quite possibly surpassed, Rome.
- Very interesting piece (and serendipitous for me since I was reading The Man Who Loved China [very well-written bio, btw]).
"Thus Joseph Needham acquired what administrators at lonely outposts in the British Empire used to call a 'sleeping dictionary.' ”
It has often been commented that one of the fastest ways to learn a new language is to have a partner bilingual (or even better, monolingual) in that language; however, I had never heard of this interesting term before!
As for Needham's Question: Many, many pages have been written on this topic. As is briefly touched upon in the article the problem of moving from empirical to "modern" science is not unique to China. Similar comments have been made made on how the Babylonian math (that survives) is a list of algorithms to (sometimes surprisingly complicated) mathematical problem instances and not an attempt at general theory, cf. to be compared to the Greek advancements in geometry.
As it's stressed in the article cultural factors are often cited as the cause. Sayings similar to the Japanese proverb "A nail that sticks out will be hammered" (http://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-about-the-Japanese-pr...) are commonly used in Middle East and Asia. There's a pervasive culture of not standing out both because it's found to be tasteless but also because it may bring danger to oneself (and to the family).
And it's not a question about geographical location, i.e being in the East, either, as is demonstrated by the examples of prominent outlier ports given in the article:
"Wesson put forward the late Roman and Byzantine empires as instances. He calls the latter “exceptionally uncreative,” and points out that the Byzantine trading port of Galata, controlled by the Genoese, was by the end of the fourteenth century producing seven times as much revenue as Constantinople, the imperial capital. The parallel with Chinese treaty ports like Hong Kong is hard to miss."
However, if this is the most satisfactory answer then we have the updated Needham Question: Why did such a culture develop in these societies?
- Good question. I've scratched a bit of this, I'm not expert.
Needham alone is huge, and Chinese technology vast. If you can find a copy (a decent college/uni library should have a set), it's fascinating to leaf through.
There are several digests, one a single volume, another a mere ten (!), rather than the 30 or so of the full work.
Simon Winchester has written a biography, The Man Who Loved China.
Philosphy covers a fair bit of general knowledge development, and Peter Adamson's series in his History of Philosophy project includes Western, Arabic/Islamic, Indian, Africana, and eventually Chinese philosophy. Science and technology make apprearances, along with ... a lot ... of religion, ethics, aesthetcss, logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and more.
I'm very weak on anything Africa. The UNESCO series A General History of Africa, 11 volumes, (1964-) is the most comprehensive of which I'm aware, which isn't saying much. It includes technology, though not as a principle focus:
https://en.unesco.org/general-history-africa#collection
For the Americas and Oceania, you'll likely need to look into anthropological studies rather than history per se. Charles C. Mann's 1491 may be a good introduction to the Americas.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/1491-new-revelations-of-the-a...
Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History, the precursor to his more recent Energy and Civilization, is history told through the lens of energy and energy-related technologies (which ... happens to be many of them).
https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/...
There are numerous recent books on the history of technology, and an increasing number of works looking at economic aand technological histories of regions, cultures, and eras, particularly of Greece and Rome (obviously Western tradition), though all but certainly others.
Jared Diamond's Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel cover some of this, but are also exquisitely researched. The real value for you may be in their bibliographies.
The New Books Network podcast surveys recent academic publications in numerous areas, with author interviews, and should be useful mining, notably:
Science, Technology, and Society https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/science-technology/scie...
Intellectual History https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/politics-society/intell...
History https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/politics-society/histor...
