Author traces man's quest to prove China's dominance in inventions

Winchester traces man's quest to prove China's dominance in inventions

By Steve Ruskin, Special to the Rocky

Published May 29, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Simon Winchester's recent best-sellers have recounted the histories of two catastrophes: the California earthquake of 1906 (A Crack in the Edge of the World) and the massive 1883 eruption of a Java island volcano (Krakatoa).

In his new book, The Man Who Loved China, however, Winchester takes a break from natural disasters and returns to a formula he developed in his first big hit, The Professor and the Madman - that of the forgotten-genius-and-his-intellectual- achievement-that-changed-the-world.

Madman, you might recall, chronicled the life of James Murray, creator of the massive Oxford English Dictionary. He solicited help from "men of letters" everywhere, and even relied heavily upon an insane American physician who sent his entries to Murray from the asylum where he was incarcerated for murder.

This time, Winchester introduces readers to Joseph Needham, whose epic work, the monumental (and still unfinished) Science and Civilization in China, was one of the most significant, yet under-read, scholarly accomplishments of the 20th century. The result is another fascinating read, filled with expeditions across war-ravaged China, harrowing escapes from the Japanese army, more than a few amorous adventures, and path-breaking scholarship undertaken within the ancient rooms of Cambridge University.

Needham was a British biochemist who became a historian out of his passion for China. In the late 1930s, he fell in love with a Chinese research student he met at Cambridge, and together they pondered the question of China's scientific and technological stagnation.

It was well known that for millennia China was the most advanced place on earth. What had happened to change that? Why, from a modern European perspective, had China become so backward?

Amidst the backdrop of a world at war, Needham went to China to find out. And his research was groundbreaking: He quickly uncovered proof that hundreds of inventions - long considered products of the West - had in fact been in use in China long before they were ever seen in Europe. Gunpowder, the stirrup, block printing and the magnetic compass were just a few.

Consider the abacus, the counting tool that Europeans believed was not invented until the 15th century. Upon his arrival in China, Needham saw them in use everywhere: small pocket abacuses and large tabletop ones. He soon found proof that the abacus was invented in that country at least 1,000 years earlier than had been thought. And so it was with many other inventions, including the moldboard plow, the blast furnace and the kite.

This was a story, he felt, that the West needed to know. Back in England, what Needham envisioned as a single book quickly ballooned into one of the most ambitious research projects of the 20th century.

Science and Civilization in China currently comprises 24 volumes, and there are additional volumes waiting to be published (even though Needham passed away in 1995). With the publication of the initial volumes in the 1950s, readers realized that everything they thought they knew about China (then waxing communist) was wrong.

It took Needham and his hand-picked associates decades to put all his research together to make his case. Along the way, Needham's political radicalism nearly did the project in. Thus, in Winchester's hands even the process of watching Needham produce books of Chinese history becomes exciting and dramatic:

"Needham's left-wing sympathies were well known. He was now being quite widely criticized - not for his science, not for his history, and not for his intelligence, but for his politics. So for him to have written a book . . . that challenged the traditionally prejudiced view of China . . . was suddenly fraught with risk."

The most impactful result of Needham's research was that it brought into relief one striking inconsistency to the richness of Chinese invention: Why, if China had been so scientifically prolific for so long, did "modern" science and technology develop around 1700 in the West instead of in China? So closely tied was this historical quandary to his research that it is still known as the "Needham Question."

Needham himself never felt the question was properly answered, and maybe never would be. Today many scholars suggest that if China's rise to economic and technological power continues at its current rate, answering the "Needham Question" won't matter: The last 300 years will just be a brief slump in China's long rise to scientific pre-eminence.

In 1764, Voltaire claimed: "Four thousand year ago, when we couldn't even read, the Chinese knew all the absolutely useful things we boast about today." Two hundred years later, Needham proved it.

Winchester's smart biography does more than tell the story of Needham and his great book. Perhaps most significantly, Winchester opens up a window into China's past, letting us see China through the eyes of a Westerner who loved that country, its people and its history, and through his passion for China now helps us see what that massive country has the potential to become again.

As Needham himself recalled: "I have been free to experience the life in Chinese homes and market-places, and see at first hand the miseries of a society in collapse, awaiting the dawn which must come soon."

Steve Ruskin is a freelance writer living in Colorado Springs.

Revealing facts

There's more to Needham than his scholarly research. The subject of Winchester's book was an avid folk dancer who practiced a quirky English form called the morris dance. And if that's not enough to pique your curiosity, Winchester also reports that Needham was a practicing nudist.

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

* By Simon Winchester. HarperCollins, 284 pages, $24.

* Grade: A-

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