In Our Time - The Needham Question

Episode Date: October 19, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Needham Question; why Europe and not China developed modern technology. What do these things have in common? Fireworks, wood-block printing, canal lock-gates, kites, the wheelbarrow, chain suspension bridges and the magnetic compass. The answer is that they were all invented in China, a country that, right through the Middle Ages, maintained a cultural and technological sophistication that made foreign dignitaries flock to its imperial courts for trade and favour. But then, around 1700, the flow of ingenuity began to dry up and even reverse as Europe bore the fruits of the scientific revolution back across the globe. Why did Modern Science develop in Europe when China seemed so much better placed to achieve it? This is called the Needham Question, after Joseph Needham, the 20th century British Sinologist who did more, perhaps, than anyone else to try and explain it.But did Joseph Needham give a satisfactory answer to the question that bears his name? Why did China’s early technological brilliance not lead to the development of modern science and how did momentous inventions like gunpowder and printing enter Chinese society with barely a ripple and yet revolutionise the warring states of Europe? With Chris Cullen, Director of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge; Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at SOAS; Frances Wood, Head of Chinese Collections at the British Library.

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or wherever you get your pods. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, what did these things have in common? Fireworks, woodblock printing, canal lock gates, kites, the wheelbarrow, chain suspension bridges and the magnetic compass.

The answer is that they were all invented in China, a country that right through our Middle Ages maintain a cultural and technological sophistication that made foreign dignitaries flock to its imperial courts for trade and favour. But then, around 1700, the flow of ingenuity began to dry up, and even reverse, as Europe bore the fruits of the scientific revolution

back across the globe. Why did modern science develop in Europe when China seemed so much better place to achieve it? This is called the Needham question, after Joseph Needham, the 20th century of British sinologists who did more perhaps than anyone else to try and explain it. But did Joseph Needham give a satisfactory answer to the question that bears his name? Why did China's early technological brilliance not lead to the development of modern science

and how did momentous inventions like gunpowder and printing enter Chinese society with Belia Ripple and yet revolutionise the warring states of Europe? With me to discuss Chinese science and the Needham question are Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at Sars, Francis Wood, head of Chinese collections of the British Library, and Chris Cullen, Director of the Needham, Research Institute in Cambridge. Chris Collin, at the heart of the Needham question is a series of brilliant inventions. Let's start with one that's little known, fourth century, the breast

strap harness. Why was that so important? Well, just imagine I wanted you to help me pull a load in my garden. If I gave you a rope and said, I'd like you to tie this rope round your neck and then pull hard, you might complain and say, that's not going to be a very good way to get the best effort out of me. However, in the ancient west, that was how one harnessed horses. You put basically a strap round where the effort was taken from their neck, and that

meant the harder the horse pulled, the more it choked itself, which is the reason why you can see in ancient Greek and Roman depictions of chariots. You might have three or four horses there, but all they can pull is a rather light thing. Whereas in China, they had a much more efficient

way of getting traction from the animal, the breast strap harness, which goes more like round the animal's chest, not on its throat, so that some people have said that, say, a Han dynasty chariot around the beginning of the Christian era is like a bus or a van compared to a western chariot. And that meant the Chinese were able to use horses much more efficiently. Now, that leads on in China to the invention of the horse collar,

which is in China from about, say, the 5th century AD, about 500 AD, and doesn't arrive in the West until the 10th century AD. And when it does get to the West, this is a momentous change, because it means that instead of ploughing with slow plodding oxen, you can use the much faster horse that can do a field quicker and also can walk quite easily several miles to the field

before you do the work. So you can plough more, You can have peasants who live together in larger settlements and are more productive. So in Europe, this had an immense transformative effect and formed the foundation of what some have called a medieval economic revolution in Europe. And that went on and on. But Francis Bacon, let's start with him in the early 17th century, said that the modern world differed fundamentally from the ancient world

because of three key inventions. He cites gunpowder, printing and the magnetic compass. He said their origins are obscure. secure and inglorious, but we now know they came from China. Let's talk about gunpowder. Can you talk about how the Chinese invented gunpowder? Gunpowder is, of course, one of the first great improvements by the human race in the killing of human beings. But rather ironically, it was developed in China by people who were searching for the elixir of life, seeking to find out how they could, as they would have put it,

subdue potassium nitrate to make it a medicine you could take. Unfortunately, in subduing, it, they discovered a certain mixture sometime in around the 9th century of honey, salt peter and sulphur, that when you cook it up and the water begins to go out of it and it starts to turn into sulphurous toffee, starts to go off like a volcano. And so the Taoist text in which this is found says, basically don't try this at home or you'll burn the house down, scind your beard and give Taoism a bad name. But by 1044 AD, you find in a Chinese military manual the first really quite good recipe

for gunpowder, that's before the time of the Battle of Hastings. And this, when it gets to the West again, does things it doesn't do in China, which is to cause huge social change. You can just imagine the impact of gunpowder weapons, for instance, on a

field of battle where the Armoured Knight had predominated before, or on castles, basically with thin high curtain walls. I mean, in 1414, the King of France did a tour with his new artillery train of English carcles in northern France. I think he knocked down one a week.

In Europe, another example, of something that comes from China and has a huge transformative effect. And the myth is, or the reality is that in China it was used for fireworks, whereas in Europe it was used for destruction. Always, of course, Chinese were just as interested in killing people as people in Europe were. Some might say the difference was, however,

that there's basically one or at most, two large states in China around this time, and therefore the competition is not quite so strong, whereas in Europe you've got lots of independent countries all ready to fight one another. International arms trade starts up early, and so the weapons that get here are improved very quickly. Tim Barrett, Chris mentioned Taoism, spelled T-A-O-I-S-M,

Taoism, the religion, which encouraged the spirit of inquiry, which eventually led to gunpowder. Now, as I understand it, Needham, who we're going to come to the great sinologists of the 20th century, argued that Chinese inventions owed a great deal to that religion. Can you develop that idea? Up to a point, yes.

It's quite clear that for all our early information on gunpowder, we rely on Taoist texts or texts that were preserved by Taoists. This religion had developed around about the same time as Christianity, although it had deeper roots. And from Buddhism, which came in from India at about the same time, it borrowed monasticism. Now, just as in the West for a long time, monasteries were one of the chief centres of learning.

And so the Taoists, like the Buddhists, would have large monastic centres with libraries in them. And it was in their libraries that they tended to preserve not only literature of interest to people practicing the religion, but a somewhat broader literature, just like a Western monastery might have some classical texts which were actually secular, not religious. So the Taoists tended, therefore,

to preserve things that they were broadly interested in, including information about alchemy because of their, one of the key features of their religion was the pursuit of immortality. But this may have misled Needham somewhat. At the time that he was starting to write, there were basically only three labels for ways of thinking in China. They were Taoist, Confucian or Buddhist. but we've come to realize that actually things were more complex than that.

He tended to see Confucianism as being exclusively an ethical system to do with relationships within humankind and therefore not very interested in the natural world. Buddhists he saw as fleeing the world, looking on it as illusion, and therefore unlikely to be very helpful to science. that only left one group of people who he supposed would have had a particular interest in the natural world and certainly in the case of alchemy, you could say that he was right.

But unfortunately, that's probably too much of a generalisation to say that therefore only Taoists were interested in anything scientific. For example, in the middle of the 8th century, there was a great Buddhist mathematician and astronomer who says quite explicitly, well, we Buddhists are actually interested in spiritual truths, but this secular stuff, we have to get it right or people will think we are stupid.

So there was no reason why Buddhists shouldn't have been interested in things like mathematics and astronomy. Are you suggesting then that these developments, of inventions which came in clusters, as I understand it, and needed him reported from, let's say, our first century onwards. It was not necessarily motivated by any abstract or religious system. People going out there and inventing things because of practical reasons or because of they themselves wanted to solve problems.

I don't think I can even say that, because sometimes they invented things for the most, what seemed to us, impractical of reasons. I'm very interested in the beginnings of printing, which has strong links with Buddhism. One of the ways that Buddhists thought about their own scriptures, which has certain parallels in Europe that in exact, would have been as relics of the Buddha.

For political purposes, it was good to be seen in control of holy objects, like relics of the Buddha, and to be able to distribute them in huge quantities. And the best example is in Japan in the late 8th century. We're still not going to printing. So why did they decide to go to printing? They printed off a lot of little strips of Buddhist texts

and then distributed them across Japan so that when I say they, it was actually the ruler. So in effect, the ruler was the ruler was, demonstrating an ability to produce huge numbers of holy objects. So it was fulfilling a religious purpose. No, it wasn't meeting... It's a law of unexpected consequences. Francis Wood, it's about time we called you in,

and as you've got your hand up saying you had something to say, so there's a double reason. One of the things that I wanted to say was about printing, that, I mean, yes, it starts in the religious context, but one of the interesting things about China, as opposed to say Japan, where printing stays inside them, monasteries for centuries. It's very clear from the Dunhung finds that we have in the British Library that people immediately saw the economic possibilities of printing. I mean, we've got several

illegally printed calendars which date from the 9th century, which were made in Sichuan. Only the emperor was supposed to promulgate the calendar, but you could see quick-thinking businessmen in the marketplaces in China could see that they could make money out of printing. We've never seen... Just a second, hold on. Just to say, I'm going to concentrate on Francis. There's some information we want to gather here before we move on. Can you give us some sense of medieval China at its height? What sort of, what would you say was its grandeur? What would you say was the key to its success?

I think medieval China, the key to its success, is really what has happened before. By, say, the 12th, 13th century, China has in all sorts of areas of technology, advanced to a point where life is very comfortable. Massive amounts of rice produced in the south, taken up the wonderful Grand Canal to feed the North. With all the inventions along the canal to make it work, the lock gates and everything. You couldn't get there if there weren't lock gates and so on, better boats.

Then also you have things like, you know, the ceramic industry, which is way ahead of anything anywhere in the world. And continues to be way ahead until the 19th century, doesn't it? It does. The mystery of ceramic. Yes, absolutely. I mean, there's glorious song ceramics. And these two, I mean, there's not a...

only do you have huge amount of internal commerce, again, mostly along the waterways, so that you get some ceramics spreading all over from the kilns, but also external commerce. Trading with Japan, Southeast Asia, we know this, that they were sending ceramics down and then bringing back luxury goods, all sorts of, you know, scented woods and things, sea slugs and so on, from Southeast Asia. I mean, what went out from China was eagerly sought. What China brought back really was sort of trinkets and frippery for the rich. that they could enjoy. And by then, I mean, you've got a huge market economy. And I think that

economics is extremely important. And it's a kind of driving force in many different sort of ways. But it is that China is then sitting in its comfortable, suave and silk and so on, sitting on the basis of all these earlier introductions, printing huge streets in every city, which were devoted to bookshops. You know, little, you've got almost every house probably could have had one or two printed books. So these things weren't only produced in one place, but they were produced all over China and moved about. Can we just develop the economy? I'm a little bit, Francis.

When you say economics is important, a lot of people think it's fundamental. But you have a society, a place big enough for its internal trade to be sufficient, educated enough to make that productive, and well-run enough to make it on the whole order. I mean, no, there were breakdowns and there were warlords and so, so.

But the machine is working extremely well and is self-sufficient. Is that an important factor in all of this, both in the success and then later in the, not failure, but to falling away? I think that is very important. That China does, it's vast, it expands. And by the medieval period where you previously had rather controlled markets, markets are much freer, they aren't regulated so much by the state. I mean, during the Tang dynasty, people you were sort of fairly strictly controlled within the cities. What dates are that? That's 600 to 900 AD. People, where, where, the way you lived in the city, the walls of the city would be closed at night, and within the city walls were closed.

But by the song, you've got a much greater freedom. Markets are held much more freely. People move much more freely. You've got banknotes, printed banknotes from the song, so that merchants don't have to carry vast quantities of heavy copper cash around, but they can just hand out paper promissory notes. So it's a very well-developed economy. And to some extent, I suppose, what people do say is that it was almost too successful. for its own good, it leads to a sort of possible complacency. Why do you think that gunpowder, you mentioned gunpowder and printing, seem to ripple through this society without causing great storms and drangs, and as when they came across to Europe, as it were, sorry about this, won't have been smoke, I mean, it's...

Well, isn't it a lot to do with their being, as it were, native inventions? I mean, you grow up with them. They're not so surprising. But when something like paper, when paper hits Europe, I mean, there are all sorts of wonderful stories about the King of Spain saying, don't whatever you do write anything important on it because it's not as strong as vellum, which is crazy. But, whereas, you know, the Chinese have had papers since probably

about the second century BC and used it for so many things. I mean, you know, they had lavatory paper, they had wallpaper, massive quantities used in the bureaucracy. They used paper in partly in clothes, making clothes and so on and shoes. And so it was all over the place. So it's not really going to cause much excitement. It's always been there. Chris, you're about a Russian and I arrested your development of your point.

I just wanted to say that there is a problem in the way we talk about the Chinese past sometimes, in that we tend to interpret the past very much in terms of what we perceive the Chinese present to be. Now, that meant that Westerners in the 19th century particularly had to look at the past of China and finding that the reasons why China was in such a terrible mess as it was in the late 19th. century, early 20th century and so on. So when Francis was talking about the splendor of the song, the cash economy, and all the rest of it,

which is indeed made China into the world's most exciting and vibrant country at the time, there is this temptation to try to find in one's description of that a reason why it went wrong later. Now, I think that's perhaps a mistake, and I think this problem will go away over the next 50 years.

But in 50 years' time, no one's going to be looking for reasons in the Chinese past for failure anymore. That habit will have left us, I believe, and that means, therefore, that perhaps looking for the reasons for China's success will become the fashion. And it will be in historical terms, I think, just as wrong.

So to look at the sort of first Western interpretation, that takes us to the next section, Chris. First historical interpretation from the West of China could be said to be, roughly, with the arrival of the Jesuit of the 17th century. Tim Barrett, what did they find, What did they report back about this place at that image? We, Marco Polo being the individuals had gone there,

but the Jesuits went and they thought, this is meat for us, all these well-behaved people who need Christianity, and this is our greatest harvest field. Yes, the story of Jesuit and other missions to the East is one of constant disappointment. I mean, they started off in India, and of course they were welcomed there, except they suddenly realized that they were just being welcomed as one religion amongst many and if people were tolerant and so forth, it was because they were quite happy to have one more God.

Now let's talk about China. When they got to China, what did they find and what did they report? Well, after these other disappointments, they found people who they thought were running such a well-ordered society that it must be because of the ideals dominating that society and those they trace back through Confucius to very early times in China where coming from a background in medieval thought where they were familiar with the concept of sort of natural theology

and the idea that a knowledge of God wasn't solely from revelation but might be as it were inherited from the time of the Garden of Eden, they reason to themselves that this kind of knowledge must have somehow survived to an extent in China that was greater than elsewhere, that the great antiquity of Chinese civilization had led to an inheritance of good order and through the writings of Confucius and his followers high ethical standards and so forth. So all they had to do was announce the revelation that they brought with them of Christianity and everybody would see sense immediately and there would be turning towards Christianity.

But there is also, I think one of the, I mean, to sort of jump a bit, one of the things that was important about the Jesuits was, and I'm putting it very simply, they decided that they would aim for the court. And they also decided, as did later arrivals in China like Lord McCartney, they decided that one of the ways to demonstrate their usefulness, was to show their scientific abilities. So you get Jesuits managing to beat the local Muslim astronomers

to predicting an eclipse. And then you get the Jesuits instructing, even as far as instructing the emperor, teaching the Kangxi emperor in the sort of 60, late 1600s, teaching him maths in the court, actually in the inner court, in his own chamber, teaching him math, and producing for him lots and lots and lots of,

books. They published in Chinese and Manchu talking about their astronomical achievements. They brought mapping, Western mapping to China. Before we go there, can we just give the listeners some idea of what the Jesuits reported back to Europe,

of what they'd found about China that was attractive? Because as I understand it, from reading for this programme, they gave massive glowing reports of this amazing place, and Europe became amazed by China, not only as a place of treasures of technology and invention and riches,

but also of enlightenment. Can you give us some flavour of that, Francis, before we move on? I think, yes, I mean, I think in the 17th century, their publications were absolutely seized upon. And you've got all the great sort of French philosophers, I mean, all the great European philosophers. I mean, Voltaire wrote lots about China. You get Didreau, you get Leibniz,

was mad keen on various aspects of Chinese thought. And this all came because they wrote these compendious books. I think one thing we have to get over about what surprised Europeans about China was the way it was governed, which we haven't mentioned so far. That is that China was an imperial bureaucratic state. In other words, the people who did the work for the emperor were not hereditary aristocrats, nor had they purchased their jobs through money on the whole.

They had become, say, the Minister of Works, because they'd passed out top in a real, rigorous system of open examinations that any literate person in the country could enter. And this idea of a career open to talents was tremendously influential in Europe for two centuries afterwards.

I mean, it led to the creation effectively of the modern British civil service and so on. In France, it underlay many of the ideas of the French Revolution. And you can say honestly that China became for certainly a good century and a half world's most admired

country. World countries seen as the model for the future in many ways by lots of people. Hence, of course, the great wave of disappointment when people began to see it the other way eventually. Yeah, I think that's an absolutely essential point. I'd just like to fill in a bit more of what they reported back then about the, let me, the technology that look what's happening here. Can you give us one or two more instances about before we move on? Well, one example is obviously reporting on porcelain production that the Jesuits were the first to understand that porcelain relied upon two, on special local clays.

This wasn't, nobody in Europe could quite sort of work it out from the way the Jesuits were talking. So they report on porcelain. They also, the report on things like fortifications and locks and canals and so on, the sort of hydraulic nature of China. They report on the agriculture, sometimes rather oddly. They also do these sort of, I mean, I think it is, though, more the idea that Chris was saying that in amongst all this technological achievements, silk,

the silk production was also another important thing that they reported upon but what I suppose a lot of the philosophers in Europe particularly like was this idea that an intellectual could become the boss but there were a lot of European intellectuals who took, not against but questioned what was coming at Diderot, if I can't want to say, Didoro said the Oriental, he said there was lack of scientific progress in China

because the Oriental spirit which tends towards easiness and laziness concerned only with one's immediate and lacks the courage to challenge traditional common sense. Leibniz said that they didn't have modern science because they didn't really understand mathematics, which was the basis of modern science, the mathematicization of hypotheses following the laws of nature,

which was the basis of modern science there. Hume had, again, criticism making it didn't have enough commerce, therefore it didn't get going. So the Europeans took it on in one way, as a place of wonder, to be plundered for ideas and inspirations, but they were also criticizing it quite soon afterwards. Could you develop that? I think we can split the story about European reactions to China into three bits,

the earliest bit, which is what you find, say, in the 17th century, people like Perena. They're saying, oh, the Chinese have never developed proper science like us, by which they mean Renaissance science. In other words, the Chinese poor benighted people don't believe in the four elements of Aristotle, but seem to talk about five phases instead, and this is very wrong.

So some of the earlier complaints we can simply discount by saying they're not like us, they're not thinking in an Aristotelian tradition. Later on, I think there is a time when there's been just so much praise of China that as people do always, when there are media fashions,

people react the other way. You know, Dr. Johnson, in reviewing a book of travel, says with great relief, here the reader will find no Chinese perfectly polite, meaning civilised. in other words, no more of this stuff saying China's wonderful. There's just the natural tendency to swing the other way.

By the time, however, you do begin to get to the end of the 18th century, there is beginning to be a genuine sense. Hello, this is funny. We are seeing major changes in our countries. We're seeing in England the huge development of agriculture, followed by a great technological improvement throughout the country, spread of steam, power and so on. And a sense of, hmm, nothing like that seems to,

to be happening in China. And that's the beginning, I think, of a genuine perception that the West was, at last, getting a technical lead. And yet they still went at the end of that century, Francis Wood, and Lord McCartney, and we mentioned earlier in 794, arrived at the head of a British trade delegation. He seduced, in commercialdom, Catherine of Russia, so he was very full of himself to open trade up. They still wanted to trade there, and he was very effectively snubbed. The Chinese had no doubt whatsoever that they were above it. everybody else and they didn't need this as British trade or British trade delegation. Yes, and I think, I think to some extent, he arrived in the same spirit as the Jesuits.

He wanted to kind of wow them with British technology as the Jesuits had been trying to teach the earlier Qing emperors about their own maths and so on. And all the things he brought, he bought it took a diving bell, he took a hot air balloon, which was a very new invention at the time, took telescopes, burning glass, and so on. But the Chinese were not in the least interested in these. And I think to some extent the Jesuits had slightly sort of blown that aspect of kind of Western science and the wonders of the Western world by treating the things slightly as toys. And actually the Qianlong emperor did say, you know, we have no need of your toys. We have everything that

we want. Some people would say, I think, that whereas the old story about the Chen Long Emperor is, oh, how stupid of him to refuse trade contacts with China. Other people would say, as Francis was hinting there, he was actually a very well-informed statesman. He knew a lot already about the West through the medium of the Jesuits. He also knew what had happened in India, where the British had appeared previously saying, we'd just like to trade with you, please. And then, of course, by the end of the 18th century,

they're all over the place. They're on the Chinese borders in Nepal. And the idea of giving these people a logement, which they were asking for in China, was, I think, a very bad idea from Chinese political point of view. So I'm rather on the Chenling Emperor's side there. Tim Barrett, the Protestants came in in the 19th century. The Jesuit order were largely expelled from China.

We haven't got time to go to that. Did this mark a dramatic change in the Western attitude to China when the Protestant missionaries came in? Yes, the Protestant missionaries came from usually from a very different sort of background. Some of them were educated. Some of them were not. They didn't have the kind of cosmopolitan outlook that Jesuits did. And certainly all were agreed.

that the only important thing to know about the Chinese was that they were heathen. How did the Chinese react to these particular visitors? Well, they did their best to keep the missionaries out until after the opium wars, where they finally had to allow them in because of British force of arms. The Chinese attitude towards any religious group

is to keep it on a fairly tight reign. The Manchu emperors of the period had actually regulated Buddhism quite stringently. And so they weren't really looking to have a whole bunch more of religious leaders pouring into their territory and disseminating another load of ideas. So we had a lot of friction now, a lot of anti-Western propaganda coming in after China.

Yes, there had been some anti-Western propaganda, propaganda produced, especially by the Buddhists, in response to the Jesuits. And a lot of this got recycled and there was a new tone of defensiveness there, perhaps, which made things a little bit more negative. I was going to say, I think actually it is sort of slightly different because of the way that the Protestant missions are out in the countryside, absolutely everywhere. They won't be confined. And, I mean, some of them with the best of intentions, you know, bring,

Western medicine to China. And they have orphanages and things like that, where children die in large numbers because 19th century medicine wasn't very good, whether it was Western or Chinese. And one of the things is that they do, in a sense, by bringing a certain amount of science to the countryside, they actually foster sort of anti-Western,

also anti-Western science mood in amongst the Chinese people. The Chinese said they used baby's eyes as mirrors or something. That's right. Well, in order to manufacture a mirror, you needed baby's eyes. and also in order to lay down a proper railway line, you had to put a dead baby under each sleeper. That was the sort of story that went around. And so that you get local Chinese people being very anti-Western innovation in China

because of these beliefs. I would like to turn to what we flagged earlier on as the Needham question. This was from Needham, the great synologist, 20th century, lived the age of 95, these huge books still being produced that bear his name about Sussians. science and civilization in China. You met him, didn't you, perhaps? Can you just tell us what you think his stature is in this discussion about Chinese science?

I think he's amazing. He was an incredibly witty man. He was very tall, large, with a sort of a wonderful kind of schoolboy white haircut, a fringe and dark round glasses. And he had a little gold pencil, and if you're a girl at Cambridge, he'd come and collect you. He'd tap you on the chest with a little gold pencil and write your name down so he could invite you to call. talktail parties at his college to meet his young men.

I met his wife as well, who by that time was wheelchair bound. I mean, he was a very, very eccentric character, but a brilliant lecturer, absolutely brilliant. He could captivate an audience of any sort by talking about Chinese science in a way that they all felt they understood every word and that they realised that Chinese science was much better than anybody else. He was a Marxist Christian. He went to China. Why did he become so infatuated with China and did devote the rest of his life to it? I think it happens to a lot of us who start with China. I mean, he made, I think he met, when he first went, he was on a UN mission investigating science in China.

And I think he met some of China's finest intellectuals. And when you meet some of China's finest intellectuals, you really are meeting people who have an absolutely vast knowledge. They know their own culture and they know your culture. And that's pretty amazing. and I think he engaged with those endlessly. Chris Cullen, what did he find in China? Why did he want to undertake this science and civilisation in China, this massive, massive undertaking, which is still being still underway?

Well, he'd always been as a scientist, and he was a fellow of the Royal Society, a biochemist in the 30s, he'd always been as a scientist interested in the history of science. And when in the 1930s a bunch of young Chinese researchers turned up in Cambridge, and he could see these people are just as good at science, as I ever have been, he started to say, why have I never heard anything about great Chinese scientific discoveries then? And when he ended up in China during the war, as Francis said,

he had this opportunity really to get access, which no one had ever had to that degree before, to a huge amount of Chinese material that showed, well, surprise, surprise, though he had never heard of it, there had been a huge amount of science and technology in pre-modern China. The things we were talking about earlier. The things we were talking about earlier. So he came back, basically, and talked about.

with this story, gave up being an active research biochemist, although he kept his job you could in those days at Cambridge as the reader in biochemistry until he retired, and settled down just to write the story of it all. I think we should say one thing too. A crucial role in this,

as there very often is in what individuals do, is the story of his relationship with Liu Guajan, who was one of those research students who came to Cambridge in the 30s, with whom he had a long-term relationship. And he praised her as the bridge, the evocator, the person who started all this. So I think even though Lugwe Jin always stayed behind Joseph Needham

and almost tried not to be seen as the important person, the role of that woman was extremely crucial in what he did. Tim, Tim, how did you contextualise what Needham did? How important was it in the state? in scholarship generally and particularly for China? It was revolutionary in its own way because Westerners studying China tended to inherit the sort of curriculum that their Chinese teachers had been brought up on,

which was the sort of humanistic, Confucian literature and so forth. Nobody had looked into all these other sources of information like the texts within the Taoist canon, which is more like a patrology. It's got not simply scriptures, but things written in later ages by prominent figures. As I understand, even in China itself, they sort of dismissed their past.

There was a book in 1922 in China saying, why are we so about it science? Why have we done nothing? Yes. Why China has no science, yes. But basically, they'd missed all this material in part because, as I pointed out earlier,

religious groups were thought of as being slightly dangerous and therefore nobody paid attention to vast tracts of material which actually contained quite interesting information in. When I was an undergraduate, the only place where you could go in English to read anything about what was in this huge Taoist collection

was Needham's early writing. He was, simply the first scholar in this country or in any English-speaking country to read the stuff. And then we come to the Needham question, Francis. Can we spend the rest of the programme discussing? The question given his name is, this was going on to an extraordinary extent, better say in simple terms, outstripping Europe, all they get. And then the European science, modern science, as we know it, let's say from Galileo onwards,

as it were, swept in and swept ahead and seemed to sweep Chinese, Chinese science inventions from significance. So even Francis Began didn't know who invented in gunpowder and the printing press and magnetism and even the Chinese themselves in the 20th century said we didn't do anything at all.

So why did it stop? Oh, Peter out. One of the things I always think when we're discussing this is it's rather unfair that when we use science, we are saying and what we mean is modern Western science. I mean, I think one of the things that Neidham would have said is that there are different ways of looking at science

and science isn't just ours. I mean, we also ignore Indian maths and Babylonian achievements and so on, and that he wanted to kind of reverse that view that only Western science as well. I think you've established that very well, the three of you, but I do think it is also fair to say that, as Chris said earlier, that in the late 18th century, things were happening in the West that were simply not happening in China, given China's tradition, why weren't they?

And then the West, as it were, I'm sorry to use these. their course terms and vulgar terms, I know, but pulled ahead in modern science, mathematical based modern science, and so on, and it didn't happen over there. Now that's led some people to say, well, they weren't ever scientists at all. What they did

was brilliant at inventing. But science, a science, which came out of sort of abstract, ideas of abstract thought, which some people think began with, anyway, found a focus with the Greeks. That is a different strand of development. That led to

the eventual modern science and China was not in that loop now is that the case I think that is I would say that that is the case that their ways of abstract thinking were very different that you certainly couldn't say that there wasn't abstract thinking in China but my feeling really is that in a sense they didn't well they didn't get Western science partly

because the West exploded in on China I mean you have things it's you have problems it is I think economic and political Sorry, I don't get that. Well, I think that they don't develop it themselves out of, I mean, they don't develop the Euclidean geometry and the various, they don't, and Galileo is not Chinese, they don't develop it themselves. On the other hand, by the 19th century when it might have become more available to them,

by that time, the West was so much pushing with its newly revived gunpowder, was cutting China up, was dividing China for its own economic reasons. that there was no way that ideologically that really the Chinese could at that time take it on. I think there's a lot in what Francis had just said. Once there has been one industrial revolution, with all the power, military commercial that that gives, there's no room in the world for another.

If, for instance, the Sung Navy had sailed up the Thames sometime in the early 13th century, with printing, gunpowder, the compass and all the rest, and had completely swept us away into the Chinese culture world, there might have been some Chinese historians saying, but look at all that interesting stuff those Greeks did

and there's things they did do in the West. Why didn't they have the Song Industrial Revolution? These questions are ones perhaps, we should perhaps as historians ought sometimes to refrain from answering. But since the problem won't go away, and it seems to be really, I think,

in many ways the longest-lived, most widely discussed historical question of the last 50 years, If you have to plump for an answer, I would go for something like Hume's answer, which says that things happen much more quickly under conditions of intense international competition, such as existed amongst the separate states of Europe, whereas in a huge unified state like China, there isn't quite the same pressure to be ahead in the technological race. Now, of course, China is in a world where there is intense international competition.

And by golly, it's doing very well at it, isn't it? Though I think people have pointed out that though there was perhaps, politically there was a sort of lack of willingness to engage with the latest Western technology, you get things like pirates on the East China coast. They were very quick to acquire the latest ballistics in the 19th century.

They always had better guns than the boats that they were attacking. So it's not, you know, there's a central problem towards the end of the 19th century. It's to do with central government unwillingness, but local people were keen. But you're very much of a view, Chris Collin, This will disappear as a question as China, and it'll be seen as a mere absence of mind for a couple of centuries.

So we use the word bullet. I suspect that may be the case. People are already beginning to write narratives of Chinese history that begin to try to depict even the 19th century as a success story. Myself, I don't believe in starting off with the idea of the kind of story you're going to write. I think you should find the history first. But that's the way the fashion is beginning to turn for good or ill. There's a terribly nice thing that Einstein said when he was asked in the 50s

about why the Chinese hadn't developed modern science. And he said it was because they didn't have Euclidean geometry and they hadn't had the Renaissance and this idea of proving things. But he said the question really we should ask is not why didn't the Chinese do that, but why did anybody do those things? Well, thanks very much, Francis Wood, Tim Barrett and Chris Cullen. And next week we'll be discussing Diderot and the French encyclopedists. Thanks for listening.

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