The Astonishing Dr Joseph Needham

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3 January 2009

The astonishing Dr Joseph Needham - Part 1 of 3

These days everybody knows that the Chinese invented practically everything hundredsof years ago. What people don't realise is that this understanding is so new, in the early1950s 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 thebeginning of his massive workScience and Civilisation in China and in 2008 SimonWinchester's bookBomb, Book and Compass reminded the world of this achievement.

Today in part 1 we talk to Simon Winchester but also hear once more the programsmade in the 1970s with Needham himself.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: This is The Science Show on ABC Radio National and we begin thisportentous year with a really unusual experiment. We shall look at a 21st centuryphenomenon, China, through 20th century eyes, then go back even further and wonderwhat's really been behind the Chinese modern miracle, and why it happened at all. Andwe 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 wethought 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-yearslumber. Here in the first of three programs, we begin with Simon Winchester and howhis adventure with Needham took off.

Simon Winchester: About 16 years ago I think, I was doing a book about the YangtzeRiver, and when I was back in New York writing it up having spent about a yeartravelling along it, I came to the part about the three gorges, which in those days, were aferocious stream, but of course now ever since the building of the dam has turned intoan enormous lake of sewerage. However, when it was a ferocious stream, which was

three hundred miles long, how did sailing junks get up it

which they clearly did, fromWuhan to Chongqing, there was a very lively trade.

I wanted to see pictures of sailing junks, from the Ming and the Qing dynasties, becausethey would have had to be very light and capacious and strong, to manage to get upagainst these terrible waters. And someone said to me in London, who knew aboutships, well the obvious book to look at is volume 4 part 3 of Joseph Needham's Scienceand 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 said

Mike McCabe his name was

Mikehave you ever heard of a book called Science and Civilisation in China? And he looked


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at me as if I was something the cat had dragged in and he said, you do mean JosephNeedham, and I said I think I do, and he said, have you never heard of Joseph Needhamand I said no I haven't, and he said you ought to be ashamed of yourself, the mostimportant Englishman ever to have lived in China.

He produced this monster book, 17, 18 or 19 volumes, called Science and Civilisation inChina. 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 wentdown 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 lookingat 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 theuse of the compass, and the drawings that I wanted of the Qing dynasty, and I thoughtwho 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 wereseventeen or so other volumes, devoted to astronomy, and botany and ceramics, andengineering - he must have been a remarkable fellow.

Robyn Williams: He certainly was a remarkable fellow, and the question was, was hewriting something that was dry as dust or was if full of beautiful prose, was it done withverve and vigour?

Simon Winchester: Well that's I think what most amazed me. Not only was thiscompendium that I looked at, stunningly full of remarkable arcane information, but itwas beautifully exquisitely produced, with evidently, the work of a person of greatlearning because there were references to all sorts of other cultures in Arabia andHindustan and Africa. He seemed to draw on a lifetime of knowledge and a greatliterary 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, someof the amazing breakthroughs which happened long before in China than they didelsewhere. 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 readChinese which Needham did after he learned it from his mistress in 1938, he startedattacking the archives, and speaking to people, and found out incrementally, this hugelist of achievements. But no one in Britain knew. No one in the west knew it. Theassumption was, the date you mentioned, the early '50s, China, was as Emerson hadsaid, this booby nation, good only for ceramics, silk, rhubarb and tea really. The thoughtthat they had ever been central to the manufacture of human civilisation was justridiculous as far as the west was concerned. We, the west had made it. That wasobvious! Well it was wrong, because Needham, very slowly, very steadily painstakinglyassembled 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 thisreally set him on the path and in short order he had discovered three things which


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Francis Bacon had said most clearly defined modern human kind which was use andmanufacture 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 onesfor the delicate shaped bottoms of the aristocracy. He was an amazing discoverer of thearcane.

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 ishow John Merson introduced the story way back then.

John Merson: It is rather ironic that China in the twentieth century should be seekingmodern science and industrial technology from the West, when up until the sixteenthcentury, the situation was quite the reverse. Francis Bacon, one of the prophets ofmodern science, writing in the seventeenth century, listed the technology which heconsidered essential to the scientific and economic revolution that was transformingEurope: gunpowder, the compass, the clock, paper and printing, along with the skills ofthe European shipbuilders and navigators. Yet these particular technologies we nowknow 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 Romantimes until the Europeans found the sea route to the East in the sixteenth century. Whatis interesting about the movement of technologies from one culture to another is thattheir impact is often so unpredictable. In the case of Europe, the effects of Chineseinventions and artefacts were often far more profound than they were in China itself.Ironically it was these same technologies, transformed by the scientific and industrialrevolution, that were to rebound on China during the nineteenth century when the gunsand cultural values of European imperialism were to bring an end to the culturalsovereignty of the Chinese empire, an empire that had maintained itself for over 2,000years. 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 scienceand technology for an economic revolution similar to that which occurred in Europe inthe 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 bereturning to often throughout this series. Let us begin by looking at some of the basicsocial and economic factors which determined the political institutions and philosophiesof ancient China.I called on Dr Michael Lowe from the School of Oriental Studies whom to explain theremarkable 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 thewhole you have a failure to produce any unity of the same sort. You have the Holy


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Roman Empire, but in political and dynastic terms that doesn't really match up. It's adifference which I am quite sure does derive from a basic view of life which finds itselfformulated 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 seesnature 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 seesman as the centre of existence, and regards man's duty and his pride as being that oforganising 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 whichgovernment and institutions have relied on both these types of philosophy. They have infact succeeded in compromising between the two principles in a peculiarly Chinesefashion. I think you see it in the way in which the whole universe is regarded as a unityin 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 oneand 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 separationbetween mind and body, and in the process you're philosophical world view would be tocreate 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 thesetwo 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 upa 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. InChina 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 ofHeaven which unites, temporal authority and permanent authority. You've got to waitquite a long time in the West before you get the Divine Right of Kings emerging, andthe Divine Right of Kings when it crops up first, is there as a divisive force, rather thanas 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 justexplained was clearly not just some mental aberration on the part of the Chinese. Therewere sound economic reasons for such a world view, for Chinese culture was built onthe 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 pointthat was brought home to me when I visited Professor Jean Chesneaux at the Universityof Paris.

Jean Chesneaux: The life of the peasant is built on the same relationship between thefuture, 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 calendarof 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 theland. 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 arepetition of the past. This is the whole idea of Confucianism. That's for instance the


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reason for which the curriculum on which was based the examinations used to select themost able officials in the empire. This curriculum had no provision at all for any kind oftechnical or administrative training. The same person could be a good general, an ablefinancial 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 withthe 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 perspectivethat has been so much a part of our Christian cultural heritage in the West. Here's DrLowe again.

Michael Lowe: I think in the West you've got this linear view, of time as seen asleading up to the birth and phenomenon of Jesus Christ or leading therefrom, and thewhole 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 whichrecur one after the other, according to established principles. You get this in variousmetaphysical systems, that of the I Ching, the book of changes, with its sixty-foursymbols for sixty-four different situations which follow one another, and then the cyclerepeats. You get the whole idea in the metaphysical system in the five elementscombined with Yin Yang, which interact together according to five phases. Five phasesis, a much better explanation than five elements. You can see it in nature, you see thenatural world obeying these cycles, you see the seasons obeying them on earth, you seethe movements of the heavenly bodies following one another in a cycle, the Chinese seeindividual 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 thathistorical time is marked off by dynasties, beginning usually with the Shang about 1500BC 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 historicalevents from the birth of Christ. In China, historical time began with the foundation ofeach new dynasty, and as Dr Lowe has suggested, these dynasties were seen asfollowing 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 theZhou dynasty, around 1000 BC, which Confucius idealised as part of his polemicagainst the failings of his age. Imperial dynasties in China seem to last on average about200 to 250 years, and it is interesting to note that there may well have been goodreasons for dynasties to follow the same cyclic pattern. Recent meteorological researchhas shown that climatic changes could have something to do with the regular rise andfall of imperial dynasties in China. Here is Dr Clive Gates from the CSIRO in Canberrawho 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


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interplay over China and they have been shown by meteorologists to vary in theirpattern over long periods, and so there will be perhaps sometimes a hundred or twohundred years of below average rainfall, and then a similar period of above averagerainfall. That is a very dynamic factor in the history of China because it is a strangething, 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 periodshave 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 aboutevery couple-of-hundred-years intervals and strangely enough these changes seem to tiein quite a deal with changes in climate that occur round about those fifty to one hundredyears 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 thedykes and canals to good order. The water conservancy system came first. Second, torestore the proper harmony between society and the cosmos through the calendar. Thecalendar is an extremely important mediating factor between the natural state of order-the stars, the sun, the moon and the earth-and man's activity. The calendar is a reflectionof the cosmic order on man's organisation of time and, therefore, to appoint acommissioner of astronomy to restore a calendar in its proper balance with thecalculation of years and months was an act of state, an act of political power, a priorityfor the new state. And third, to appoint a commission of historiography, composed ofhistorians whose duty would be properly to record the story of the previous dynasty soas to assess its successes and its weaknesses in order to make this fallen dynasty, whichhad just been replaced by the new regime, enter the regular span of the previousdynasties, also to take its place on the roll in order to make the historical system ofreference for future generations stronger and broader. Their aim was to make the futureconsistent with the past.

John Merson: It was a very conservative society .

Jean Chesneaux: I should not say conservative, I should say self- perpetuating. Yousee 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 theimperial government mentioned by Professor Chesneaux-the production of the calendarand 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 inChina, to explain the role of the imperial bureaucracy in the development of Chinesescience and, more particularly, observational astronomy.

Joseph Needham: You have to remember that China was basically an agrariancivilisation 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 thecalendar 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 onthem in the West and in other parts of the world. The calendar was the important thing.


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If you accepted the calendar it was equivalent to accepting allegiance to the Chineseemperor.

John Merson: This is what became known as the Asiatic Mode of Production; the greatdependence 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, inturn, determining the nature of its science as well.

Joseph Needham: There is no doubt whatever that there was a predominantlybureaucratic character about Chinese society. In fact, many people often speak ofbureaucratic feudalism in China as opposed to the aristocratic military feudalism ofEurope. 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 militaryaristocratic feudalism in China; broadly speaking no fiefs, no primogeniture, no landed

property in the sense of the Western world. There was this bureaucratic state, andobviously 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 atthe times when they did them. I'll just give you one example, and that is a meridiansurvey which was set up round about 720 AD. It was under the auspices of theastronomer Royal, Nangong Yue, and a very brilliant Tantric Buddhist monk, Yi Xing,who was the greatest mathematician and astronomer of his time. They measured sunshadows 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 thatthere you had an extraordinary concerted effort-bureaucratic if you like, but set up in away 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-whetheror not they worked out the curvature of the earth from it is not quite certain-but theywere extremely interested to know what the difference in sun shadow was for a degreeof latitude and things of that sort.

John Merson: This bureaucratic character of Chinese government allowed aremarkable tradition of observational astronomy to develop. The first recordedobservation 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, Chineseastronomers were making observations and keeping accurate records of events in theheavens. So meticulous were these observations that contemporary astronomers wantingto confirm some theory about the recurrence of meteors or other such phenomena havegone back to these ancient Chinese records. Yet this tradition of fastidious observationsand records wasn't born out of some general scientific interest in astronomy. Astronomyin China, like history, was political, a matter of very particular concern to the emperorand the bureaucracy that surrounded him. Here is Dr Christopher Cullen, an historian ofChinese 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 greatdifferences between China and the classical Western world in which the astronomer was


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perhaps associated with religious activities but was mostly an amateur. We can look atthe role of the astronomer in China very much in a political sense. There is one edictwhich seems to refer to an official determination that state secrets of such importance asastronomical ones should be guarded, that members of the Astronomical Bureau were tohold 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 aboutastronomical portents, you could indirectly make political criticisms that it would not besafe to make by direct means. If we look at the later Han dynasty, which runs fromroughly 1 AD to 200 AD, a scholar named Beilenstein has made a study of statisticalsignificance of these records which reported astronomical patterns to the emperor. Hehas found that there is clear evidence that the official astronomers and others too whowere 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'. Ifyou find a large number of earthquakes, meteors and solar eclipses memorialised, youcan 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 ofgovernment in China than it was in the classical West, and that it was regarded as amatter of most vital necessity for the state to keep an eye on what was going on in theheavens, 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 forpublishing accurate calendars, so that you could say exactly what was going to occur inthe celestial field above.

John Merson: It is interesting in the light of what Christopher Cullen has said aboutportents to consider the significance that many Chinese peasants attributed to the TangShan 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 untilthe sixteenth century was far in advance of Europe in its application of science andtechnology to the service of the state. But there's a problem in talking about 'sciences' inancient China when there weren't people one could describe as being scientists in themodern 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 onemight call the 'professionalisation' of science, which didn't take place in Europe inmodern 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 JosephPriestly or Antoine Lavoisier who would have certainly called themselves hommes descience and so on. But you can't expect that in pre-scientific revolutionary times, so Idon't think you can talk about it but they went by other names, that's all. You couldspeak 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 themathematicians, the 'suanxuejia', who were like the boys in the back rooms of thevarious government departments, or provincial governors, so if somebody was facedwith 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 weretechnicians, really, in the government service and they were certainly called suanxuejia,

'mathematicians', but were not professional as they would have been after the rise ofmodern science. Then you have the doctors. The physicians were a very recognisable


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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 scienceswere orthodox and some were heterodox, so for example, astronomy and mathematicswere very respectable. A Confucian scholar would be quite happy to specialise in one orother 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 suchfields. Where you got to the heterodox side of things was in other departments like, forexample, 'fengshui'. These were the geomancers, the 'gentlemen from Can Zhou' whoused the magnetic compass to ensure the most fortunate siting of temples or familytombs. There was a deep-seated belief that unless the 'fengshui', literally 'wind andwater', was right, you would be dogged with ill-luck of every kind and in the case ofyour tomb, for example, if it were not oriented correctly, your descendants would notrise 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 traditionalChina. I think no one can live in China without realising the value of this in thecountryside. 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 sciencewould be alchemy or early chemistry, because that was the province of the Taoists andthey 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 getqualifying examinations for medical practitioners as early as the fifth century AD underthe Northern Wei dynasty, and in the eighth century you get the establishment of thefirst national medical college and the provincial medical colleges. Every provincialcapital had its own medical college which was supported by the government, and wehave 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 theArabs, 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 thirteenthcentury 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 madebetween the ideas of the Taoists and those of the Con fucianists. Michael Lowe earliermade the point that these two poles of Chinese philosophy had themselves reached aremarkable balance in Chinese culture. Perhaps 'harmony' would be a better way ofdescribing 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 somewherein the fifth century AD who first discovered the formula for gunpowder.

Joseph Needham: Confucianism, the Rujiao as it is called in Chinese, I suppose youcould say was the earlier, but not really because the Confucians and the Taoists grew uptogether, and they were always at loggerheads. The Confucians, the followers of thesage, Master Kong, who lived towards the end of the sixth century BC, were primarilyconcerned with society in this world, and they felt that they knew what it would take forall people to live in harmony and happiness together with the absolute minimum ofstrife. They therefore were very influential throughout Chinese history. Confuciushimself 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 washis maintaining that all young men who could profit by an education should have it. He


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was absolutely democratic from the point of view of educational opportunity. And itwas 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 QinShi Huangdi in 220 BC. Of course there had been a lot of bureaucracy in the feudalstates 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, theannual sacrifices in the Confucian temples were still going on, and I had the opportunityof attending one at Maitong in Guizha, during the war years. The point is that there wasnever any priesthood in Confucianism, there was no theology because the ideas of theConfucians about gods and spirits were extremely sceptical. You remember the masterhimself 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 Confucianismwas sceptical and agnostic, and nevertheless, extremely determined where socialwelfare was concerned, and prepared to inculcate a strong resistance to any ruler whodid things which were evil from the Confucian point of view.

John Merson: Against the Confucian orthodoxy there was of course the Taoisttradition 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 Confucianphilosophers because, in a nutshell, the Taoists felt in their bones that until man knewmore about how nature worked, they would not be able to legislate really well forhuman society. The Confucians had no interest in that. They were not primarilyinterested in nature at all, they were thinking all the time about human society but theTaoists wanted to investigate nature, they wanted to study it and to contemplate it; theyretired to their mountain forests and temples, and made all sorts of investigations, andthat'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 organisehuman society, which was extremely different because they said that it ought to be doneon a spontaneous basis. You will remember that the two great watchwords of theTaoists were 'ziran' something that happens naturally by itself, and 'wuwei' namely, notforcing things, but allowing things to take their course according to nature, and nottrying to go against the grain of nature. They even went so far as to say that if peoplewould let themselves go and obey the dictates of their own natures, then everythingwould work in harmony together. People were so spoilt and bent from forcingthemselves to do things they didn't really want to do. If everybody did what they wantedto 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 toooptimistic and perhaps it was, but nevertheless that was the Taoist vision as opposed tothe Confucian tradition of regimentation.

John Merson: It's a bit like the conflict between classical and romantic tradition inWestern civilisation. Your description of the Taoist is very much like the Rousseauview 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


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century Europe from what it was in fifth century BC China. You can't say it was exactlylike 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 scholar-bureaucrats were the dominant force in Chinese political and cultural life, and as Joseph

Needham has suggested, they tended to follow the Confucian preoccupation with ethicsand 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 subsumedwithin 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 sameemphasis on the individual as one finds instituted in English law, at least from the timeof 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 thatearned these scholar-bureaucrats the praise of Voltaire and other members of the FrenchEnlightenment. The ideal of self-cultivation was a value shared by both Confucianistsand Taoists alike. It was perhaps best reflected in the attitude of the scholar-bureaucratto the arts, and more particularly to painting and music. Here is Dr Pierre Ryckmans, aspecialist in Chinese painting from the Australian National University in Canberra.

Pierre Ryckmans: The main purpose in Chinese culture in all its aspects, whetherConfucian or Taoist, was to achieve harmony. I think harmony is the key word ofChinese traditional culture and civilisation. Whether this harmony was the Confucianoutlook of achieving the harmony of man in society, man with society, man with othermen, together with a set of rules, etiquette and ritual which provide a nice oiling for thesmooth working of human relationships, or the problem of man dealing with himselfand 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 atthe root of everything there is the absolute, which is expressed conveniently, in anegative way, as 'nothingness'. It would be better translated as 'not havingness'. Whatwe call 'being' in Western philosophy is what the Chinese call 'nothingness'. This'nothingness' materialises in the one principle and the one principle itself divides intotwo 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 IChing (Book of Changes) is another way of putting it. They are various expressions ofthe same global cosmological view. So the main research, the main purpose of humanlife is, through the diversity of phenomena, to find a common unity, to find a commondenominator of it all, and to put oneself in unity with it, in harmony with it, and here ofcourse 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?


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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 notcopying creation, he is working like the Creator. He himself is the creator of amicrocosmic universe, just like the cosmic creator is the originator of the macrocosmicuniverse. 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 themacrocosmic creation. This parallelism is achieved at various levels, for instance, at thelevel 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 conceivablein Chinese painting where one of those two elements would be missing. You need tohave both the mountain and the water, which answers to the philosophical terms of maleand female, active and passive, fullness and emptiness and so on. At the plastic level offorms 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-inkcorresponding itself to the couples mountain-water, fullness-emptiness. So all thesethings 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 whichallows the artist to achieve this communion with the world. This is the reason why greatChinese 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 craftsmanand be despised. The painter paints in order to become himself. Painting is a means ofself-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 caseof 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 theimportant thing was not the painting, but the act of painting. The painting itself is just akind of graph, the record of something which happened, like when you have anearthquake and the seismograph gives some graphic outline of what happened.

John Merson: What Pierre Ryckmans has said of Chinese painting is equally true formusic, as Professor Colin Mackerras from Griffith University explains in relation to theChinese 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 tohim. The composer may not say specifically what it does represent as in the case of thework like theJupiterSymphony of Mozart. Now, in the case of the Chinese zither, itwas 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 thisinstrument called Bo Ya was playing the zither one day and he thought of highmountains as he played. He had a very close friend who was listening to him, and whoalways listened to him as he played, and his friend replied 'what a magnificent melodythat is, it evokes the feeling of high mountains'. In other words, he didn't have to be toldwhat 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


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up and commented how broad and flowing it was, just like flowing waters. The idea isthat the hearer is just as important as the player, the hearer can understand what it is thatis 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 playedagain, because he deemed the world not worthy to be played to.

Pierre Ryckmans: These, the highest flowers of Chinese culture were achieved at highcost for the mass of the people. They were indulged in, enjoyed and practised by a verysmall minority. If you look at these things from an inside point of view, from inside thatminority, 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 saysthat there would be no artists-in the future world everyone would be an artist. Similarlyin the limited sphere of that gentry there was no idea of being an artist, or a professionalexpert, 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, aphilosopher, 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 humanitycould only be realised by a tiny handful of people, those who had had access, throughtheir education and successful examination, to the ruling posts, to the posts of commandof the country. This kind of humanistic ideal was closely tied to a certain social andeconomic reality which was the reality of an agrarian state, and a state ruled by a smallscholarly 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 andcivilisation in China, made over thirty years ago by John Merson who is now at theUniversity of New South Wales. Next week, in part 2, we look at some specificsciences, like medicine, and we hear more from Simon Winchester, whose bestseller,

Bomb, Book and Compass, tells the story of Joseph Needham, and the transformation ofChina in recent years. Underlying all this is the mystery of why everything seemed tostop, five hundred years ago. Why did the industrial revolution take off in Europe andnot 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 RadioNational. And this is part 2 ofScience and Civilisation in China, one of the mostremarkable stories in history, and a portrait of one of the most remarkable men. Yousee, before the 1950s, hardly anyone knew, as we take for granted today, that theChinese had invited virtualy everything, hundreds and hundreds of years before thewest. Rudders, stirrups, printing, bridges, grafting parts of trees to each other, toilet


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paper; different sizes of paper for men's bottoms, and women's bottoms, and so on andon. But then Jospeh Needham went to China in the 1940s during the war, and spedaround the countryside, everywhere, finding it all out, and revealing the secret, in hiscolossal 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'scontribution. 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 ofwhich he was trained in.

Simon Winchester: Indeed! Well you hit the nail on the head when you asked aboutpromiscuity, because that's really what led him to it. I prefer to use womanizing becauseI 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 in1937, when he was laboring away with his wife in biochemistry, he was anembryologist, his wife was a specialist in the mechanics of muscles, what happens whenmuscles contract, suddenly because of the turmoil in China with the Japanese invasionin 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, DorothyNeedham. Joseph fell for her. And she responded. This man was tall and loud andboisterous and he looked like Harry Potter on steroids. He was a very attractive man inhis comparative youth, he was then 37. They began an affair and when it wasconsummated, a day which you can follow through every twist and turn of the detail, itwas 17th February 1938, after the consummation, she taught him his first ever characterin Chinese. And he wrote later he said it was seeing that character, it was the characterfor cigarette, when you've done the deed, I suppose it's the obvious thing to write, hesaid it was as though a door had opened onto an utterly alien universe, and I steppedthrough it and I was never the same again. I entered the glittering crystalline world ofChinese idiographic writing, and I fell hopelessly in love with it, and the place fromwhich it came.

Robyn Williams: You mentioned the Japanese in China. We now see China as acollusus. But in fact, just a few decades ago, in the '30s, it was completely disastrouswasn'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 Americancolonies, George III had decided to send a mission to China, under a man called LordMcCartney. McCartney arrived at this haughty magnificence of the Chinese court. Whoare you? said the emperor, there was this vulgar man with lots of hair and a big nose andsmelled of an old wet dog. Well you've come to see me? Well go and stand alongsidethe 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 gavehim Wedgewood china, he said this was impertinent, we've been making much betterchina 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 havetheir heads higher than his, the emperor. He couldn't possibly accept that. So he said


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very grandly, we have no use for your country's manufactures. Be gone! And so theMcCartney 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 nineteenthcentury, which is why essentially we went to war over opium in 1839, which resulted inthe 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 haveHainan Island in the south, the Germans took Shandong in the east then the Japanesetook Manchuria, and then the Japanese said to heck with this, we're going to take all ofeast Asia, and blend into this huge co-prosperity sphere, as they called it in Tokyo, andlaunched a major attack on a China, which was already internally weakened, becausethe 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 asyou quite rightly it was a complete and total shambles.

Robyn Williams: And he arrived there as a kind of diplomat during the war and justslightly 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 collegeand 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 dothis?!

Simon Winchester: He just had irrepressible enthusiasm, endless curiosity and thisimbued with a sense of wonder. He loved it! He travelled thirty thousand or fortythousand miles! He once joked with Mao that he had travelled far longer than the longmarch. 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 hewas based because that was the capital at the time, in Sichuan province. He went up tothe caves of Dunhuang which was a seven-month journey through the Gobi desert. Hewent to Fujo in the east, that's near Shanghai and Shanghai was occupied by theJapanese. He went down to the Burmese border, and then he went up to Sian andBeijing and the north once the Japanese had been kicked out in 1945. And on all ofthese adventures, you're absolutely right, there were car crashes and he was flooded anddisasters with the engines. I'll never buy a Chevrolet after reading this! And he met themost extraordinary people and as well as performing his official British governmentduties, which was to help keep alive the refugee universities that had assembled in thewest of China to get away from the depredations of the Japanese, he collected all thisinformation 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 unimaginablequantities of material to him, including, two copies of the longest encyclopedia everwritten, which one of the emperors commissioned during the middle Qing, during the1820s 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 whichyou don't quite answer in the book, is, given all that brilliance, over those hundreds ofyears when China produced virtually everything, a few hundred years ago somethingstopped, and Europe invented the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution and thescientific revolution. Why didn't the Chinese? At what point did Needham know that

was the big question?


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Simon Winchester: Which is eponymously, the Needham question, and it underpinsthe writing of the book. Well before he left actually, he had already discussed thesematters with Gwei-Djen, who by this time, 1943, was teaching at Columbia Universityin New York. And there's an indication I found on a piece of paper, a letter of invitationhe 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, hewas able to establish, that there was, and he was able to look at early Chinesemathematical treatises for instance, that there had clearly been a Chinese Euclid. Andthere had already been a Chinese Archimedes. But there was never to be a ChineseGalileo. There was never to be a Chinese Einstein. Why he kept wondering! Whatstopped China and why did the engine of creativity pass to the west? Why is all modernscience a creation of the west, and not of this county that had this vast tradition? Henever really answered it in volume 7 part 2 which he wrote at 94 years old in 1994, hehad a stab at it. He said really, it's easier to answer why there was so much creativity inthe west. Rather than why there was so much less creativity in the east. He said, well, itwas 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 Dutchare 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. Therewas no intramural competition in a China that under the late Ming was essentially onemonolithic country. There was that. But at the same time he realized that the system ofgovernance 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, butto become a bureaucrat. So that he could run China with a Mandarin's cap along thesame lines that it had always been run. And so that kind of an ambition meant that therewas 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 suddenlywith all this fierce competition became a great hotbed of innovation.

Robyn Williams: Simon Winchester. His biography of Joseph Needham is calledBomb, Book and Compass, and it came out in 2008. And so to John Merson's 1979series which we've adapted forThe 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 tohear these thoughts in 2009, as we watch that country take on the future in a way thatwill 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 andthe five elements as being central to the traditional Chinese view of nature and thecosmos. So to begin the program, I asked Dr Joseph Needham to explain the origins ofthe idea. Dr Needham you'll recall is the author and the editor of the series, Science andCivilisation in China.

Joseph Needham: There was a kind ofphilosophia perennis, a perennial naturalphilosophy 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 tomodern times. But so far as traditional Chinese science, technology and medicine were


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concerned, there was always one essential natural philosophy which dominated invarious ways the different fields. If you ask what that was, of course it was based on theconceptions of Yin and Yang and the five elements, and also many ideas connected withthe '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 mightdescribe 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 physicsand about our knowledge of the world and the universe. It started out by the idea of thesunny side and the shady side of hills. The Yin was the shady side, the Yang was thesunny 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, femaleside of the world. I don't think this ever failed to play a part in natural philosophy inChina, right through the ages and down to the time when modern science came, andatomic 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 thatthe 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 thefour 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 thegreatest 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 runsthrough everything in China, and is absolutely contrary to the sharp separation betweenspirit and matter which you get in Descartes for instance, the Cartesian separation of thetwo which was no doubt extremely important in the origins of modern science; but itwas very antipathetic to Chinese ideas.

John Merson: For another perspective on this distinction between Chinese and Greeknatural philosophy here is Professor Nathan Sivin an Historian of Chinese Philosophyand Science, from the University of Philadelphia.

Nathan Sivin: In the two societies for which we have a great deal of information aboutthe beginnings of science, the European and the Chinese, we can see that just aboutevery possibility of human thought was at least played with before the people workedout a characteristic form. In both societies we can see attempts to understand howchange takes place and how the world keeps more or less equal to itself through changein two different ways. One is by thinking of all the change as a change in state ofsomething that is always there. So for instance with Anaximenes you can think of atable as air that is condensed to the point that it is hard and you can hear it when youknock on it, and you can think of the table when it is burnt as simply changing into amore rarified kind of air. So you are not faced with the potent metaphysical question-certainly 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 thatunderlies it is thinking in terms of life cycles. You find that thinking to some extent


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among the Greeks, you find it much more in China, and it tended to becomepredominant there. People were aware that there is the cycle of birth and growth andmaturity and decay and death, that every living thing follows. They believed, asEuropeans did until very recently, that this was not only true for the animal andvegetable 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 fourthousand years to mature in the bowels of the earth, there is a common shape thatdefines the constancy that underlies all the change that seems to be going on at randomaround us which really isn't random at all. In other words, the Chinese tended to beaware of processes and the way processes fit together and the way smaller processeswere related to larger processes. The sorts of philosophic concepts that they used to talkabout them were ways of looking at the parts of processes, so that Yin and Yang forinstance 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 partthat accepts change and acts as the body on which change takes place, the light part andthe 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 theyworked together in the order of time, how they were complementary.

John Merson: Yin and Yang of course expand into the social definitions as well, interms of food, in terms of male and female, in terms of a vast range of categories, don'tthey?

Nathan Sivin: When these categories were defined, there was no idea, just as therewasn't in the West until rather recently, that science was one thing, and the rest ofhuman enterprise was another, so it was natural, just as it was for Aristotelians, for anunderstanding of change in nature to fit with an understanding of change in society andin an understanding of individual growth. The other set of concepts that we can find inall the sciences that grew up in early society was Wuxing which for some time has beentranslated as 'five elements'. That tradition grew up when the Jesuit missionaries went toChina and were trying to find aspects of Chinese culture that they could assimilate totheir own so that they could show the Chinese that European culture was better at doingits thing. They were very intent on showing the superiority of European science in theseventeenth century by proving that four elements are better than five-just at the time, ofcourse, 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 wereused 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 theideas of Yin Yang and the five elements to explain a more specific process in nature-thereason we fall ill, and the action of chemical medications. Here's Professor Ho PengYoke from Griffith University in Queensland who is a specialist in Chinese medicineand alchemy.

Ho Peng Yoke: Different parts of the human body are associated with these fiveelements. 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 gallbladder and the eyes with wood; the lungs, the large intestine and the nose with metal;


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the stomach, the spleen and the mouth with earth. Harmony between the two forces ofYin 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 othercould cause sickness, and in extreme cases they would cause death. So the task of atraditional 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 surgicaloperation.

John Merson: It is interesting that when you look at the development of Chinesemedical practices, and Chinese science in general, you see a lack of a theoretical basewhich modern science has, a methodology, yet it had an empirical base, it wasexperimental . .

Ho Peng Yoke: Yes. Take the case of copper sulphate which the Chinese used as aneye remedy, of course it is useful, we know that copper sulphate can be used as an eyeremedy, 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 greenin colour and green belongs to the wood element. Now I come back to the five elementsI mentioned earlier on. The liver, as I mentioned, is associated with wood, and wood isgreen in colour so they say that the green colour was associated with wood and with theliver and the liver with the eye, so the argument goes, therefore copper sulphate is goodfor the eye, hence it is a good remedy.

John Merson: In effect, on purely empirical grounds, it is good for the eye, but theargument is irrational in terms of what we know now about chemistry and physiologyand there were other examples like this. I think the case of acupuncture is an interestingexample. Here you had a method by which pain could be relieved, the functions ofvarious organs could be affected, but the rationale of how it worked goes no waytowards explaining what was really taking place. How did they arrive at the knowledgeof the connection, say, between copper sulphate and eyes, when in fact their theoriesabout how it worked were nothing like the truth.

Ho Peng Yoke: I think all this knowledge was gained through experience. They justhappened to find out that copper sulphate was good for the eyes, then they tried to findan explanation after that. Of course it doesn't follow that anything green is good for theeyes. I think what the Chinese did was not to use the theory to find out new things, butto 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 aneffective treatment without recourse to the sort of theoretical models common tomodern medicine and science. Acupuncture is a remarkably complex technique of

blocking the nervous impulses reaching the brain which was developed in China at avery 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 thebody 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 tocirculate. It is a very old system, going back to the middle of the first millennium BC,


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and it was gradually developed in the course of time. There are many specialisedtextbooks on it, right down to our own time. The Western world started to sit up andtake notice of it I think about twenty years ago, and it was only when it was discoveredin China that acupuncture anaesthesia could permit major surgery to be done on peoplewhile 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 aboutinvestigating acupuncture.

John Merson: It has been suggested by some observers that the effect of acupuncture ispsychological. I think you have, in your research, pointed out that this is not true, thatthere is a physiological process involved. Can you explain what you mean?

Joseph Needham: We certainly believe that there is a physiological effect, but on theother hand, I wouldn't say that it hasn't got a psychological component, in fact, I shouldgo so far as to say that every form of therapy, every kind of healing which man has everused, 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 therest of the world, have elucidated the impulses which go up the spinal cord from theneedles when they are stuck in at the periphery. You see, they stimulate nerve endingson the surface of the body, at the edges of the body as it were, and the impulses arerelayed up the spinal cord. It is quite easy to visualise it if you think of the nervoussystem as a telephone exchange. It is a vast mass of millions of telephone cables, theneurons reaching up and down from the brain to the edges of the body. If you canimagine a situation where you can block the impulses coming from a pain area, youcould have a kind of exchange where they could never get anything but the engagedtone, all lines busy. Block the pain impulses getting through to the cortex then youwould be home and dry and that is what, broadly speaking, is the meaning of the gatetheory, which is one way of explaining how acupuncture works.

John Merson: The Chinese have been using this for centuries: how do they see it? Youare talking about it in contemporary scientific terms but how did the Chinese explain theway it worked?

Joseph Needham: They didn't explain it in terms of modern scientific theories, ofcourse, because once again it is quite obvious that if one has firmly fixed in one's mindthe idea that modern science didn't start until the time of Galileo, it is no use trying tolook into Chinese history for scientific theories of modern type, but that doesn't meanthat they didn't have any theories. They did have a theory about the action ofacupuncture needles, because part of their medical theory was the idea that the Yin andYang balance in the body was upset, or balance between the different organs or viscerawas 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 howone 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 andcrossed into Europe from Russia and Turkey in the eighteenth century. It is the principle


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which Jenner expanded into the modern method of vaccination. What is fascinatingabout 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 EastAsian History of Science Library at the University of Cambridge.

Lu Gwei-jen: Since the tenth century physicians knew that they could prevent smallpoxspreading, by variolation. Variolation is a term we use for human inoculum, for instancethe smallpox virus which came from other patients. The pustule content was taken fromthe 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 fewweeks 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 beinoculated, 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 itsrhythms 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. Thebody 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 theweather that placed great demands on your ability to adjust, because normally the bodyrhythms were finely tuned to those of the seasons. You could get sick through an excessof emotion too, because the emotional rhythms were seen as tied to the cycle of theseasons.

John Merson: Restraint was expected of people and I suppose that if you were going tohave a general philosophical orientation with this emphasis upon harmony, the harmonyof family, the harmony of the universe, the harmony of nature and your relationship tonature, 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 thecycle of the seasons has all the possibility of diversity in it. You might say that one ofthe reasons why Chinese society was able to remain stable for so long was that itallowed 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 Confucianofficials. He was just fitting into a different convention. In the same way what matteredwas doing things in their time. It wasn't that you had to hold yourself in, but that youfound the proper time to let yourself out, so that in spring according to the Chinese viewthere was a good deal of appropriateness in exuberant emotion, just as it would begrossly out of place in winter when things were slowing down. Every possibility foremotion, every possibility for physical behaviour, every possibility for functioningwithin the body had its place in this scheme. What mattered was the rhythms of theircoming out. It was the doctor's job to understand where the break was between theeconomy 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.


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John Merson: Did the doctors have a sense of pathology, a sense of the way in whichpeople contracted specific diseases?

Nathan Sivin: It was on the one hand not a germ theory in that it never looked at singlecauses. 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 verywidespread disease, because that's the cause we can isolate, that we can look at under amicroscope. It is interesting that the psychosomaticists are the people who have taughtus most about how limited a view that is, without at the same time saying it is all inyour brain. That's because you can find behavioural patterns, not just patterns ofthought, but patterns of living and behaving, that tend to be common to people withtuberculosis. They tend to be patterns that discourage regular hours, that discourageregular diet, that make it difficult to lead a comfortable life with enough sleep. On theone 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 alsothink 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 veryrecently the tuberculosis bacilli were in everybody's body in the world, or nearlyeverybody'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'thave them you wouldn't get tuberculosis) they weren't a cause in the other sense, that isto say that if you did have them you would get tuberculosis. So if we look at theirthought in a much more general way than merely scientifically, the Chinese didn't tendto think about reducing the complex causation of every event in the world to a singlecause that could be looked at under the microscope and talked about to the exclusion ofthe others. They wanted to know everything that made something happen. That'sdangerous too, in a way, because once you start looking at everything, there's no placeto 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 thebeginning was the use of chemicals in the treatment of disease; copper sulphate, youwill recall, was a common eye remedy. Now this tradition of using metals as well asherbal compounds in the composition of drugs is a development which originated inChina around the first century BC and didn't reach Europe until around the thirteenthcentury. But it is not until the time of Paracelsus, the great fifteenth century alchemistand physician, that you first see mercury being prescribed for the treatment of syphiliswhich 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 deepinfluence of China on Europe, which nobody would ordinarily suspect, and that is thewhole idea of chemical medicine. The point is that the Hellenistic proto-chemists as wecall them, the people in first and second century Alexandria, were not really interestedin 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 theidea 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 veryearly 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 Shaojunasked the Emperor Wu of the Han to support his researches into elixirs and other means


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of obtaining great longevity. From that time it doesn't look back and there is the directconnection with the making of gold from other things, already started at that time. Wefound to our great interest that this idea of a chemical medicine passes over from Chinathroughout the rest of the Old World, it spread out during the Middle Ages. It reachedthe 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 thenit got to the Byzantines in the eleventh century, and finally to the Latins, our ownancestors, in the thirteenth. There you find Roger Bacon, for example, whom I wastempted to describe as the first European to talk like a Taoist. One of Bacon's books wascalledDe Rate Adate Adexium Senum Tactus, 'How to Retard the Afflictions of OldAge', and there he said that if only we knew more about chemistry, we should be able toincrease the length of life of man enormously. Of course he couldn't say 'forever' as theChinese were prepared to believe, but he did have the examples of Methuselah in theBible and 969 years wasn't doing too badly, and he thought that we could get there if weknew 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 emperorsand scholars throughout the long history of the practice. The second approach was amystical one, whereby the contemplation of chemical processes put one in touch withthe essential principles of change, embodied in the ideas of Yin, Yang, and the fiveelements mentioned earlier. Firstly, the elixir of immortality. Professor Ho Peng Yokeagain.

Ho Peng Yoke: The objective of Chinese alchemy was to find an elixir of life whichwould bring about physical immortality. A person who has taken such an elixir will notgo 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 themountains at will, and he will stay in another world, but he could come back to thisworld if he liked. Now the Chinese did not have the notion of a soul like the Christiansor the Muslims in other parts of the world; they thought that death was avoidablemedicine. In fact, the elixir was prescribed in the same way as medicine, so there was aclose link between medicine and alchemy. The Chinese also believed that one metalcould transform into another metal quite readily in the natural state. For example, leadcould change into a golden type of colour, into silver, into gold, and for that mattersulphur 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 thechange, so that Chinese alchemists could try to change the base metals into gold, andthat was the first objective. After making gold they could change the gold into the elixirof life, which is quite unlike alchemy in other parts of the world. In Europe the makingof gold was the primary objective, in China that was only secondary, it was only ameans to an end.

Nathan Sivin: The alchemists on the whole were interested in various ends that did nothave to do with the understanding of what we would identify as chemical change. Somealchemists were interested in making an elixir of immortality that would make peopleimmune 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 littlelaboratory models of the cosmic process so that the great cycles of the cosmos, that took


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thousands of years to work out in nature, could be recapitulated in a year in thelaboratory so that they could contemplate them.

John Merson: Here again, we return to the point that was made earlier by PierreRyckmans, 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 gettingoneself into harmony with the cosmic process. The same mystical objective was true ofthe alchemists in their contemplation of chemical change, but it is with the use of elixirsof immortality and longevity that one comes across something of a paradox. For if theTaoists, 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? Surelythe principle of wuwei. of going along with nature, which Joseph Needham hasmentioned, would have led them to accept the inevitablity of death with someequanimity. 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 underthe aegis of their religion, the question might arise as to how it could have beenreconciled with the cultivation of that calmness of mind, and serenity undisturbed byany external circumstances, including death, which were so prominent in philosophicalTaoism. But it is only a seeming paradox. Inheriting, perhaps, a traditional Confucian

prejudice, we probably tend to make altogether too sharp a distinction between Taoistreligion and Taoist philosophy. Now longevity was obviously a technique, and materialimmortality simply a greater one. No successful technique could go against the grain ofnature, in order to work it must go along with it. The real question at issue here iswhether extending human life indefinitely was going against nature, and the answer isthat it was not, because nature's time scales were variable, and in a word if you couldfind the right medicine, the right drug, the right chemical substance, which nature itselfhad created, you would be able perhaps to go on for many decades, perhaps manycenturies, perhaps forever, on the surface of the earth.

John Merson: There are supposed to be some quite horrific stories of the attempts toinduce 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 thatthe strangest paradox of all was the fact that the oldest chemical explosive known toman was discovered by the Taoists, precisely in the course of their efforts to attainlongevity or immortality drugs. It

The Astonishing Dr Joseph Needham

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