Introduction (Part I)

Joseph Needhjam

I should like to give a warm welcome to this book by Robert Temple. It is, in its own way, a brilliant distillation of my Science and Civilisation in China, published by the Cambridge University Press, a work which will be complete in some twenty-five volumes and of which fifteen have now appeared or are passing through the press.

The extraordinary inventiveness, and insight into nature, of ancient and medieval China raises two fundamental questions. First, why should they have been so far in advance of other civilizations; and second, why aren't they now centuries ahead of the rest of the world? We think it was a matter of the very different social and economic systems between China and the West, as I will explain more fully in a moment. Modern science arose only in Europe in the seventeenth century when the best method of discovery was itself discovered; but the discoveries and inventions made then and thereafter depended in so many cases on centuries of previous Chinese progress in science, technology and medicine.

Perhaps I should describe how I became involved in all this. Coming to Cambridge in 1918, intending to read medicine, I was trained primarily as a biochemist, and specialized in the connections of biochemistry with embryology, producing Chemical Embryology in 1931, and Biochemistry and Morphogenesis in 1942. But I was always interested in the history of science, and in a way Charles Singer did as much for me as Frederick Gowland Hopkins. My History of Embryology came out in 1934.

Three years later the laboratories in which I worked received several Chinese scientists, some intending to do research leading to the doctorate. We became great friends, and this had two effects upon me: first, I found that the better I got to know them the more exactly like my own their minds were, which raised in acute form the question of why modern science had begun only in Europe. Second, I learnt the Chinese language; and I did so as a labor of love, which is quite a different thing from going through the mill of the Oriental Studies Tripos. By the time that one of them, now long my chief collaborator, Lu Gwei-Djen, left in 1940, we had decided that "something absolutely must be done" about the history of science, technology and medicine in traditional Chinese culture.

Then in 1942 I was asked to go to China, as an envoy from the Royal Society, and this led to my staying there "for the duration" of the Second World War as Scientific Counsellor at the British Embassy in Chungking. Since the post involved a great deal of traveling, I had ample opportunities for learning about what had happened in Chinese history; wherever I went there was usually someone, a medical doctor, a mathematician or an engineer, who was deeply interested in how the subject had developed in his own culture, and was able to tell me what to read, what books to buy if possible, and so on. Thus I gained a remarkable orientation, which perhaps could hardly have been achieved in any other way. After the war was over I put in two years helping to build up Unesco by organizing the Division of Natural Sciences.

When I returned to Cambridge in 1948 the project of Science and Civilisation in China began in earnest, with the help of my first collaborator Wang Ching-Ning. Although I was still Sir William Dunn Reader in Biochemistry, and therefore had a good many lectures to give to the advanced students, we made good progress, and the first volume of the series came out in 1954. Looking back at it now, I feel that in a task of this sort it is very important not to know too much, but yet to be in possession of a boundless enthusiasm for the Chinese people and their achievements over the ages. Now some fifteen volumes have been published, and the whole set is expected to consist of at least twenty-five, so we have come a long way since we started.

And gradually what a cave of glittering treasures was opened up! My friends among the older generation of sinologists had thought that we should find nothing—but how wrong they were. One after another, extraordinary inventions and discoveries clearly appeared in Chinese literature, archeological evidence or pictorial witness, often, indeed generally, long preceding the parallel or adopted, inventions and discoveries of Europe. Whether it was the array of binomial coefficients, or the standard method in interconversion of rotary and longitudinal motion, or the first of all clockwork escapements, or the plowshare of malleable cast iron, or the beginnings of geobotany and soil science, or the finding of smallpox inoculation—wherever one looked there was "first" after "first".

Francis Bacon had selected three inventions, paper and printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass, which had done more, he thought, than any religious conviction, or any astrological influence, or any conqueror's achievements, to transform completely the modern world and mark it off from antiquity and the Middle Ages. He regarded the origins of these inventions as "obscure and inglorious" and he died without ever knowing that all of them were Chinese. We have done our best to put this record straight.

Chauvinistic Westerners, of course, always try to minimize the indebtedness of Europe to China in antiquity and the Middle Ages, but often the circumstantial evidence is compelling. For example, the first blast furnaces for cast iron, now known to be Scandinavian of the late eighth century AD, are of closely similar form to those of the previous century in China; while as late as the seventeenth century all the magnetic compasses of surveyors and astronomers pointed south, not north, just as the compasses of China had always done. In many cases, however, we cannot as yet detect the capillary channels through which knowledge was conveyed from East to West. Nevertheless we have always adopted the very reasonable assumption that the longer the time elapsing between the appearance of a discovery or invention in one part of the world, and its appearance later on in some other part of the world far away, the less likely is it that the new thing was independently invented or discovered.