The Invention of Everything: Joseph Needham and the Rediscovery of Chinese Science

Sean Paterson is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society living in Guangzhou

In 1620, the great polymath Francis Bacon published his magnum opus, the Novum Organum. Among an early draft of the scientific method, he considered three inventions that had, in his own lifetime, turned the world upside down.

‘It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequences of discoveries’, he wrote, ‘and these are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three of which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely printing, gunpowder, and the magnet [or compass]’. Indeed, he concluded, ‘no empire, no sect, no star, seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.’

While Bacon may have been satisfied to consider ‘bomb, book, and compass’ (in Simon Winchester’s neat phrase) as happy mysteries, we now know better. They are neither obscure, inglorious, nor – relative to Bacon’s time – recent. All three are Chinese inventions.

Of course, China’s contributions in the history of science and technology go far beyond this trio. Most of us could, if pressed, rattle off a preliminary list: paper, the abacus, chopsticks, tea, silk and sericulture, kites, seed drills, porcelain, steelmaking, wheelbarrows, and drilling for natural gas. Common to all is a date of invention often centuries, even millennia, before their better-known European discoveries: Sichuanese salt miners were flaring off gas from bamboo derricks as Roman legions marched on Gaul.

This list of achievements is, today, common knowledge – and internet listicle fodder. And yet, until well into the twentieth century, Bacon’s view remained predominant. Absent the odd concession here and there, China’s contributions to science were widely overlooked. That we now think differently is, in great part, the result of one man’s extraordinary work.

Joseph Needham became involved with China almost by accident. A biochemist by training, he had found a comfortable perch at Cambridge, married a fellow professor, and in 1931, published a landmark text, Chemical Embryology, that both he and his colleagues suspected might be an early summit to a promising career. Then, rather suddenly, his personal and professional lives collided.

In 1937, a young Chinese researcher arrived at Newnham. Lu Gwei-Djen, daughter of a Nanjing apothecary, had been studying vitamins in Shanghai when she was forced to flee the Japanese assault. Ferociously intelligent, vivacious, and remarkably tough (she had continued her research despite a dose of typhoid), she studied under Dorothy Needham, who soon introduced her to her husband.

While later eulogies were politely discreet, we know from Needham’s own diaries and letters that an affair quickly developed, eventually maturing into an suitably bohemian menage-a-trois between Lu and the Needhams. In his own telling, after one assignation, Needham turned to Lu and, lighting a cigarette, asked her what the Chinese word for it was. She told him.

After that fateful smoke break, Needham turned his attention to learning Chinese, quickly establishing a mastery of the language. From here, his interest in Chinese affairs expanded rapidly. He was soon, as so many students find themselves, intoxicated.

Five years later, war work gave Needham the opportunity to travel to China for the first time. Appointed head of a British scientific commission, he was given orders to report on the state of Chinese universities and chemical research, and flown – at no inconsiderable risk – into the wartime capital, Chongqing.

Laying on a rocky promontory at the junction of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers, Chongqing is, as travellers from Somerset Maugham to Paul Theroux have noted, a natural fortress. A thousand miles upriver of Shanghai, it was beyond the reach of Japan’s army – if not of near-daily air-raids. It made the best redoubt for the wartime government, which had relocated there – alongside all of China’s universities, temporarily combined into one. From a base here, Needham spent four years travelling – by plane, jeep and boat – around China.

Easily dispatching with his official work, Needham began collecting old manuscripts and interviewing scientists. One after another, in field after field, they would proudly point to an early Chinese invention of something commonly assumed to be a European innovation. Needham, his curiosity piqued, began to think. If what they claimed was true, then why wasn’t Chinese science better known? If China had had such a formidable advantage, why had Europe leapfrogged it? Why did China, with millennia of innovation behind it, seemingly plateau in the seventeenth century? Why had the Scientific Revolution taken place in Europe, and not China?

Professional duties intervened, and Needham spent two years in the US, as head of natural sciences at the newly-founded UNESCO – indeed, he would later claim he put the S in its name – before he could return to Cambridge with his hoard of materials and a burning question.

Eventually reunited with Lu – who had had a glittering career of her own in Nanjing and Paris before settling in Cambridge in 1957 – and a bevy of Chinese colleagues, Needham set to work. Plans for a single, albeit substantial, volume on what was soon being referred to the Needham Question proved insufficient. Noting the lack of a systematic account of Chinese inventions in English, he planned out a series, Science and Civilisation in China, in seven volumes, each tackling a key theme: physics, biology, military technology, and so on. He anticipated perhaps a decade’s work.

Needless to say, it took far longer, occupying the rest of Needham and Lu’s lives. While keeping to his original scheme, it soon became apparent that more hands were needed, and teams of researchers took over the writing of each volume under the pair’s aegis. Needham himself began to take a backseat, particularly after his reputation was imperilled by his very public assertion – at the height of the Red Scare – that the United States had used chemical weapons in North Korea. After a rush of volumes in the Sixties and Seventies, work began to slow as topics became harder to trace in detail. They are still being published today, and what began as a small team enterprise has become the ongoing work of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge. The series is nearing completion, having reached seventeen thick volumes and tens of thousands of pages. It has also been simultaneously published in Chinese, while two abridgements followed in the Eighties – one for the general reader, and an illustrated coffee-table book prepared for the Queen’s 1986 visit to China.

Today, few outside the NRI can seriously say they have read all of Science and Civilisation in China. It has become one of those books, like Gibbon or Toynbee, that one speaks of highly – if vaguely – and raids for essays. It is a mainstay of embassy bookshelves, and full sets sometimes turn up with London dealers, but readers are thin on the ground. Nonetheless, its influence – perhaps because of its forbidding length and air of impeccable sagacity – is assured. In a pleasing twist, a book conceived seventy-five years ago, that did so much to establish China’s historical scientific credentials, has become relevant once again, as an ur-text for those who want to understand one of the biggest trends in modern science: an epochal shift to the East.

Needham wouldn’t recognise Chongqing now. The city has sprawled and grown beyond his wildest dreams. Illuminated skyscrapers thrum and buzz in a swirl of hyperactive advertisements, and the lung-busting staircases he rued have been replaced by moving walkways. Now the industrial capital of China’s southwest, it is one of the world’s largest metropolises – and the site of dozens of scientific research stations.

His adopted city is just one of the more visible examples of a greater trend. China, almost as if in answer to the Needham question, has barrelled headfirst into the future. Forty years of breakneck modernisation have launched it into the first rank of scientific powers. Chinese scientists publish at formidable rates: ranked by research output, eleven of the world’s top twenty universities are now in China. In materials science, engineering, mining, electronics, and (increasingly) artificial intelligence, China arguably leads the world; while across the Global South, the next generation of engineers is just as often trained in Shanghai or the Pearl River Delta as in Silicon Valley. Those who know China’s history of innovation and invention will have no doubt about its future. And for that knowledge, they have to thank Joseph Needham, his tireless half-century of work, and the ongoing efforts of his successors.

*title image credit: Needham in his laboratory at Cambridge, c. 1950. Courtesy of Needham Research Institute Archives.

The opinions expressed are those of the contributor, not of the RSAA.

Science and Civilisation in China
This series is recognised as one of the most remarkable works of scholarship in the twentieth century. Originally proposed as a single volume of 600 to 800 pages, the project now encompasses seventeen books. The published volumes reflect Needham’s vision of the field of the history of science and its social background in China, and his aim to make Chinese achievements in science and technology better understood.