Content area
Full Text
An English biochemist single-handedly changed the West's perception of China, revealing its past scientific glories and predicting more to come. Simon Winchester investigates the ongoing legacy of Joseph Needham.
Seldom does the pork-andrice reliability of a Chinese takeaway spring a revelation. One frigid December evening last year in Washington DC, as I was counting out money for a Shanghainese delivery man, I mentioned that I was writing a book about Joseph Needham, known in China as Li Yue-se. Hardly anyone in the United States knew of my chosen subject, so I was astonished when the delivery man gave a sudden and enthusiastic response. "How wonderful!" he replied. "Li Yue-se! The most famous Englishman ever to have lived in China! We are taught about him in school. He is loved in China, because he told us Chinese about ourselves. He helped us to feel proud about all we have done in the past."
The encounter underlined a sobering reality. Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (1900-1995), the sole architect and author of what is universally acknowledged to be the greatest and most authoritative of all books about China in the English language, is now far better known in the country about which he wrote than in his homeland where he wrote it.
This autumn marks 60 years since Needham began work on what would become his masterpiece: an enormous series of books entitled Science and Civilisation in China. Each volume was greeted with stunned admiration by critics and scholars around the world - the approbation growing as the number of volumes swelled. Together the books can now probably lay claim - although their author never did - to causing a profound mind-shift in the way the West came to regard the mysterious and long ill-regarded China.
Fresh perspective
Needham was among the first in the Western world to realize the scope of China's historic achievements, and so to expect an equally glittering future for the nation. Now China is indeed rising to prominence again. And yet Needham, known and revered in China, is still very much a prophet without honour in the Western world. Except for within a scattering of academic centres, his name is little known or long forgotten.
Needham's interest in China came comparatively...