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Sinofile - A regular round-up of news from China.
The Chinese language explained - Walter Fung explores the basics of the Chinese language.
Timechart summary of China's history - David Wright's quick guide to Chinese history.
China's Exploding Technology- A reprint of Dr Joseph Needham's survey of science and technology given at the fifth AGM in 1970.
Images of the Grand Canal - Keith Ray describes the longest man-made waterway in the World.
Chinese poems and proverbs - A selection of Chinese poems and proverbs.
China Eye Diary - Notices and events.
Joseph Needham was an eminent Sinologist and historian of the science and technology of old China. He was a founder member and President of SACU. At the SACU Annual General Meeting on 16 May 1970 he gave a lecture on the developments of science, pure and applied in present-day (1970) China and related them to the inventions and discoveries of the past.
On the occasion of SACU's 40th anniversary, China Eye is reprinting this lecture which was first published in the SACU journal, the 'China Eye' of the day'.
Well, Chairman and friends, I'm afraid everybody will be very disappointed tonight in this talk, because unfortunately I'm afraid it won't be very bright. The thing is that I am fundamentally nowadays a historian, a historian of science and technology, and I'm not one really well up in the current developments of science pure and applied in China at the present day.
Nevertheless I have put a good deal together along the general idea that we should try to have a look at things that had been done during the past two or three years, and in fact since the Cultural Revolution came to China, in the field of science and technology; linking it up at the same time with background material which may take us back for centuries. I don't think there's any harm in doing that, because the idea that China suddenly sprung, as it were, out of the earth from nowhere and has suddenly impinged upon people's mentality, has nothing to do with China - it's only a reflection on people's mentality, that they haven't been aware of it before.
But if one looks at the whole thing as one continuous fine of evolution, I think it's extremely fruitful. Now the Chairman of course has already referred to the question of the satellite, which people are calling 'Mao No. 1'. In case anyone doesn't know the proper name for it, it's jen-tsao ti-chhiu wei-hsing. (in pin yin this is 'ren zuo di tiu wei xing') Somebody asked me that - in fact the interviewer asked me on the impromptu interview which the BBC had on the Home Service not long after it went up. And at that time I didn't know, and wasn't able to tell the right name; but in fact it means 'the man-made earth-guarding star'; wei-hsing is the satellite, that's something that goes round the planet, and jen-tsao is man-made, and tichhiu is the earth. It's 380 lb s. in weight, as we know, and it corresponds to an intercontinental ballistic missile of 5000 miles range.
You may have read an article by Nigel Calder, a very good science journalist in the New Statesman for 1 May (rather appropriately) in which he talked about an evidence of a certain maturity, a once-and-for-all demonstration of talent, which is absolutely right; and then he went on to consider the possible intentions of this achievement. He raised the question of whether it was primarily civilian or military in intention. And of course the interviewers on the BBC naturally did the same thing.
One of the questions on that occasion was: would it mean that the Chinese would engage in a long-term space programme, like the Americans and the Russians have done, with landing a man on the moon and so on. My reply to that was that I thought they had better things to do with their resources than trying to land a man on the moon or on Mars before anyone else. I said that I felt they were conscious of the world food problem for example, and the question of raising the standard of fife of the millions in their own country, and that therefore they were not really so likely to engage in a long-term space programme as some people might think.
As for the civilian applications, Nigel Calder took that one up, and pointed out that weather reports are already available apparently from the American and other satellites that are circling anyhow, so he didn't think it would be likely to be that; and then he ventured to make some rather frightening prognostications; but it was only leading up to a very good point indeed. He said:
"More chilling is the thought that the Chinese are not signatories of the Outer-Space Treaty, and that they might want to put H-bombs in orbit. Plainly there is a lot of terror and awed respect to be engineered with a swarm of such orbital bombs flying routinely over Moscow and Washington. However, it doesn't make much sense militarily, chiefly because satellites without elaborate orbit-changing powers are probably easy to destroy with anti-satellite missiles. But the fact that it's no longer incredible makes the final nonsense of Washington's China policy of two decades. The Russians, too, would be well advised to drop their racialist jokes about the Chinese. And if the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Vienna have aimed at a thermonuclear world order without China, they are most regrettably but logically doomed to fail on that basis. After all, Mao is NOT on a different planet. A great deal of the world's future safety hangs on the SALT talks. In this period when multiple-warhead missiles and ineffectual but seductive antiballistic missiles threaten a terrific resurgence of the East-West arms race, the possible effects on the Vienna discussions of this new Chinese complication are not to be shrugged off. But the remedy may have to be the radical one of providing a place for the world's most populous nation, not only in the United Nations, but also in SALT and similar negotiating bodies."
This was very-well said, I thought, by Nigel Calder in the New Statesman. And the Times also had a leading article which wasn't really too bad. The Times leader writer pointed out - and a very good thing he did - that:
"when China's first nuclear device was exploded in 1964, it was accompanied by an assurance from Peking that the Chinese would never be the first to use nuclear weapons, and that China was making them solely for her own defence. Since then there has been a critical period in the expanding Vietnam war, and lately some sharp hostility on the Sino-Soviet border; yet nothing so far has invalidated the Chinese assurance."
I thought that, coming from the Times leader-writer, was really quite good. And he went on to say the same thing Nigel Calder said, that the world's great outsider has been China, excluded from the United Nations and from SALT. Sooner or later, the Times said, this gap must be closed. Sooner, of course, we would say, the sooner the better. And he finally added that Moscow and Washington have every reason to be aware of the difficulties and frustrations, but the need is overwhelmingly there, and a reminder to Moscow and Washington of it is given every 114 minutes. Well, I thought that was very good, coming from the Times.
And now, to take quite a different point of view about the satellite and the launching mechanism, the rocket, I must fill out my side of the story, and go on to explain - though I'm sure there's probably no-one here who doesn't know what I'm going to say now - about the origin of gunpowder and rockets. But I think it ought to be said - I think really that's part of the point of the story of this evening - that we should link the present, and the new, with the past. The fact is that the oldest mention of any explosive substance known to man occurs in a Chinese Taoist text of the middle +9th century, where Taoist alchemists are strongly advised not to mix saltpetre, sulphur and a source of carbon, with various other things like arsenic; because those who have done this have sometimes had the cottage explode where they were working, or burn down over their heads, and singe their beards; and it was not bringing Taoism into any credit to do this. So don't mix that particular mixture.
That was about +850. Then immediately afterwards - very soon afterwards - by +919, we get the oldest reference to the fire-drug, as it was called, huo yao the name which gunpowder still retains in Chinese, as an igniter for a flame-thrower. This is in the military-books of the time, and it's a kind of slow match which was used for the ignition. Here we go back to an earlier stage, we link up with Greek proto-chemistry. Because it was in Byzantium in the +7th century that an ingenious proto-chemist, if we may call him so, called Callinicus produced for the first time the famous 'Greek fire'; and it has been shown by various scholars that this was nothing else but distilled light petroleum fractions. Then in the 10th century we get information about this being presented to China, though no doubt by that time they were distilling their own; and so it links up through the Arabs with the Byzantine civilisation.
But the explosive character of the particular Chinese invention was destined to undergo a very rapid development, because by +1000 - we're coming to the time of William the Conqueror, when no such thing was thought or heard of in the West - by +1000, rockets were flying in the air, with arrows on the end. They were called huo chien or fire-arrows. And at the same time also, this gunpowder, which was probably very low in nitrate, was put in bombs which were going off and thrown from trebuchets - a kind of catapult. This was called huo phao. And just at almost the same time, in 1044, we get the first printed formulae for gunpowder in any civilisation.
© Copyright Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU) 2005