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Sinofile - A regular round-up of news from China.
The Evolving Chinese Community Conference - Walter Fung reports on a recent conference discussing the Chinese ethnic community in the UK.
Chinese Cooking : Preparing the Wok - Teresa Ray with tips on choice and preparation of this essential of Chinese cookery.
China's Exploding Technology- A reprint of Dr Joseph Needham's survey of science and technology given at the fifth AGM in 1970.
Marketing in China - Dr Martin Parnell surveys the ins and outs of marketing goods in China.
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'.
But the transition to guns and cannon followed quite soon afterwards; because when we come to +1110, when the Chinese were trying to repel the invasion by the Chin Tartars from the North, a new invention was made, namely that of holding a rocket - not letting it fly free and deliver some war-head, but holding it on the end of a pole, and using it in the other direction as a kind of five-minute flame-thrower.
If you had enough of those, and enough chaps lighting them on the battlements of a city, it might be - I'm sure it undoubtedly was - a considerable dissuader from those who were trying to take that city. This was used a lot in the wars with the Chin Tartars and with the Mongols, and it was called huo chhiang or fire-lances. It is really rather important, because it depended essentially on natural tubing. You see, in China, India of course, and Ceylon, they had natural tubing which the West didn't have, namely bamboos; and if you're only using it for five minutes or three minutes, in the form of rockets or fire-lances, this will work very well.
And it's very important historically, because I think undoubtedly it was the ancestor of all the guns and cannon made in bronze and iron of later times; and of course the rockets, the solid or liquid fuel rockets, that we have at the present time, such as were used to launch the satellite that the Chinese successfully did this year.
When you come to 1280, you come to a very dubious period, a dark period, which we haven't unfortunately got to the bottom of; because the crucial time is 1280 to 1290 or 1300 when we have yet to find out where the first metal-barrel guns or cannons were developed. There have been of course claims for Europe, but I myself am not inclined to rate them very highly because of the fact that the natural bamboo tube existed in the East and not in the West. There is also a claim to be made for the Arabs - the Arabic civilisation - which was certainly referring to them about 1300, under the name of madfaa, a kind of cannon or gun. We don't know exactly what it was made of; but we're quite certain that the thing was in Europe by 1327, because that is the date of the oldest picture in European civilisation (in an Oxford manuscript) of the earliest European bombard. I think that 1280 was almost certainly the time when the thing was starting, and we don't yet know whether it was in China, in Arabic regions, or in Europe; but I myself believe that it was probably in the East. The first dated cannon, by the way, are all Chinese, from the 1360s onwards, which is some half a century earlier than the oldest dated ones in the West; but of course that doesn't prove the point.
Two further matters of interest in connection with the tremendous achievement of the first explosives technology in China: one is that from about 1230 onwards we get what the technicians call really brisant explosions - in other words the blowing up of city walls and gates and towers which you couldn't do with the low-nitrate compositions which they had previously. These are all right for rockets, but they won't do for brisant explosives; you've got to raise the nitrate, and that was undoubtedly done by about 1230; because in the wars with the Mongols in the time of Genghis Khan and his immediate successors the Chinese were using these against strong places held by the Mongols, and successfully blew them up.
And the other point, too, is that when you come to about 1400, you get an extremely interesting phenomenon: you get two-stage rockets in Chinese technology. Something - it's fantastically similar to the Saturn rockets of our own time - is found there, with subsidiary rockets placed at an angle to the main projectile; and not only that but an automatic fuse arranged so as to let loose a shower of projectiles when the whole thing was reaching its destination. Well this is a very remarkable thing, this is found in the Huo Lung Ching (Fire Dragon Manual) which is a treatise on artillery from about that period, about 1400 or a little later.
I wish I could say we had written all this up in our work on the history of science and technology in Chinese culture; but I am very glad to be able to say (not that it matters to anyone I suppose, except us) that my collaborator Wang ChingNing is coming back to Cambridge this summer. He's the great authority on this subject, and he's really going to draft the whole thing and get it down.
I should like also to make one final remark about this, and that is that anyone who goes around with the idea that the invention of chemical explosives, which is what it amounts to - after all it's the ancestor of everything, cordite and gelignite, and TNT, and everything you want to think of in this way - to think of it as what my friends in France call néfaste, something tragic and terrible for mankind (rather like Shakespeare used to say in his plays 'that villainous saltpetre should be digged out of the ground' etc, that kind of thing) - it's not fair to look at it that way. Because where would human communications and transport be if it hadn't been for the explosives used to build all the railways and roads in the world, and cuttings and tunnels, to say nothing of mining, the burrowing for metals in the earth, the use of explosives in destroying obstructions in canals, and every conceivable sort of beneficent human communication? This is the kind of thing which you've got to weigh in the balance, and it isn't fair to regard chemical explosives in a purely military light. After all, ever since the beginning of fire, obviously man has been faced with the problem of how he's going to use the Promethean gifts which the inventors provide, and that is a moral question which is not really up to them, but up to every one of us.
The question of the satellite was of course the high point one had to begin with, but I want to go on now to talk about power production. And as you may possibly know, the Chinese at the present time are very proud of the successful completion during the past year of a 125,000 kilowatt steam turbo-generating dynamo set with a double internal water cooling system. This problem has not been solved elsewhere, but the Chinese have succeeded in doing it. It's a very difficult one, because although it's quite easy to water-cool the stator-the parts of the dynamo which don't rotate-it's very difficult indeed to cool the rotor; and they've used hollow copper tubes for doing it. It runs at about 3000 revs per minute, and it is regarded, I think, by engineers in all countries as a considerable achievement. It's only part, of course, of a very big move towards power production; and you'll find that last year 25,000 kilowatt types-very useful in all countries-were actually ready for export from China. They can be exported to underdeveloped countries, in the regular trade of China with the rest of the world, to say nothing of A/C diesel generating sets in plenty. And as a matter of fact in Albania the Chinese have in the past two years constructed a complete thermal power station.
In 1969 also they were rather pleased that they designed and constructed entirely in China a hydraulic power station, consisting of a set of nine 72,500 kilowatt water-driven turbines, with a total output of 652,000 kilowatts. That is certainly the first time that this has been done completely in the Chinese culture-area. Well, we are all extremely delighted to compliment them on these achievements, and I certainly feel very proud of them myself. But if you want to go into power-production, then it's fair to take a step backwards, as we did with the question of the chemical explosives, and just put yourself in the middle of the +10th century. At that time, a picture was painted, which still exists. We're not absolutely sure whether it's the original-it may be a later copy. But it's quite possibly the original, because the design of the machinery which is visible through the open walls of the mill is very archaic indeed. It's called "The Mill at the End of the Canal", and it dates from about +960. This is when we find the first form of the standard assembly for the inter-conversion of rotary and longitudinal motion. You see, everybody used to be familiar (nowadays I'm afraid owing to the use of Diesel engines on the railways there's a generation of children growing up that's not going to be so familiar as the children of my generation were) with the eccentric, connecting-rod and piston-rod; because steam locomotives all had them very obviously, and they only had to stand in railway stations and admire the way these things went round. Actually there is still a bit of steam left. I noticed on my way to London this afternoon that-rather a joke-of all people, the Central Electricity Generating Board moves their trucks at Tottenham with steam, from nice tank engines painted blue. This is a compliment to the past indeed.
Of course the standard assembly was not used in China in the Middle Ages for steam. But it was absolutely identical in principle; it was the morphological prototype of the steam-engine, acting in reverse. What happened in China in the Middle Ages was that furnace bellows-blast-furnace bellows-were operated by power from water-wheels. They always used horizontal water-wheels, or generally did so; and then they had above an eccentric working a connecting-rod which then pushed the piston-rod to blow the furnaces. So they were starting with the rotary motion and converting it to longitudinal reciprocating motion; while of course the steam-engine, as developed from the time of Trevithick and James Watt onwards, does the opposite thing: it applies the power to the piston in the cylinder and it gets the rotary motion out. But nevertheless, the morphological equivalent was there; and it was a very long time before Watt and Trevithick, a very long time indeed; because it was not in the 18th century but in the 10th that this started in China.
So you might say that the morphology of the steam-engine was ready for several centuries before it ever came to life in physiology; and this is another very remarkable achievement of the Chinese in the old days from the point of view of power-production. Of course there's no direct connection with the turbines and dynamos, except that the horizontal water-wheel is the ancestor of all turbines; this we know through the work of Besson in France in the late 16th century. The tub-wheel is the ancestor of all turbines, and the Chinese had been making those. But all their modern electro-technical work, of course, is derived from the foundations of the study of electricity in the 18th century.
The science of electricity is a typical post-Renaissance science characteristic of the 18th century, of people like Francis Hawksbee, Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, and all those; but it happens that the study of magnetism on which it depended in the first place was something about which Europeans had done nothing whatever in ancient times. Ptolemaic astronomy and Euclidean geometry were indeed two of the great pillars of modern science as it developed in Gallileo's time in the west, pillars on which modern science was founded. But there was another pillar-perhaps several others-namely the study of magnetism; and nothing had been done about it in Europe, absolutely nothing. It was the Chinese who had started that, from the Han period onwards-from the first and second century onwards they had been pegging away at that. And, in fact, to put the thing in a nutshell, one can say that the Chinese were worrying about the declination-why the magnetic needle does not point exactly to the astronomical north-before the Europeans had ever heard of the existence of the north-or south-pointing needle at all.
Turning to another subject, when we come to the instrumental and mechanical things now being made in China-many for export-we can find extraordinary items in the instrument and electronic equipment which China has been exporting in the last year and in 1970. In physics, for example, we find medium plane-grating spectrographs and multipurpose oscilloscopes; in engineering we find high-precision engraving machines, photo- and thermo-sensitive devices for automation in factories; and here again quite recently I saw a very good picture of an automatic gas chromatography control apparatus, which is very important in automating chemical industrial plants. The Chinese are also making transistorised digital computers. And while we are speaking of the chemical industry, they make all kinds of refrigeration and other chemical compressors, moulding presses for thermosetting plastics, and many things also for telecommunications-they're making their own telephone exchanges, automatic switching equipment; and one thing I found particularly interesting was that they are making electronic high-speed telecommunications equipment for coding, decoding and printing out Chinese characters, 1500 a minute.
This is very interesting, I don't know how it's done-whether by code-numbers which are then converted into the actual characters or not, but in any case it shows the way in which, with an ideographic language, you can still storm some of the heights of modern technology without worrying that you haven't got an alphabet. Why should you have an alphabet? The Japanese in recent years have practically liquidated illiteracy in Japan, and their language is far, far worse than Chinese. And yet, they are using it right and left in science and telecommunications and everything else. But whether the new Chinese high-speed equipment would be useful for them, too, I don't know; I imagine it certainly would. In the field of medicine, also, many things are now home-made in China which only a few dozen years ago would have been quite incredible. For example, electroencephalographs and electrocardiographs-they're all made there; and they are now also, for cardiac surgery, making their own artificial heart-valves and other spare parts for human beings. We heard much, of course, in recent years about the restoration of severed limbs and fingers; it's a branch of surgery in which the Chinese have particularly excelled. Now they're going in for cardiac surgery and replacing spare parts. And another interesting point about surgery, too, is that the Chinese pharmacopoeia-the indigenous traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia-has been laid under contribution of late for various kinds of drugs from plant and mineral origins which are useful in the healing process after surgical operations. There isn't the slightest doubt-that there is a very great deal in the traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia which has not yet been brought to light and studied with the aid of modern science; though the Chinese are working. hard on this. Medical equipment which is rather nice is electronic erythrocyte counters red-blood-cell counters, to relieve technicians of a frightful lot of labour electronic blood cell counters. A very nice thing. I suppose they're used in hospitals here; but anyway they're home-made in China now.
When one learns back after looking at a list like that, and thinks about the achievements that the hands and brains of our Chinese friends could make in times past, it sends one's mind back to the late Han period, the +2nd century, when the father and mother of all seismographs was made in China. This was the work of Chang Heng, one of the greatest astronomers of the +2nd century, who was very worried and disturbed in mind about the frightful earthquakes that China's always been subject to. It was really a piece of very great social-mindedness as well as. purely scientific interest that one should know at the capital in those days. With no telegraphs (certainly no electric coding and decoding telecommunications machines) no telephones, all they could do at best was with fire and smoke signals (you find those groups of five little towers for them all along the Great Wall). But that was the best you could do, and there were lots of possibilities of misunderstanding and that sort of thing.
So Chang Heng devised an apparatus about + 130 which was the first of all seismographs. I don't know whether some people. here have seen pictures of it. It is in fact believed to have been an inverted pendulum which, on receipt of an earth tremor, would be knocked over to one side or the other-it was kept in a state of very unstable equilibrium-and would enter a series of slots to operate a series of balls which would then roll out and drop into the mouths of toads made of bronze waiting to receive them outside. Well, this gave an idea not only of the strength but also of the direction of the epicentre; and what is rather marvellous is that the History of the Later Han dynasty has an actual account of the use of this apparatus in practice. It said that the courtiers made a lot of fun of Chang Heng and thought the whole thing was very amusing and really a great joke; until one day it actually worked, and he informed the emperor that there must have been a very severe earthquake in Kansu province in the north-west, and they'd better prepare to send assistance immediately. And then of course three or four days later despatch-riders arrived at the court saying that frightful damage had been done and so on, and afterwards they didn't laugh at Chang Heng any more. If that could be done in the +2nd century, then one is not surprised that things can be done now. And of course when one thinks of people doing things now, there arises the question of who exactly is doing them. Well, in that particular case, Chang Heng was a scholar, with the greatest, the highest education that his age could provide; and he was a fine poet, and a real literary scholar; one of those greats-you might say universal-geniuses which the Chinese produced in all the centuries; but today we find that ordinary working men are themselves producing inventions of great value. And they are encouraged to do so in the present day China. This is a very important point.
Actually there always were men of that kind. I could give you another example from the +3rd century, namely Ma Chun, who was perhaps one of the greatest textile inventors of any age and any country. I mustn't go off on to that now, but it's interesting that the history of the Three Kingdoms period tells about Ma Chun that he was quite unable to express himself-he was not a scholar. He was unable to persuade the officials to carry out and order all the improvements that he invented, and couldn't explain them. He could show his own technicians, his own foremen, how to do it; but he could not explain it, and the officials despised him. This is all in the history and the literature; for instance of a very fine biography written by Fu Hsuan one of the greatest technicians in Chinese history.
© Copyright Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU) 2005