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Sinofile - A regular round-up of news from China.
Sir Edward Heath Interview - In tribute to the late former Prime Minister we reprint an article showing the depth of his knowledge of China.
A protégé of Joseph Needham - Zo&emul; Reed seeks help on tracing her father's (Sun Guang Chuan) interesting association with Dr Joseph Needham.
Marketing in China (Part 2) - Dr Martin Parnell surveys the ins and outs of marketing goods in China.
Shanghai Snapshots - Personal views by Elizabeth Dearnley of this rapidly developing city.
The Great Wall Revisited - Dr Keith Ray retells two visits to the Great Wall, the tourist section and the much more challenging climb to see 'rough' Wall.
China's Exploding Technology III- A reprint of Dr Joseph Needham's survey of science and technology given at the fifth AGM in 1970.
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'.
This is the third instalment of a lecture given by one of SACU's founder members on 16 May 1970. It is reprinted to mark the 40th Anniversary of SACU. The first and second parts were published in China Eye 5 and 6.
But at the present time there are people like Ma Chun all over the place. For example, in the reports which have come from China in the past year, we find people like Shih Ko-Chi, who had no great amount of education, but set to with his friends and studied at night, and succeeded in producing something they had wanted for a long time-fully electronically automated skip-hoists and scale-cars for blast furnaces-thereby sparing an enormous amount of absolute sweat and labour on the part of his mates. And this is the kind of thing that really can happen in China at the present day. Another group decided that it wasn't necessary to use the best steel for Diesel crank-shafts. They were convinced they could do it with cast iron, and it took a lot of experimenting; but this plant did in the end succeed in doing this, and saved a great deal of expensive best steel in consequence.
As a matter of fact, that harks back to something I was saying earlier on: one of the reasons why the Chinese were able to invent the standard assembly of interconversion of rotary and longitudinal motion centuries before anyone else could may have been that they had good cast iron. Of course other people had steel-the Romans could make steel. All you have to do for that is to take your purified wrought iron, your pure iron, and melt it in charcoal, so that just the right amount of carbon gets into the wrought iron, and you get your steel. They were doing that early in the Iron Age. But it isn't so easy to make cast iron. The temperature required is a great deal higher; in order to melt cast iron you've got to be rather clever. The Chinese were making cast iron something like fourteen hundred years before anyone else could do it. Nobody could get a single pig of cast iron until 1300 or so in Europe; it started in the Rhineland, and in the low countries, when the blast furnaces really began to pour it forth. Well, it's one of the foundations of our civilisation, even today; but in China you can go into museums and handle cast-iron tools from tombs of the - 2nd and - 3rd century. They were already making cast-iron tools at that time.
And there is a point, you see, about wear. Of course you need oil. But one of the bright things about managing bearings is to use a combination of steel and cast iron; and that's very effective if you don't have brass. Of course the Chinese had brass; they may have used brass. But it's very expensive-it's much more likely that they used that combination. Engineering friends of mine say that this may have been one of the contributing factors to their ability to solve that problem of the interconversion of motion before anyone else could.
Well, I mentioned Shih Ko-chi and I'll turn to others whom I think it's nice to name, people who really exist. They've no idea that we're telling their names this afternoon, but I think it's fine to celebrate them. For example, Huang Ju-lin: now, he belongs to the South-east, a machine-works in Nan-phing in Fukien. What did he do? Last year he decided that what was needed was a mobile, you might say a one-man workshop. I don't mean that exactly as it says: but supposing you could make a machine tool, and make it mobile as well, which would do turning, grinding, milling, boring, drilling and slotting that would really be rather good. You could do quite a lot of things on the spot, you could take it about with you from place to place. This was Huang Ju-lin's achievement. Not a very highly trained engineer-he was a foreman, a workshop chap, a practical man-and he produced it. And it's done by encouragement; if you don't encourage people like Huang, you won't get these results.
Another chap, Li Kuo-tsai, was in the oil, industry, and what they wanted was a 12,000 ton hydraulic, high-pressure pipe-bender; and that again was not so easy. No doubt they imported them, they got them from Germany or somewhere, but it wasn't exactly what they wanted. And there he was in Lanchow, in the great oil plant there, the petroleum purification plant. So he got together with his friends and he produced this on the spot and it was regarded as an excellent achievement.
Another thing which interests me as a railway fan myself is the new electric locomotives they've been producing in China, using silicon semi-conductor rectification instead of the old type; they're smaller, more powerful, better on gradients, and a distinct improvement on the electric locomotives they had before. No doubt this technique is well known here in the West where there's always a lot of know-how. Since the Russians haven't been willing to provide that for some time, or give any good suggestions, and certainly people from Western Europe have not, then it's up to the people there. When they can get smaller and better, more effective locomotives, naturally they're, very pleased. Well, one should say that all these people had to overcome (it's very clear from the records) a lot of opposition, from the official authorities whom one might call stuck-in-the-mud, who always wanted to follow the yang fa (foreign ways of doing things), and pretty cautiously at that.
Now I want to say something about civil engineering. Our volume about that is coming out this year. In this book we'll be telling about the epic-you can only call it an epic-of civil engineering in China through the ages, particularly with regard to the management of the great rivers and canals. The Chinese were the greatest canal builders of the whole Middle Ages: they compare in irrigation technology with the experts in other countries, the Egyptians, the Ceylonese, and also the people in South India-the greatest experts in hydraulic technology.
But they did everything quite differently, and this is what is interesting to bring out. They tunnelled, of course. You get irrigation tunnels from very early times in China. There's one in Shensi, for example, that's described in the Chhien Han Shu (History of the Early Han Dynasty), and that was back in the -2nd century. But just recently they've done one for a road, which is rather an exciting one, a half-mile tunnel, again largely done by not very well-trained engineers, foremen and so on, who managed to hit in the middle very well, the middle of the half-mile. It's a highway tunnel in the Thai-hang mountains, and it cuts out a narrow road with eighteen hairpin bends. If you've driven those roads in China as I have you'd rather go through a straight tunnel; now they're going to be able to do that. Shih Pao-ching was actually only a maintenance linesman to start with, but he did night study and was able to take charge of this tunnel which has been a great success.
Another set of people, also with rather a makeshift education (but they had some good technicians as well) in Northern Chiangsu built a highway bridge of thirty-nine arches, about a mile long, over the Hsin-yi River with pre-cast concrete units and arch-topped flanges. If you talk about segmental arches then you don't really go back to the Romans. The Romans were very assiduous bridge builders but they had one of those bees in their bonnet that you must have semi-circular arches-it would fall down if you didn't have the complete semi-circle. Everybody thought this, the Persians and the Indians as well. It was only in China that someone had the nerve -in the +7th century you had to have nerve to get away from a conviction like that- but in +610 Li Chu in Southern Hopei realised that if he had really strong abutments, he didn't need to have a semi-circular arch. He could have what you might call a flying bridge, with most of the semicircle gone, just shooting out from each side on really strong abutments.
Nowadays there are hundreds of them on railway lines all over Europe and America, steel-and-concrete bridges, flying from side to side of the valley. And not only that, when you look at those modern concrete segmental-arch bridges, most of them are empty; you have the main bridge-arch itself, and then you have just emptiness; and you have concrete pillars going up from it to lighten the weight, and then the deck on the top. Well, Li Chu did that too, because on each side he put two enormous spandrels in, perfectly empty, in order to let the flood waters go by: when the waters rose, instead of carrying away Li's bridge they'd just shoot through these spandrels. And this was really a glorious achievement for +610. It was the oldest segmental-arch bridge in any civilisation, and there wasn't another one until the 14th century, when the Italians started it. You can go to Florence now and look at the Ponte Vecchio or the Ponte della Trinita to see what they were doing in the +14th century. I myself have a firm conviction that it was people in Marco Polo's time at the end of the +13th century who saw or heard about these flying-arch bridges in China, and said 'it can be done'. They might not actually have seen them, but they convinced their friends in Italy and they started to make them. It's really a great achievement: if you go to Southern Hopei, you can see many of them, built not only during one, but several later periods; I dare say there are about a dozen of them altogether from the old times still in use.
And when you think about bridges you think about ships. The Chinese have now made, in 1969, the Hai-phin 101, a very fine 3½ -thousand-ton ice-breaker for the northern ports, the first of its kind. This embodies a number of quite new features, which certainly can't have owed much to the Russians, because they were not there, but it seems to be a great success. And another thing they've done is on a far bigger scale-of course not as big as some of the tankers that are being built in the rest of the world, but still not at all bad-a 15,000-ton oil tanker, the Taching 27, which was launched from the Hung Chhi shipyard in 1969.
That again brings up a rather interesting question: could it be that tankers in general were really a Chinese idea? Of course most oil engineers would say nonsense, it's absolutely impossible. But one of the historians of shipping, Peter Watson, wrote to me recently raising the question of whether the whole idea of a tanker isn't a Chinese one originally. He pointed out that from the mouth of the Liao River, in the North-East, there was a very great export of soya-bean oil from Ming times onwards.
There's a place called Niuchuang which had a special type of junk, a wooden sailing-ship, which worked its way across the Yellow Sea bringing the oil down to Shanghai. And according to some of those who lived and worked in Shanghai in the old days, this was in fact nothing less than a wooden tanker. As you know, Chinese ship-building has never been the same as Western ship-building. It never used the stem-post, stern-post and keel; it always worked in terms of transom stem and stern, and bulkhead construction with flat bottom, so that you have in a way a tanker ready-made, with a whole series of different holds. And as the Chinese were quite able, with the aid of layers and layers of oiled silk to carry oil about in baskets, it may well be that we'll find that the Niuchuang oil freighter was really the oldest tanker in any civilisation.
While we are talking about oil, again I have something to say about the great success of the Chinese in recent times. Already by 1963 they reached internal self-sufficiency, more or less; but now they've fully reached it, and they'll have to keep on going as their motor transport increases. The Taching oilfield, the model one, was built in 1960 in three months, and has continually increased its production since.
Another point that has come up is that the world drilling record was won by the Chinese in the last year or two. The United States record was said to be 90,300 with the best apparatus that there is, and the Soviet Union's, 52,000 metres per annum; but the Chinese have done 100,000 metres of drilling through rock in a year, which is a subject for congratulation. But of course deep drilling itself is a Chinese invention. It goes right back to the Han, that is, to the first and second centuries (the minus first and second, not the plus first and second). The reason is that they wanted the brine. In Szechuan, which is a couple of thousand miles from the sea, people want salt. They want salt in Tibet, they want salt everywhere, but the sea is a long way away. It happens that underneath Szechuan, about 2000 feet down in many places, there are colossal fields of natural brine which have been worked for these two thousand years. The brine is not only there, but is also accompanied by natural gas, which has been pouring forth from these deep bore-holes for the last two thousand years. The Chinese began to burn the gas to evaporate the salt around them, and they have continued to do so right up to the present day. I had the great good fortune to visit Tzu-liu-ching (Self-Flowing-Well) in Szechuan during the war. It was a wonderful place, an industrial centre right in the middle of a mainly pre-industrial civilisation.
Similarly I think we must admit that the first Artesian wells (so called because the first in Europe were drilled in Artois in France) were of Chinese origin. This is not necessarily because anyone brought the technique as a person, but so often what the anthropologists call stimulus diffusion can take place. People get convinced that something has been done, and then they swear on their honour or by the bones of some saint, as Marco Polo certainly did, that such-and-such things were so. Then intelligent and up-and-coming technicians in the other civilisation say: Well, if it really has been done, it can be done, let's see how to do it, and they do it a different way. Actually I think this is what happened with the windmill, but I mustn't get into that now.
What is more interesting, perhaps, and more to the point, is that the beginnings of the oil industry in the United States were made with Chinese methods. Before the steam-engine was applied to deep drilling in Kentucky or Kansas, the first American boreholes for oil were made by the Chinese method, which is known as 'kicking her down'. This involves a team of people jumping on and off a beam and at the same time a drilling-tool rotates down below; or you may have a wheel with people walking inside it; but the essential point is that 'kicking her down' is the old Chinese method, and it was used in the beginnings of the American oil industry. I think it's extremely likely that the Chinese workers, who were imported to help build the transcontinental railroad in the early nineteenth century (also at earlier dates for working and prospecting mines) brought the technique with them. Here is a case where we do have positive reason for thinking that the Chinese people themselves went abroad and transmitted the know-how.
© Copyright Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU) 2005