Podcast appearances and mentions of Joseph Needham

Zou Yan fue un filósofo y escritor espiritual chino de la era de los Reinos Combatientes. Fue conocido como el pensador representativo dela Escuela del Yin y el Yang (o Escuela de Naturalistas) de las Cien Escuelas de Pensamiento en la filosofía china es considerado el fundador de esta escuela y el bioquímico y sinólogo británico Joseph Needham lo describe como «el verdadero fundador de todo el pensamiento científico chino».

Yasheng Huang 黄亚生 is the author of one of the decade's greatest books about China — The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline. It's a rich book, a product of a career of reflections, with each page delivering something novel and provocative. In this first half of our two-part interview, we discuss… How the imperial examination system (known as keju) shaped Chinese governance, culture, and society, Why autocratic Chinese dynasties benefitted from a meritocratic bureaucracy, Statistical methods for analyzing social mobility in imperial China, How the keju system survived the Mongol conquest, What the tradeoffs in the imperial exam system can teach us about the future economic prospects of China and Taiwan. Co-hosting today is Ilari Mäkelä, host of the On Humans podcast.  NOTES (Courtesy of Ilari) A Rough Timeline of Chinese history: Pre–221 BCE: Disunity (e.g. Warring States)  221 BCE – 220: Unity (Qin & Han dynasties) 220 – 581: Disunity (“Han-Sui Interregnum”) 581 – 1911: Unity (Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties) Historical figures Emperor Wanli 萬曆帝 | Shen Kuo 沈括 (polymath) | Zhu Xi 朱熹 (classical philosopher) | Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全 (leader of the Taiping Rebellion) | Yuan Shikai 袁世凯 (military leader) | Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (military leader and statesman) Modern scholars Ping-ti Ho 何炳棣 (historian) | Clair Yang (economist) | Joseph Needham (scientist and historian) | Daron Acemoglu | James Robinson Historical terms Keju civil service exams | Taiping Rebellion REFERENCES A lot of the original data discussed in the episode is original from Huang's book. As an exception, Huang references his co-authored article on civil service exams and imperial stability, written with Clair Yang. Outtro music: 等着你回来 by 白光, a 1930s Shanghai starlet https://open.spotify.com/track/0aHMT9dIdPDz094fc37Xq0?si=d1591ff2339d421c Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yasheng Huang 黄亚生 is the author of one of the decade's greatest books about China — The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline. It's a rich book, a product of a career of reflections, with each page delivering something novel and provocative. In this first half of our two-part interview, we discuss… How the imperial examination system (known as keju) shaped Chinese governance, culture, and society, Why autocratic Chinese dynasties benefitted from a meritocratic bureaucracy, Statistical methods for analyzing social mobility in imperial China, How the keju system survived the Mongol conquest, What the tradeoffs in the imperial exam system can teach us about the future economic prospects of China and Taiwan. Co-hosting today is Ilari Mäkelä, host of the On Humans podcast.  NOTES (Courtesy of Ilari) A Rough Timeline of Chinese history: Pre–221 BCE: Disunity (e.g. Warring States)  221 BCE – 220: Unity (Qin & Han dynasties) 220 – 581: Disunity (“Han-Sui Interregnum”) 581 – 1911: Unity (Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties) Historical figures Emperor Wanli 萬曆帝 | Shen Kuo 沈括 (polymath) | Zhu Xi 朱熹 (classical philosopher) | Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全 (leader of the Taiping Rebellion) | Yuan Shikai 袁世凯 (military leader) | Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (military leader and statesman) Modern scholars Ping-ti Ho 何炳棣 (historian) | Clair Yang (economist) | Joseph Needham (scientist and historian) | Daron Acemoglu | James Robinson Historical terms Keju civil service exams | Taiping Rebellion REFERENCES A lot of the original data discussed in the episode is original from Huang's book. As an exception, Huang references his co-authored article on civil service exams and imperial stability, written with Clair Yang. Outtro music: 等着你回来 by 白光, a 1930s Shanghai starlet https://open.spotify.com/track/0aHMT9dIdPDz094fc37Xq0?si=d1591ff2339d421c Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The West has ruled history — at least the way history has been written. This is a shame. To tell the story of humans, we must tell the story of us all. So what about the rest? What themes and quirks does their history hide? And what forces, if anything, prevented them of matching Europe's rise?  I aim to cover these topics for several countries and cultures over the next year. But I wanted to start with China. To do so, I've teamed up with Jordan Schneider, the host of ChinaTalk. Our guest is MIT professor Yasheng Huang (黄亚生). Huang is the author of Rise and Fall of the EAST – one of my all-time favorite books on China's past and present.  In this episode, we explore the deep currents shaping China's history. We trace the forces shaping China's early mastery of technology to its falling behind Europe in the modern era. We also discuss the surprising role that standardized exams have played in Chinese history, and why certain democratic elements in China's past actually bolstered the emperor's authority.  The episode covers all of Chinese imperial history, ending with a brief note on the early 20th Century. In part 2, will zoom into China's economic miracle and its uncertain future. NOTES A Rough Timeline of Chinese history: Pre–221 BCE: Disunity (e.g. Warring States)  221 BCE – 220: Unity (Qin & Han dynasties) 220 – 581: Disunity (“Han-Sui Interregnum”) 581 – 1911: Unity (Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties) Historical figures Emperor Wanli 萬曆帝 | Shen Kuo 沈括 (polymath) | Zhu Xi 朱熹 (classical philosopher) | Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全 (leader of the Taiping Rebellion) | Yuan Shikai 袁世凯 (military leader) | Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (military leader and statesman) Modern scholars Ping-ti Ho 何炳棣 (historian) | Clair Yang (economist) | Joseph Needham (scientist and historian) | Daron Acemoglu | James Robinson Historical terms Kējǔ civil service exams | Taiping Rebellion References For more links and some impressive graphs, see this article at OnHumans.Substack.com. LINKS Are you a long-term listener? Join the wonderful group of patrons at ⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/OnHumans⁠⁠⁠⁠. For other episodes on economic history, see my series on the ⁠⁠Birth of Modern Prosperity⁠⁠, with Daron Acemoglu, Oded Galor, Brad DeLong, and Branko Milanovic.

A great range of scientific and technical achievements were made in China hundreds of years earlier than in Europe.

'I knew it was a book I needed to read' - VIVIENNE WESTWOOD'His book explains complex scientific theory in a graspable way' - LILY ASHLEY'This book is an important contribution, and I hope it will open many minds. What is particularly important in it are the discussions of David Bohm, of bioplasma, biophotons, and bioelectronics.' - PROFESSOR ZBIGNIEW WOLKOWSKI, Sorbonne University, Paris"Answers so many questions, scientific and esoteric, about the true nature of our reality... A seminal work... Will revolutionise how we frame reality and the thinking of everyone on this planet. Kudos to Professor Temple for striking the first match to light the fire." - NEW DAWNThe story of the science of plasma and its revolutionary implications for the way we understand the universe and our place in it.Histories of science in the 20th century have focused on relativity and quantum mechanics. But, quietly in the background, there has been a third area of exploration which has equally important implications for our understanding of the universe. It is unknown to the general public despite the fact that many Nobel prize winners, senior academics and major research centres around the world have been devoted to it - it is the study of plasmaPlasma is the fourth state of matter and the other three - gas, liquid and solids - emerge out of plasma. This book will reveal how over 99% of the universe is made of plasma and how there are two gigantic clouds of plasma, called the Kordylewski Clouds, hovering between the Earth and the Moon, only recently discovered by astronomers in Hungary. Other revelations not previously known outside narrow academic disciplines include the evidence that in certain circumstances plasma exhibits features that suggest they may be in some sense alive: clouds of plasma have evolved double helixes, banks of cells and crystals, filaments and junctions which could control the flow of electric currents, thus generating an intelligence similar to machine intelligence. We may, in fact, have been looking for signs of extra-terrestrial life in the wrong place.Bestselling author Robert Temple has been following the study of plasma for decades and was personally acquainted with several of the senior scientists - including Nobel laureates - at its forefront, including Paul Dirac, David Bohm, Peter Mitchell and Chandra Wickramasinghe (who has co-written an academic paper with Temple).PROFESSOR ROBERT TEMPLE is the author of a dozen challenging and provocative books, commencing with the international best-seller, The Sirius Mystery. His books have been translated into a total of 44 foreign languages. He is Visiting Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and previously held a similar position at an American university.For many years he was a science writer for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, and a science reporter for Time-Life, as well as a frequent reviewer for Nature and profile writer for The New Scientist.He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and has been a member of the Egypt Exploration Society since the 1970s, as well as a member of numerous other academic societies.He has produced, written and presented a documentary for Channel Four and National Geographic Channels on his archaeological discoveries in Greece and Italy, and he was at one time an arts reviewer on BBC Radio 4's 'Kaleidoscope'.With his wife, Olivia, he is co-author and translator of the first complete English version of Aesop's Fables, which attracted a great deal of international press attention at the time of its release, as the earlier translations had suppressed some of the fables because of Victorian prudery.Temple was a colleague of the late Dr. Joseph Needham of Cambridge, in association with whom he wrote The Genius of China, which has been approved as an official reference book (in Chinese) for the Chinese secondary school system, and which won five national awards in the USA. He has done archaeometric dating work and intensive exploration of closed sites in Egypt with the permission of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. His research into historical accounts of the Sphinx is the first comprehensive survey ever undertaken.

Transcript:Sushant Singh00:09Hello and welcome to India Speak: the podcast by the Centre for Policy Research. I'm Sushant Singh, Senior Fellow at CPR. This is the first episode of our series featuring leading experts and academics on the many facets of Sino India relations. Some of them will be looking at the military side of things, while others will focus on the political facets. But today, we will be discussing the historical aspects, looking at China and its relationship with India through a historical lens. To do that, our guest today is a historian of modern China with research and teaching interest in social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, transnational history, and China- India history. Professor Arunabh Ghosh is the Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History at Harvard University. His first book, Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the early People's Republic of China came out in 2020. It investigates how the early People's Republic of China state built a statistical capacity to know the nation through numbers. He has conducted research for the book in Beijing, Guangzhou, New Delhi and Kolkata Arunabh, welcome to India Speak.Arunabh Ghosh01:26Thank you Sushant for having me. And it's a real honor to be the first in this new series that CPR is organising. So thank you so much.Sushant Singh01:33Thank you. I'd like to begin with your book first, because you mentioned a collaboration between India and China on the statistical front that is hard to imagine today. It involves PC Mahalanobis of the ISI. Can you tell our listeners as to what this collaboration was about? And how do you discover that interesting nugget? And were there other collaborations also at around the same time that we don't know?Arunabh Ghosh01:56Great, thank you. Yeah, this is, this is always an intriguing sort of thing, because it was very surprising for me too actually because as you just mentioned, in your very generous introduction, the book that I've written is primarily about statistics in 1950s China. I didn't really expect to encounter such a strong India connection and an India connection that would help me understand crucial aspects of statistics and statistical work in 1950s China. So maybe first, I'll give you a sense of how I chanced upon this, and it really was quite a serendipitous kind of discovery. I think it was, while I was browsing issues of the People's Daily, that I encountered a photograph that showed Mahalanobis with the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, and a bunch of other people. And then the small caption read, "Zhou Enlai host Mahalanobis for dinner". This completely blew me away, this was July of 1957, I had no expectation of something like this being possible. So then I started digging, and eventually discovered that this was actually part of a much more sustained series of exchanges that involve statistics. But why statistics? So what's interesting here is that on the Indian side, which I think a lot of our listeners will be familiar with, the Indian Statistical Institute and PC Mahalanobis, as its director, are central to this early phase of Indian history in terms of planning, in terms of placing statistics at the heart of planning. What Mahalanobis was famous for, not just in India, but globally, was the adoption and expansion of large scale randomised sample survey, this was a relatively new technology at that time. On the Chinese side, what's interesting is that after 1949, the Chinese had explicitly rejected any kind of statistical activity that relied on probabilistic methods, including large scale random sampling. So what happened was, over the first, say, five to eight years of the People's Republic of China from 1949, to about 1956-57, they relied on other means. And by this, I mean, primarily on exhaustive enumeration on attempts to essentially count everything to the final instance of its existence- the census method, if you will. And this as you can imagine, led to tremendous problems, especially in the agricultural sector. So, it was this chance meeting in 1956, when Zhou Enlai actually visits India, and he comes to the Indian Statistical Institute, and is kind of blown away by the work that he sees being done, and then invites Mahalanobis to come to China. This is a short episode where there is a real desire on the part of the Chinese statisticians to learn more about large scale random sampling, because they feel this might allow them to overcome the kinds of problems that they are encountering, because of this overt reliance on essentially the census method of counting everything exhaustively. So that's sort of in a nutshell, what happened and I traced this exchange from about, it's really intensive about 1956 to 59. With a lot of people going back and forth, and things like that. But, for the other part of your question, this is not the only instance of these kinds of exchanges. I think they were happening in other domains. I have recently published an article about who I think is the first Chinese scientist to get a PhD from an Indian University, from Lucknow University. He was a student of Birbal Sahni. But I'm collaborating with a range of other scholars, in particular by mining archival materials that were thus far not easily available, including actually, the recently declassified Nehru papers at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. And our hope is really to, to rediscover the actual breadth of exchanges that were going on in the 50s, beyond the sort of narrative of Indi Chini bhai bhai and sort of the cultural, diplomatic kind of exchanges, but much more substantive exchanges that are going on. So I think there is actually a lot more to discover. And what I found are essentially crumbs that should lead us to explore more.Sushant Singh05:41So were these exchanges Arunabh, were they facilitated by the state, were they driven by the state, both the Chinese state and the Indian state over these exchanges, like the Science one, you refer to that was happening primarily through Cambridge and Europe? Because Birbal Sahini was such a major prominent scientist in Asia at that point in time, and the Chinese wanted to collaborate with them. So were they driven by individuals or what they're driven by state, or were they driven by some other mechanics or processes?Arunabh Ghosh06:09Right, I think you find instances of both. There is certainly a very strong state element in many of these exchanges. Some of these, because of the sort of larger geopolitics of the moment, sort of the emergence of a certain kind of third world politics, or, you know, global south solidarity. I'm using these terms slightly, ahistorically, Global South wasn't used in the 1950s, but you know, this postcolonial moment, if you will. So there is a lot of state interest and an attempt to bring people from both China and India as part of, you know, bringing people from different parts of the post colonial world together. But, I think you have a lot of instances where there are other mechanisms at play. So the one that I just mentioned, and that you also brought up about the scientists, the Paleobotanist - that is about scientific networks, pre existing scientific networks, that then carry on into post 1945, 49, 47, into the 1950s. But you also have interesting transnational political movements that are emerging that have to do with emerging Cold War politics, but also have to do with an attempt at an institutional level to engage. So the ways in which people are thinking of establishing transnational institutions, like the UN, but for Asia, for instance. And here, there is some state support, but not necessarily it's driven by the state. So this might be individual's conceiving some kind of Asian Association, say, for the advancement of a particular area of knowledge. Then maybe someone like Nehru will get on board or Zhou Enlai will get on board and so on. But the impetus is coming from elsewhere. So I think part of the goal has to be to recognise the multiplicities of possibilities. With a small footnote or asterisk to this, of course, this is more true on the Chinese side than on the Indian side where, given the strong nature of the state in China, by this time already, at some point, it was necessary to get state approval, and that could be a harder process.That may have led to greater state involvement as part of getting that approval. On the Indian side, I think you see even more diversity.Sushant Singh06:15Any examples of these associations which you refer to which were pan-Asian associations?Arunabh Ghosh07:33So there were these very interesting discussions right after the establishment of the UN, to set up, under UNESCO and other organisations, sort of scientific networks in Asia. So people like Joseph Needham, and I'm blanking on a few of the other names who are involved, were in conversation with people on the Indian side, for instance, with people like Homi Bhabha at TIFR, DD Kosambi, and also with mathematicians at Tsinghua University and also later on after 1949 in Taiwan, about say, establish the Institute of Mathematical Research. Again, the idea was not just mathematics in terms of pure mathematics, but also in terms of how it applies to physics and research in the physical sciences, and so on. So things like that, which were sprouts if you will, did not lead anywhere. Mahalanobis himself wanted to set up a statistics association for Asia and the Pacific, I think I forgot the exact acronym. So there are two that come to mind immediately.Sushant Singh09:14Arunabh, when does this kind of collaboration and cooperation end? Is it the 1962 war? Is it 1959 when the border tensions started increasing? Or is it well before that, something else happened before that?Arunabh Ghosh09:28No, those are two hugely important moments. 1959 March, when the Dalai Lama escaped, I think is a huge moment, at least from a state to state perspective in terms of a cooling of enthusiasm. 1962, of course, then becomes like a major wedge. But it's important to also recognise the internal dynamics of these things. The 1950s is a very interesting period in Chinese history, with a lot of interesting upheavals that impact the intellectual world, the world of academia in very specific ways. So, intellectuals are targeted, for instance, in 1957 in the anti-writers movement. So those things also have an impact on the possibilities for these kinds of exchanges. So one has to be mindful of the international sort of bilateral kinds of relations, but also then the domestic developments that might impact this sort of engagement.Sushant Singh10:17Arunabh, there is something else you have written a lot about in the public domain - the inadequate scholarship on China and India? Can you give our listeners an overview of the kind of scholarship on China in modern times, you know, leading to the contemporary era? And also, what are the reasons for this inadequacy in studying China and India? Why have we not done better?Arunabh Ghosh10:36Right, this is a great question. It's a very big question. Before I get into the China studies, in India case, I should actually preface any response by saying there is a larger malaise in the Indian academia in terms of how we study and understand the rest of the world. So the China case is a very important case within a larger malaise, where I think we lack expertise on pretty much anything, including our neighbours, including the immediate neighbours in the South Asian context, where we haven't devoted adequate resources over the past several decades. But in the Chinese case, what's interesting is that you see a period of intense actual interest in the first half of the 20th century, a really important moment is the establishment of China Bhavan at Shanti Niketan, Tagore's University, that becomes the first research centre dedicated to studying China, primarily at that time studying ancient Chinese history – so, looking at the expansion of Buddhism in China and  looking at questions of linguistic and cultural exchange, things like that. But what's important about that moment from a research perspective, is that you have the establishment of the first dedicated China Studies library in India. And I think for any good research to take place, the necessary, but insufficient, of course, but necessary condition is a good research library. So that kernel was established in the 1930s. And during this time, I think the other thing to remember about sort of Indian engagement with China is that there is actually a tremendous amount of interest at the popular level where people are travelling back and forth, and there are stories of people travelling to China writing travelogues, often not in English, but in different vernacular languages that you can find. And some of these have begun to be translated now. So there are several in Bengali that have not been translated. But there are there are others,  there's essentially a memoir called Chīn Me Terah Mās (13 months in China), which was essentially a memoir of a British Indian Army soldier who spent time in China serving, if I remember correctly, during the Boxer Rebellion, and then he writes about it. So there was that kind of, I think, at a popular level, a certain kind of engagement. In terms of scholarship, I think you would expect that after 1947, after 1949, there would be a real investment. And there certainly was an attempt to bring about serious exchanges at a bilateral level. But you don't really see the kind of investment that you would expect. Given that, you know, this is India's largest neighbour. And similarly for China, this is China's largest neighbour, you see the establishment at China Bhavan and a few other places, an attempt to establish language programs. In the 1950s, they attempted to begin bilateral exchanges of students and things like that. But 1962 then becomes a huge, as I think many people recognise, sort of a huge stumbling block. But the irony in my opinion is that instead of leading, therefore, to a greater sort of investment in studying and understanding China, even if it is from a narrow perspective, why did we get what happened in 1962 so wrong? Why did the leadership, why didn't the intelligentsia, the sort of political elite that was informing the leadership, why did they get things so wrong? Instead of seeing greater engagement, greater desire to try and understand China, you saw sort of a retreat. So 1962 becomes this moment, I think, where you see not investment, but disinvestment in China studies, and that has in some ways lingered into the present, I feel, where China studies remains a fairly niche kind of subject, discipline or domain of knowledge to pursue. But that's at the meta or macro level. There are other things at the institutional and micro level that I think are also very important to recognise. So one of the things of course, I had mentioned library, the other thing that's absolutely essential in studying China, of course, is his mastery of the Chinese language. While mastery might be an extreme case, but at least a sufficient degree of competence, to engage with scholars in China, to engage with people in China, to read materials in Chinese, and so on. And what has developed in India and I think here, it's the expansion of a model that we find in JNU, but then that seems to have spread to other institutions in India as sort of best practices, is a real separation of the School of Languages where you have excellent teachers of Chinese and students who actually learn Chinese to a high degree of competence. And then places like SSS (School of Social Sciences) and the SIS (School of International Studies) that are then working on China substantively. You see a real divide here, so the people who do language don't engage in subject domain expertise, and vice versa. And this I think, over the long run has led to a sort of it has really debilitated this kind of area studies in India. So you have a range of China scholars now who were produced by JNU, and a handful of other institutions that cannot engage at the level that you would expect with material in Chinese, with scholars in China. And therefore I think it sort of hamstrings our ability to then understand the complexity of a country as large and as diverse as China is,Sushant Singh15:46Arunabh, I understand that the shadow of 1962 looms large, but after 1962, there is 1988 when Rajiv Gandhi goes and meets Deng Xiaoping, then there is 2004 and this current century that we are in, by now things should have changed, things should have improved. Why didn't anything change in the last 30-40 years?Arunabh Ghosh16:06Yeah, I fully agree things should have changed dramatically. And why they haven't is a bit of a mystery, but also not entirely in the sense that I think a lot of this area studies impetus. Unfortunately, we have enough historical instances of this and the best example is the evolution of area studies in the US often emerges from the recognition of the state, that these are strategic areas that we need expertise in, and then the funnelling in of resources. But what's interesting in the US case, and I think this would have had a salutary sort of effect if it had been pursued in India, is that yes, you create sort of a very narrow, strategically focused kind of expertise, but in supporting area studies broadly, you also provide grounds for a much wider engagement. So in the US, you see not only this sort of foreign policy and sort of contemporary China focused academic community, but a much wider community that has expertise in China now. Something like that could have happened in India, if there was concerted state support starting after 1988, as you said, or even more recently. Now, that did not happen. I think this is a failure of leadership in many ways. Again, as I mentioned earlier, it speaks to a broader failure of higher education in India. I think the Chinese case is an example, China studies is an example of this. Another footnote to this, of course, is that there are interesting developments more recently now, with private universities trying to sort of establish some kind of presence in China studies. It's very early, it's not clear how successful they will be. But I think it represents a recognition at least from, if not the state itself, then from society, more broadly speaking, that we need to know more as a society. So you know, there are private institutions that have set up centres for China studies that are trying to set up MA programs, and things like that, but it's very early days still, in that process.Sushant Singh17:55Arunabh, you brought up western area studies model. Most Indian scholars use Western research and Western scholars to understand and study modern China and obviously, these in the field of national security and diplomacy as well. To your mind, what are the dangers of doing this for Indian scholars and for Indian policymakers? This intermediation of knowledge through a Western prism? What are the dangers of this?Arunabh Ghosh18:18Yeah, I think this is hugely important. And it speaks very much to things we were just discussing in terms of, you know, an ability to work with primary materials ourselves, inability to form our own conclusions based on our reading, as opposed to reading essentially someone else's interpretation of events or documentary evidence. At a general level, I think that the danger is that essentially, in being second hand consumers of knowledge, and then formulating our own sort of interpretations, we are giving up, in some ways, a certain kind of agency in terms of formulating the questions and frameworks themselves. Which is not to say that all of the existing work that emerges primarily in the Anglophone, but say the West, broadly speaking, on China is useless – most of it's actually very interesting and very useful. But it is in some ways, granting over our ability to ask our own questions. And I think asking those questions with, you know, particular contexts that are South Asia specific or India specific in mind. These don't have to do with bilateral relations only, these have to do with a whole range of things that are going on in India right now, whether it's urban policy, whether it's health policy, I mean, Omicron and COVID is a great example. Right? How do we think about policy in India, vis a vis other places, including China? So I think if we formulate the questions, then the frameworks, the way in which we look for evidence, all of that follows. So I think in some ways, there's a kind of path dependence that emerges from where you start. And so that is, I think, at a very broad methodological level the danger here. More specifically, I think if you take a look at specific instances, then of course it is that you are essentially relying upon other strategic goals with which a particular policy piece may have been written, and then you have to try and interpret that and make it applicable to say, the Indian case, as might be what happens a lot and that again, is in some ways a needless exercise. You're not treating it as a data point, but as essentially, largely informing your perspective altogether.Sushant Singh20:30Would it be fair to say that even though India and China have been neighbours, they have been and remain distant in that sense. They've never been neighbours? They've been physical neighbours, but they've not been neighbours in other senses. Is that true?Arunabh Ghosh20:41Yeah. So this is I think, yes, the short answer is yes. But there is a footnote or a complicated answer that would be no. The yes is in terms of contemporary nation states, I think the ways in which the Republic of India and the People's Republic of China see each other.  The Himalayas are not just a physical barrier, you know, they are a barrier in other ways. But if you think in a slightly longer historical sense, then people from both subcontinents, if you think of East Asia, China and India, as subcontinental sort of spaces, have been meeting and intermingling in other parts of the world. So Southeast Asia is a great example of this. The Caribbean is another great example of this. And of course, now much more recently, actually, the US is a good example of this, because you have roughly, I think, 5 million people of Indian descent in the US and roughly 5 million people of Chinese descent in the US. So there is actual engagement in other spheres, but from a contemporary nation state perspective, in China and in India. Yes, you're totally right, that there has been I think there is a real impasse in terms of bilateral engagement and understanding. So that's why you fixate on the specific moments like Amir Khan's amazing popularity in China, it becomes this thing to wonder at because it's so unusual, it's so exceptional.Sushant Singh21:54And you sometimes wonder that China is India's biggest trading partner, and by a long distance, and you still don't have that kind of neighbourly relations? Arunabh Ghosh22:00Absolutely, that's the other reality. And I mean, I think it's gone over $100 billion in mutual trade now, right, in spite of all the political rhetoric of not buying Chinese products, and so on. So there are ways in which the Chinese and Indian economy are actually much more deeply interlinked than people realise. But again, in terms of popular perceptions, there is a real divide.Sushant Singh22:28Arunabh, as a historian, what is the biggest myth about China in India that you constantly face and maybe even get irritated about? And similarly, when you are in China, what is the biggest misconception or misunderstanding about India that gets your goat?Arunabh Ghosh22:42I don't know if I have a good answer about this, because this, again, perhaps speaks to some of the problems you are alluding to. I think in India, the thing that I find the most galling at times is the sheer ignorance about China. There really isn't much of a sense, besides sort of a very sort of contemporary notion. And of course, more recently, that it's this amazing success story, and so on. It's not a myth, but it's the constant sort of raising China up onto a particular kind of pedestal by a certain set of Indian elite, I should say. If you go beyond that, there isn't even that much. There is no sense, no real acknowledgement of what it is. The other thing I should actually add in terms of it's an irritating myth, of course, is this complaint about the quality of Chinese products that you do hear a lot, which I think is also somewhat misplaced. But it itself would be interesting to research in terms of, you know, about how much of this is, you know, it's by design in terms of the ways in which commodities are flowing in terms of the ways in which markets are understood, and where higher quality versus low quality products are being sent. And, of course, the role of intermediaries, the people who are actually importing stuff, which might be on the Indian side. Anyway, that's an aside. So as I said, the bigger thing for me, though, is not so much a myth, but just ignorance, the sort of the very broad strokes generalisations that exist about China, that can be a bit of an irritation. On the Chinese side, it's not so much ignorance, as opposed to there is sort of a romanticisation. It's interesting, in more recent terms, mostly in the past two decades, as the Chinese economy has taken off, and there's a certain kind of confidence amongst the Chinese middle class about their own place in the world and their own sort of economic growth – that, you know, India is now it's, in some ways, an interesting kind of Orientalisation, India is the land of mystical wisdom and the power of religion and morality and things like that. This is not a dominant strain, but you do hear it's certainly distinct amongst a certain set of, again, middle class elite Chinese. And this I find very interesting in terms of it's not longer even seen in comparative terms, but it's seen as this again, you can, as I said, you can orientalise it and you can almost romanticise it. So this is the place you would need to visit if you are, you know, you're in the throes of a crisis of materialism, then India is the place that you could go. So this certainly happens amongst elite, very rich Chinese that you know, partly this is driven by sort of the tourism surrounding Buddhism. So you visit the various holy sites in South Asia, in India, in particular, that are linked to Buddhism and of course, this is not just Chinese tourists, but also Japanese tourists, tourists from Southeast Asia. But there's this kind of search for a certain kind of moral, or religious equanimity. So that's something that I find kind of both interesting and a little irritating. But it's that perception is devolved to just that.Sushant Singh25:53And yoga is well, we have done a bit by putting yoga in the mix as well.Arunabh Ghosh25:57Yes, thank you. Yoga, I feel, is a global phenomenon. It's not restricted to the Chinese themselves.Sushant Singh26:06You know, China's economic success and rise as a global power has really created a sense of China envy in India, the one you alluded to in your answer. The secret of Chinese success is seen in its character as a centralised authoritarian state, unlike India's very raucous democracy. Is that a fair understanding of contemporary China in India? And if not, why not?Arunabh Ghosh26:28I think it's a fair understanding of what the understanding in India is or a fair reflection of what the understanding in India is. But, I think it's sort of again, this is the understanding at again, at the level of sort of the elite intelligentia in India, right? I think that's not the popular perception. And so, I guess this would be my answer to your question, if I was only looking at the elite response would be this kind of envy at, or the hankering for a strong, centralised authoritarian state. So there isn't much wiggle room to say that, yes, it's relatively authoritarian compared to other parts of the world. It's relatively centralised, compared to other parts of the world. But I think in some ways, framing it in this way, begs the question, because one sort of looks at it today without acknowledging both the recent history- the history of the past 70 years since 1949, but also the longer history of the nature of the state and state society relations in China. The same thing is being done on the Indian side, right. So you're not acknowledging the longer history in India of states, a centralised state, the rule, the nature of state- society relations, and so on. But I think one important test, or a question one should ask, when we frame it this way is this, look at how successful China is. And it's because of its strong, centralised authoritarian state, you have to then acknowledge by that same token, that all the failures before the success should also be attributed to precisely the same thing – the fact that it is a strong centralised authoritarian state. And these failures are not trivial, these failures are failures that led to arguably the largest famine, in absolute terms in human history. This is the great famine of the late 1950s. It led to tremendous turmoil in the decades that followed, essentially sort of tearing society apart from the inside. So I think we have to recognise that certain things come with a strong centralised authoritarian state. It can be very effective in certain areas, but the failures can also be cataclysmic. So that's one thing to remember. Then the other is to what extent, this is where the longer your historical point becomes important, to what extent can a particular contemporary reality that has a larger sort of historical set of antecedents, how can you sort of apply that to a place like the Indian subcontinent, which is tremendously different. A simple way to think about this is the way in which we understand the centrality of the state, or the presence of a large centralised state, through the longer history of the subcontinent. In the Indian subcontinent, a large centralised state is the exception, not the rule. Whereas if you were to generalise that's the opposite case, in the Chinese case, it is a rule and the exceptions are when there is disarray and being broken apart. So, there is a very different sense altogether about how individuals think about the state. And I think until this is acknowledged and taken up seriously, this kind of very superficial envy and like, oh, all we need is a strong state that can ride roughshod over, you know, whether it's people's rights or other kinds of environmental regulations and so on, I think, will have a certain kind of appeal, but is extremely dangerous. Sushant Singh29:52I also think that it comes out of a certain ignorance of China because there is a certain amount of federalism in the Communist Party model as well. The provinces and the districts decide what they wish to do in terms of so many policies that they have at their other levels and the competition among these provinces and districts. And even if you look at  some of the public health, public education things, you know, that have also come about because of that.Arunabh Ghosh30:20Absolutely, this is hugely important and this, again, speaks to thinking of China as a sort of given unit and not recognising actually, that it's demographically, while still, but maybe not for very long larger than India, but geographically significantly larger with a tremendous amount of variation. And then, the way in which the provinces run. There's a very good example from just very recently, which is what happened in the city of Xi An. And the massive lockdown that took place in Xi An because of the cases of COVID that were discovered. And if you look at the internal chatter, and the way in which people are understanding this within China, Xi An has historically been seen as a relatively poorly run city, compared to say, Shanghai or Beijing or some of the other cities. And so there were people who were not surprised that you saw mismanagement and all those cases about people being turned away from hospitals and so on, because the lockdown is being imposed. But then that led to other kinds of hardship. These are people who are not, you know, who are seeking help, not because of COVID, but for other medical, medical reasons. So there was this kind of internal recognition of diversity, variation, different ways in which different provinces have responded. I mean, one of the things you see, for instance, is the tremendous inequality right now within China, where the coastal provinces are significantly richer than the inland provinces. So again, that needs to be explained and understood, it can't be explained, understood with this sort of unitary, centralised authoritarian state model. So yeah, that's very important.Sushant Singh31:50Arunabh, this border crisis that India and China face, which is the most contemporary issue when Indians think of China today. History plays a role in it, the colonial part, the Imperial past, how important is the role of history in the kind of crisis that we see between India and China now?Arunabh Ghosh32:07So I think history is important at two levels. One, is just as you just alluded, I think, recognising that a lot of these problems have their origins in the Imperial and colonial legacies that both the Republic of India and the People's Republic of China are dealing with, but more than just dealing with, recognising that, in some ways, enthusiastically both states, accepted these Imperial legacies – in particular, the territorial imaginaries and the realities of British India, of the Qing empire. So I think recognising this is the first step. And there is, I think, in both countries, again amongst the elite and the intelligentsia. They are very quick to blame Imperial and colonial legacies when it comes to the other country, but are very slow to recognise the fact that similar logics are operating for them too. So at a meta historical level, I think that's hugely important. But I think at a more micro level in terms of the 20th century itself, I think historical scholarship is extremely important in understanding what exactly happened. And how to complicate the easy and grand narratives that exist. So right now, for instance, in India, it's very popular to blame everything on Nehru. Earlier it used to be Krishna Menon, and now it's Nehru. But I think this does a disservice to actually understanding what were essentially a series of very complex moments, and trying to understand why decisions were made the way they were, and so on. So I think the first step would also be to step away from the blame game. This is of course for popular consumption, this is what you want to do. It's easy to play things off and have people to blame. But from a historical scholarship perspective, I think this needs to happen on both sides. And here, the big challenge is access to archival materials, getting a sense of the deliberations as they happen in those specific moments. There's been good work on the Indian side recently, as you of course, I'm sure are also aware. Nirupama Menon Rao has just published a book and there's a whole host of other books that have tried to explore the border crisis and its evolution. We have seen some work on the Chinese side also, but the archives on the Chinese side remain closed. So it's been difficult for scholars outside of the PRC to explore these questions from the PRC's side, in many ways.Sushant Singh34:37Arunabh before I let you go, can you suggest three books about modern China that you would recommend to those interested in understanding the country better?Arunabh Ghosh34:44This is there's been so many good books published in the past 2-3 years that this is an extremely difficult task. So if I can mention a few without restricting myself to three, then I can touch upon a few different areas that might be of interest to readers. So one that emerges out of the conversation we've had about the nature of the state and the nature of the Chinese state in particular, I think a really interesting book would be Great State: China and the World, Timothy Brook (2019), which tries to look at the way in which we should understand the nature of the Chinese state through a longer perspective, not just 20th century. So Brooke is primarily a historian of the Ming, but then writes expansively. So that would be a great book to get a slightly longer perspective on the history of the Chinese state itself. There's a good book on the history of the party that was just published by Tony Saich, my colleague at the Kennedy School here called From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party (2021). That gives you more of a sense of how the party, which is, it's a pretty dramatic story, because it's a party that was on the fringes in the early 1920s. And by 1949, came to dominate the largest country in the world. And now, the largest economy in the world is soon to be or if by PPP terms already there. So that's another book that gives you party history.There's a great book by the Chinese historian Yang Kuisong called     Eight Outcasts: Social and Political Marginalization in China Under Mao (2019). It was recently translated into English and this provides a very different perspective on post 1949 Chinese history, it's from the bottom up. As the title suggests, it's the story of eight people who had to undergo because of, you know, their individual identities made them outliers, or a certain kind of minority, you know, it could be because of their sexuality, it could be because of other kinds of things, and how they endured the first two, three decades of the PRC. I'm reading right now, after a long time. Finally, I've been meaning to write a memoir. And this might be of interest again, to an Indian audience. It's a memoir by probably China's most famous      Indologist, a man by the name of Ji Xianlin, who wrote a memoir called The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (2016)and it's his experience of the Cultural Revolution. He was a very prominent professor. He was at Peking University, the most prominent university in China, and endured     all kinds of hardship during the cultural revolution and he wrote about it. So that's another fascinating take. Finally, one last book I can mention, which I think is, again, speaks to sort of, the economic takeoff of China, starting in the 1980s,but     provides a sort of much more nuanced perspective on the kinds of decisions that were taken, is a book by the economic economist and economic historian Isabella Weber called, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (2021). And this is sort of about price controls and the ways in which price controls were imposed in the early 1980s, as China is     liberalising, so a very interesting economic history that is, in some ways, quite important today also in trying to understand the dramatic growth of the Chinese economy. So obviously mentioned more than more than more than three. I have many more dimensions, but maybe I'll stop there.Sushant Singh37:51Arunabh thank you so much for your time and for this wonderful conversation. It was it was really nice. Thank you so much.Arunabh Ghosh37:58Great. Thank you for having me.Sushant Singh38:03Thank You for Listening. For more information on our work, follow us on Twitter and log on to our website at https://cprindia.org/

O trabalho de Joseph Needham foi efetivamente um marco nos estudos sobre a China. Com ele o campo da sinologia evoluiu para um novo arranjo no qual o país asiático passaria a ser compreendido por sua própria cultura e não mais por uma cartilha eurocêntrica responsável por diminuir a importância das demais civilizações do mundo em relação à modernidade europeia e atrelar o seu sucesso a uma aceitação incondicional dos parâmetros ocidentais. Sua vasta obra dá conta de diversos temas através dos quais o leitor pode perceber a China como uma civilização em grande parte responsável pelo sucesso da moderna ciência europeia, dado que foram muitas de suas invenções que, em um novo contexto, possibilitaram o caminho que conduziu às revoluções social, científica e industrial ocorridas no ocidente. Ao longo de seus escritos Needham frequentemente se indaga e propõe explicações para os motivos de tais revoluções não terem ocorrido na própria China, seus esforços, contudo, não exaurem o tema, ainda hoje palco de debates. Este programa conta com a participação de Eduardo Vichi Antunes, doutorando em ciências sociais com foco em #filosofiachinesa. Todo mês, Leandro Ferrari, do perfil #CulturaChinesa no Insta (siga: https://bit.ly/3rWpkYO), aborda um tema que vai muito #AlémDoEurocêntrico.

JF and Phil have been talking about doing a show on The Glass Bead Game since Weird Studies' earliest beginnings. It is a science-fiction novel that alights on some of the key ideas that run through the podcast: the dichotomy of work and play, the limits and affordances of institutional life, the obscure boundary where certainty gives way to mystery... Throughout his literary career, Hesse wrote about people trying to square their inner and outer selves, their life in the spirit and their life in the world. The Glass Bead Game brings this central concern to a properly ambiguous and heartbreaking conclusion. But the novel is more than a brilliant work of philosophical or psychological literature. It is also an act of prophecy -- one that seems intended for us now. Header image by Liz West, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Green_marbles_2.jpg). REFERENCES Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780312278496) Paul Hindemith (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hindemith), German composer Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780393321692) Alfred Korzybski, concept of Time Binding Christopher Nolan, Memento (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/) William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780312160623) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780679772873) David Tracy, [The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/790661.AnalogicalImagination)_ Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness (https://bookshop.org/books/seeing-through-the-world-jean-gebser-and-integral-consciousness/9781947544154) Teilhard de Chardin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin), French theologian Mathesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathesis_universalis) Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze (https://bookshop.org/books/the-hermetic-deleuze-philosophy-and-spiritual-ordeal/9780822352297) Weird Studies, Episode 22 with Joshua Ramey (https://www.weirdstudies.com/22) Joseph Needham (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Needham), British historian of Chinese culture James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (https://bookshop.org/books/finite-and-infinite-games/9781476731711)

Hello Interactors,My family and I are safely back home in Kirkland, Washington. It feels good to be home and dry and mosquito free. Reflecting on our visit to assorted colleges and the words uttered by students giving campus tours and admission counselor pitches, I imagined my kids embarking on their collegiate journeys. It’s a grand opportunity to pattern-match what you know and what you love with what a school can offer. The trick is finding a pattern that is close and then adapting to the environment or finding an environment that can adapt to your pattern. Is there such a school?As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…RELIGHTING THE ENLIGHTENMENTWe’ve all experienced movies and TV shows where the camera slowly pans across a vast landscape, often with mountains and steep valleys. And then, just as your eye registers wilderness, our visual sense is rewarded by the sound of a screeching, soaring bird echoing through the valley. It’s a Hollywood convention that blends suggestive artistry with the absoluteness of nature. Sometimes the sound of the screech is accompanied by the image of an eagle. That’s when my daughter and I look each other and roll our eyes and think to ourselves, “That’s not an eagle.”We got to witness the true marrying of the bird with that sound while sitting on the deck at my sister-in-law’s house in Connecticut. And right on cue, my daughter and I looked at each other with jaws agape only to return our squinting gaze back to the sky as a hawk soared above us unleashing that familiar sound. Our senses, primed by the repetitive artificiality of film, were substantiated by the naturally occurring biology of a bird. The blending of art and science.Arts and humanities have been separated from math and science through decades of academic and societal tribalism. But don’t tell our brains that. It really can’t tell the difference. Our family can’t either. My wife and I found this overlap to be our grounding attraction. Separately growing up finding fascination and success in blending the arts with mathematics; we continue to insist the braiding of these individual strands yields a stronger rope. Nature and nurture has seemingly put our kids on similar paths. Our daughter is equally adept at communicating with the environment as she is drawing it. She recently went to the Seattle Zoo to draw some animals. When she approached the tiger cage, alone, the tiger rose, stretched, and chuffed – an audible non-threatening breathy snort through the nose typically reserved for another feline friend or zookeeper. The big cat then proceeded to pose for her. She has a way with animals. She also immerses herself in the mystical ancient worlds of Chinese fiction and then exquisitely draws the scenes from memory. As she focuses her college search, she’s attracted to programs that will teach her mind to invent and her hands to make interpretations of both natural and imaginary worlds. Our son is more interested finance and economics. As a self-proclaimed car nut, perhaps he’s driven by the immediate desire to amass enough money to own his own exotic car collection. Or maybe as a budding car photographer he too is attracted to programs that celebrate the blending of arts and sciences. After all, despite attempts in recent decades to attach economics to rational mathematical certainty, it is still a branch of the social sciences. And it’s confounded by the interwoven and interdependent uncertainties of human behavior who’s desire to attain worldly possessions is bounded by the limits of our natural resources.In the words of esteemed biologist, E. O. Wilson, from his book Consilience – The Unity of Knowledge:“But the theorists cannot answer definitively most of the key macroeconomic questions that concern society, including the … strength of ”externalities” such as the deteriorating global environment. The world economy is a ship speeding through uncharted waters strewn with dangerous shoals. There is no general agreement on how it works. The esteem that economists enjoy arises not so much from their record of successes as from the fact that business and government have no where else to turn.” Wilson goes on to argue that of all the fields in social science, economics, as it was intended to be studied and practiced, is furthest along the path of integrating the arts and sciences. Economics has embraced the lucidity of calculus and analytical geometry that advanced fields like physics, chemistry, and biology. But it was the behavior of the physical environment that inspired Newton to invent the language of calculus to describe it. It was through the manipulation of environmental conditions that he arrived at the mass and distance laws of gravity and three laws of motion – all in the span of just three years. For the first time the world had a way of consistently and empirically describing and understanding astronomical orbs in motion and earthly sand in the ocean. Poet Alexander Pope summed up Newton’s nudging of the world from darkness in two lines:"Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.FROM NEWTON TO NEEDHAMNewton’s influence on the age of Enlightenment cannot be understated. Once great thinkers of the time realized the power of analyzing and describing complex phenomena in repeatable, fundamental terms, they sought ways to apply it. In 1835 Belgian astronomer and mathematician, Adolphe Quetelet, asked why not apply these methods to social phenomena? Soon the field of “social physics” was born; what we now call sociology. Quetelet was interested in applying statistical methods to the social sciences believing they could help explain phenomena like crime rates, marriage rates, and suicide rates. He was criticized by other scientists for assuming such events had an explanation other than freedom of rational choice. Here we are 186 years later and many in the social science of economics still believe humans are rational actors and insist personal choice will ultimately lead to our collective good; despite a world economy with historic income inequality, exploitive labor practices, fragile global supply chains, extractive capitalistic markets, and dwindling natural resources. Their math does not compute. The enlightenment’s insistence on precise reduction of the natural world into mathematical minutia was the work of Newton’s predecessor, the inventor of algebraic geometry and modern philosophy, and France’s preeminent scientist, René Descartes. He believed that because the world exists in three dimensions, it should be described in three dimensions. I spent last spring focused on the chopping of America into a grid made of dots named after Descartes: the Cartesian coordinate system.Descartes vision for a unified knowledge grounded in a fundamental reduction of the world into mathematical terms came to him in 1619 in a single night of successive dreams. He recognized everything in the world, from rainfall to reasoning, results from cause and effect. This rational description of naturally occurring phenomena is what led him to marry the idea of physics with medicine to create the field of biology. But as a devote Catholic and a believer in God as the perfect creator, he had a conflict to resolve. He solved it by creating the separation of mind and body. With one phrase, I think, therefore I am, he was able to justify the idea of God as being all powerful in his head while his body was of this world and thus scientifically testable and mathematically measurable.Some historians believe is was this logical and rational separation that fueled the explosion of scientific discovery throughout three centuries of Enlightenment in a Europe dominated by religious belief, power, and control. An era of discovery unique to Europe. British scientist and historian, Joseph Needham, spent most of his career trying to understand and explain why countries like China and India didn’t have their own ‘Enlightenment’ given their advancements in science that predated European discoveries. In 1969 he posited what has become known as “The Needham Question.”  He asked, “Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo.” He was particularly interested in why the same discoveries “had not developed in Chinese civilization.” After all, Needham pointed out later, in 1985, that even one of the founders of the Enlightenment, Francis Bacon, “had selected three inventions, paper and printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass, which had done more than (anything else), he thought, to transform completely the modern world and mark it off from the antiquity of the Middle Ages. He regarded the origins of these inventions as ‘obscure and inglorious’ and he died without ever knowing that all of them were Chinese.”In 1937 three Chinese students came to study at Cambridge where Needham was doing work in biochemistry. One of these students, Shen Shih-Chang, studied under Needham, another, Wang Ying-lai, went on to be the first to create a synthetic insulin, and the third, Lu Gwei-djen, was a biochemist and historian who taught Needham Chinese and went on to co-author the influential book, Science and Civilisation in China with Needham. Their knowledge of science and history inspired him to take many extended trips to China to meet and consult with an array of Chinese scholars, artists, and scientists. His commitment to this cross-cultural exchange is what led him to co-found the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1945. Needham concluded that China’s “focus stayed on holistic properties and on the harmonious, hierarchical relationships of entities, from stars down to mountains and flowers and sand. In this world view the entities of Nature are inseparable and perpetually changing, not discrete and constant as perceived by the Enlightenment thinkers. As a result the Chinese never hit upon the entry point of abstraction and break-apart analytic research attained by European science in the seventeenth century.” [Wilson: Consilience] As Needham’s interpretation of the history of Chinese science unfolded, he became increasingly convinced the ancient spiritual belief of Taoism played a central role in their discoveries and advancements. THE TAO OF YOUThe word Tao is a Chinese word that can have many meanings depending on tonal variation. According to one Chinese dictionary, said one way it has 39 meanings all related to “way” or “path”, but if said with another variation it has six meanings related to “guide” or “lead.” Etymological scholars seem to agree on the root meaning: “to tend in a certain direction.” The Traditional Chinese characters for Tao pictorially construct such a meaning: 迪.   辶 ti  "walk" and , 由 yu  "to proceed from”. Taken together they can mean "follow a road," "go along," "lead", "direct", or "pursue the right path." Maybe we could add another popular English word the western world adopted, “enlightened.”Like Needham, my daughter was also influenced by the presence of Chinese students. What started in middle school as an obsession with K-Pop has morphed into a fascination with a genre of Chinese fantasy novels called  仙侠, Xianxia. The literal translation is 仙 xian “immortal” 侠 xia “hero” and the novels feature mortal protagonists known as ‘cultivators’ who nurture life experiences and resources through struggle and pain to become immortal beings or xian. Like Needham’s interpretation of Chinese science, this genre draws heavily on Taoist beliefs and also Chinese martial arts. Cultivators are often students of Tao philosophy and they’re “following a road” in “pursuit of the right path”. My daughter is enamored with the Taoist doctrine of living simply and honestly and in harmony with nature. It’s what she experiences in her Dr. Doolittle-esque interactions with animals, drawing them in their habitat, or even recreating scenes depicting twisted plots from one of 300 chapters found in her voluminous Chinese novels. The word plot was first meant to mean a building site. Then directors came along to plot areas on a stage for actors to enact a scene — for a story that we now refer to as a plot.   We humans have been plotting through the visual arts, depicting stories of animals and humans interacting with people and place, for at least the last 30,000 years. Caves have allowed these images to remain all this time, but many scholars believe people were drawing on whatever they could find; countless images washed away by weather and time. What my daughter is doing is in her DNA. It’s in yours too.Drawing is what provided a shortcut through Darwinian evolution. Before our brains were able to draw, pre-human creatures were stuck evolving at the same evolutionary rate as any other species. But once our brains became powerful enough to take what we saw in the world and then draw it, that knowledge could be stored for generations. Over successive iterations, the plot thickened. By drawing scenes and telling stories humans could communicate between tribes and generations about what worked and what didn’t. The sound of the hawk screeching across the sky. What does it look like? What does it mean? We cheated the system of evolution through maps, drawings, and depictions of life and death; humans in search of advancement, economic utility, with minimal negative externalities. We drew images of struggle on the path of mortality in search of the right path; cultivating a journey to the immortality of our species through artistic genetic shortcuts. Without images our species would have evaporated ages ago. Given the climate crisis, and our economy that fuels it, what stories will the images tell to future generations? Epigenetics is the study of how our behavior and our environment influence how our genes work. We shape our environment and our environment shapes us. We all inherit a set of DNA from nature, but epigenetic environmental changes alter how a DNA sequence is influenced. Nature and nurture. My wife and I have given our kids the genes they have and we’ve provided the environment for their DNA to be influenced. In another year they’ll be embarking on journeys into environments of their choosing learning new ways to shape their own DNA and the environment around them. Like the bird flying high in the sky, let’s hope they find ways to live simply and honestly and in harmony with nature. Let’s hope we all find the right path. Subscribe at interplace.io

Episode: 2080 China: A case history in the survival/nonsurvival of invention.  Today, we ask why only some inventions survive.

The rapid expansion of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century cannot be attributed to a single new military invention providing technological supremacy over their enemies. The weaponry and equipment of the Mongols differed little from those of their enemies or from previous nomadic empires. Still, the Mongols were adept in employing the tools of their foes. As historian Timothy May wrote, “the Mongols rarely met a weapon they did not like.” Therefore, many questions have been raised regarding the usage, or lack thereof, of gunpowder weapons in Mongolian expansion, particularly outside of China. Today, we give a brief introduction to gunpowder weapons, both their history of use, their use by the Mongols, and the possible role of the Mongol Empire in the dissemination of these weapons. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   For some historians, like J.J. Saunders or Kate Raphael, the Mongols as both users of gunpowder and transmitters of its knowledge to the west is a total negative or extremely unlikely. They see no clear indication of it’s usage in the western historical sources, seeing possible mentions as too equivocal to be relied upon. But the great British sinologist Joseph Needham and his associates, after a thorough study of well over a millennium of Chinese written sources and archaeology, has demonstrated thoroughly that not only were a number of a gunpowder weapons a common feature of Chinese warfare by the thirteenth century, but that the Mongols also used these during their wars in China. More recent historians such as Iqtidar Alam Khan, Thomas T. Allsen and Stephen G. Haw, have advanced Needham’s arguments, arguing that the Mongols carried gunpowder weapons, such as bombs, fire-lances and rockets, west in their conquests over the rest of Eurasia. Stephen Haw in particular has suggested that the infamous smoke-screen employed by the Mongols in Poland at the battle of Liegnitz in 1241 was a gunpowder-based weapon.    To demonstrate this, we must very briefly give an introduction to Chinese usage of gunpowder. Chinese alchemists and engineers had been mixing various chemicals for medicinal and experimental purposes for centuries, including some of those which constitute gunpowder. Gunpowder itself was not the result of any single individual’s experiments, in the style of the old European fable of Berthold Schwarz, but rather a long series of trials combining materials -often, rather ironically, in search of elixirs to eternal life- which ultimately resulted in discovering a rather flammable substance. The first recipe for gunpowder finally appears during the Tang Dynasty in the 8th century CE, in a Taoist work urging alchemists not to mix saltpetre (potassium nitrate), sulphur and carbon-rich materials like coal, and to especially not add arsenic to the mixture, as the result would light aflame. The Chinese quickly found the energy produced by these materials quite mesmerizing when used in fireworks display, and found use for it in civil engineering and mining,  but contrary to some popular sentiments that the Chinese only used it for peaceful purposes, it appears they rather quickly applied this new material for warfare. From the 10th century to the 13th, the Chinese created a great number of weapons to violently disseminate knowledge of gunpowder. By 1044, possibly in reaction to military defeats against the newly established Tangut ruled Xi Xia Dynasty, the Song Dynasty was presented a collection of nine kinds of gunpowder weapons and three distinct gunpowder recipes in the Wujing Zongyao. This technology advanced under the Song Dynasty, which faced a collection of ever-more fearsome foes on its northern borders.   From the 10th century onwards, these weapons took a number of forms.  Bombs thrown from catapults (huopao), enclosed in pottery or fragmenting metal shells. Arrows (huojian) with incendiary packages strapped to them, launched from bows or massive mounted crossbows, developing into early rockets over the twelfth century.  Most infamous was the fire-lance (huojiang): a bamboo or metal tube capable of shooting a jet of flame three metres in length, sometimes with shrapnel and toxic materials packed into the tube to form a terrifying, flame-spouting shotgun. The proportions of consitutent chemicals were refined to increase power, with other additives such as lime to even human faeces to produce a number of horrific bombs; some to explode and throw armour piercing shrapnel, some to spread flame and destroy buildings, with others to have a choking, blinding gas dispersed by the explosion to envelop and confuse the enemy.   The Song Dynasty government was so reliant on these weapons -and so terrified of their foes acquiring them- that it prohibited the sale of any of the materials composing gunpowder to the Khitan Liao Dynasty or Tangut Xi Xia in the 11th century. Both lacked access to natural reserves of saltpetre producing lands. But with the Jurchen conquest of the Liao and Northern Song in the early 12th century, the newly formed Jin Dynasty seized not only stores of these weapons, but the knowledge and resources to produce their own. Now facing a powerful, gunpowder armed foe, this spurred a new stage of gunpowder experimentation by the Song Dynasty. The first textual references to fire-lances, rockets, and new kinds of bombs appear as Song forces desperately resisted Jin invasions. The Song were imaginative when it came to employing these against the Jurchen. The narrow crossing over the rivers into south China became the main lines of defence, and the Song quickly took to arming their ships with rockets and huopao, catapults capable of lobbing bombs against Jin troops, to destroy ships or cast poisonous clouds against men and horses. As early as 1127, Song officials were recommending that all warships be equipped with such weapons to repel the Jin. Other uses speak of the desperation of defenders, coupled with considerable access to gunpowder. The 1207 siege of Te-an is a well known example: the Song defenders filled tea sacks with rice straw, used matting and gunpowder to hurl against the Jin troops assaulting the walls. The Jin were quick to pick up such weapons too, a cause for no shortage of alarm amongst the Song court, among other things. While perhaps effective in slowing the Jin invasions of southern China, gunpowder weapons were neither key in the initial Jurchen conquests of the north, or in actually repelling them. Skilled leadership and political will, in addition to general miltiary resources and logistics, were by far the determining factors. Gunpowder weapons were another tool in an arsenal, rather than the defining strategic component as they often appear in popular imagination.    When Chinggis Khan invaded the Jin Dynasty in 1211, whole companies of Chinese siege engineers entered into his service, either willingly deserted to him or forced into service, bringign with them knowledge to construct various siege machines from catapults to rams. There is not, however, clear indication of the usage of gunpowder weapons against the Jin in these very first years of the conflict. One such Chinese siege specialist who willingly deserted, Guo Baoyu, accompanied Chinggis Khan west on his camapign against the Khwarezmian Empire. According to his biography in the Yuanshi, when the Mongols attempted to force a crossing of the Amu Darya, a number of Khwarezmian ships blocked their path. Guo Baoyu ordered a volley of huojian to be launched against the fleet. The ships were all set aflame, allowing the Mongols passage. While huojian originally and literally meant fire arrows, according to Joseph Needham, Jixing Pan, and Thomas Allsen, over the twelfth century the term came to signify rockets, when powdered gunpowder mixtures with higher percentages of saltpetre, charcoal and less sulphur made for effective rocket propellants.   In addition, the Persian historian Juvaini often makes a distinction between “fire, naphtha and stones,” being thrown into cities during Chinggis Khan’s Khwarezmian campaign, as if there were distinct incendiary weapons being used in addition to the naptha (i.e, petroleum) derived weapons more familiar in the Islamic world. According to Needham, naptha has been utilized for military purposes since the 4thc entury BCE, and remained a feature of armies in the Middle East up until the Mongol conquest. Juvaini’s flowery language makes it difficult at times to know if he was simply being poetic, or literal in terms of the weapons being used, even when he was an eyewitness to the events he describes. While Chinggis Khan certainly brought Chinese siege engineers westwards with him, it does not seem that gunpowder weapons made up a key component of his tactics. Likely, Chinggis lacked the resources to manufacture gunpowder and gunpowder weapons, and if he was making use of them, it was in limited quantities- his tactics for taking cities relied on skillful use of Chinese siege machines in great numbers alongside local forced labour and his powerful Mongol warriors. As mentioned earlier, gunpowder weapons were a tool in the arsenal, rather than a defining component. They lacked the ability to destroy walls by themselves: this was still the job of stones thrown from catapults, which the Mongols are expressly described using throughout the Khwarezmian campaign.    After Chinggis Khan’s death in 1227, his son and successor Ogedai completed the war with the Jin Dynasty, in the process cquiring greater experience with gunpowder weapons, and the natural and manpower resources to produce them. In the early 1230s there are a number of references in Chinese sources to the use of these weapons in the last years of the Mongol-Jin war. In 1231, for instance, the Jin utilized a new development in bomb technology, the heaven-shaking thunder-bomb (zhen tien lei), to sink Mongol ships in a naval engagement. These were bombs with high nitrate content in their  gunpowder mixture encased in a cast-iron shell. When set off, they created a monstrous noise like thunder, while also splintering the iron shell into a wave of armour and flesh tearing shrapnel, an early fragmentation grenade.   The most famous gunpowder engagement came the next year well recorded in a detailed description in the dynasty history of the Jin, the Jinshi, compiled under Mongol auspices in the fourteenth century. In 1232, the great Mongol general Subedei besieged the Jin capital of Kaifeng, in a year-long siege in which sides utilized gunpowder weapons. Subedei had catapults launched gunpowder bombs into the city, while the Jin defenders had a variety of gunpowder tools in their defensive arsenal. Mobile shelters pushed up to the walls of Kaifeng were annhilated by thunder-crash bombs dropped onto them via an iron chain. Additionally, great number of ‘flying-fire-spears’ (feihuojiang) were employed. Depending on the interpretation of the historian, these were either fire-lances packed with wads of shrapnel and arrows which when fired acted as a sort of flaming shot gun, while others like Jixing Pan suggets these were infact rockets.    Either way, they were used to great effect and in great numbers. At one point in the siege, a Jin commander took 450 men armed with fire-lances into the Mongol encampment, a surprise attack resulting in hundreds of Mongol troops killed or drowned then they tried to flee. The Jinshi remarked that the thunder-clap bombs and flying-fire-spears were the only two weapons of the Jin the Mongols feared. Yet, these devices could not arrest the fate of the dynasty. A scovered back in episode 14 of this series, the Emperor abandoned Kaifeng before the siege was complete, and the city fell in 1233, and the Jin Dynasty itself finally extinguished the next year.   We must emphasize again, that while terrifying, these gunpowder weapons were not themselves the key determining factors in these wars. The modern concept of all powerful, destructive guns, bombs and cannon must be ignored. The reliability of these early medieval weapons was questionable. Different proportions of the necessary chemicals, or in the design of a given weapon, might result in a device going off early, too late, or not at all. The range of these weapons was often short, and they were best utilized in the defense, in situations where their effect on enemy morale could be maximized. These bombs were not yet the secret to destroying city walls, though they could set fire to wooden structures, towers or gates along the battlements.    Regardless, they were a frightful weapon when used properly. Thus it seems unusual that Subedei, the commander of the final campaigns against the Jin who faced these gunpowder weapons, made little use of them in the great western campaign begun only a few years later. Though specialized Chinese artillery was employed against the Alans of the north Caucasus, Rus’ principalities and Hungarian, there is little direct indication of the use of gunpowder weaponry in the west. Many of the mostly wooden cities of the Rus’ principalities were burned, it is true, but the Rus’ sources generally offer no description of how this occurred, only that it did. Usually they imply the fire was started after the city already fell. In the case of the siege of Vladimir, the Nikonian Chronicle specifies that a great volume of stones were shot into the city, and that the church at Vladimir was burnt only after the Mongols stacked a great pile of wood next to it and set that on fire.   A possible indication of gunpowder usage is supplied by the Franciscan friar John de Plano Carpini, who travelled through the Rus’ principalities late in the 1240s bearing messages from the Pope to the Great Khan. In his report of his travels, Carpini offers a very accurate description of Mongol battle and siege tactics, with the intention that his observations be used to help prepare Christendom against further attacks. Carpini’s short description is worth quoting:   They reduce fortresses in the following manner. If the position of the fortress allows it, they surround it, sometimes even fencing it round so that no one can enter or leave. They make a strong attack with engines and arrows and they do not leave off fighting by day or night, so that those inside the fortress get no sleep; the Tartars however have some rest, for they divide up their forces and they take it in turns to fight so that they do not get too tired.  If they cannot capture it in this way they throw Greek fire; sometimes they even take the fat of the people they kill and, melting it, throw it on to the houses, and wherever the fire falls on this fat is almost inextinguishable. It can however be put out, so they say, if wine or ale is poured on it. If it falls on flesh, it can be put out by being rubbed with the palm of the hand.   As the Mongols, as far as is known, did not have access to Greek Fire, it seems that Carpini is attempting to describe an incendiary of unusual properties using cultural terms he was familiar with. And as Carpini’s knowledge of Mongol siege tactics largely came from his discussions with survivors in the Rus’ territories, it seems to imply that a special type of fire-causing weapon was used against the Rus’: quite possibly gunpowder weapons Subedei had brought from China.   The famous smoke screen employed by Mongol forces at the battle of Liegnitz in Poland in April 1241 may also have been a type of gunpowder weapon, as suggested by Stephen Haw.  Firstly, for those of you unaware of the context, here is the relevant quote from the description of the battle of Liegnitz, recorded in the fifteenth century Polish chroncile by Jan  Długosz.   “Among the Tatar standards is a huge one with a giant X painted on it. It is topped with an ugly black head with a chin covered with hair. As the Tatars withdraw some hundred paces, the bearer of this standard begins violently shaking the great head, from which there suddenly bursts a cloud with a foul smell that envelopes  the Poles and makes thm all but faint, so that they are incapable of fighting. We know that in their wars the Tatars have always used the arts of divination and witchcraft, and this is what they are doing now. Seeing that the all but victorious Poles are daunted by the cloud and its foul smell, the Tatars raise a great shout and return to the fray, scattering the Polish ranks that hitherto have held firm, and a great slaughter ensues.”   Haw suggests that the smoke weapon used at Liegnitz was the same as a category of smoke bombs used in Chinese warfare over the preceding centuries. Devices to deploy toxic smoke and smoke screens have been used in Chinese warfare since at least the 4th century CE, but during the Song Dynasty more effective versions were developed with gunpowder. in easily shatterable pottery containers, these weapons were packed with poisons, foul-smelling ingredients, shrapnel, arsenic and lime. Dispersed by the force of the explosion, these bombs unleashed a cloud or fog of painful gas containing lime and arsenic in order to blind, disorient and confuse enemy forces- very similar to the smoke weapon described at Liegnitz. Not understanding it was a gunpowder weapon, either a bomb or modified fire-lance, the Poles focused on the most visible ‘tool’ as the origins of the smoke, mistakenly identifying a Mongolian horse-hair standard as the device. The failure of the chronicle to describe the sound of the weapon going off could be attributed to the confusion of battle distance in time of Jan  Długosz’s compilation from the actual event. None of the contemporary Polish observers would have known what gunpowder was, and therefore failed to associate obvious things we would associate with it, such as the sound, lash of flight or actual mentions of delivering the weapon.    This is a point we must emphasize. The ambiguity of language of many western sources on the Mongols makes it difficult to  identify if a new gunpowder weapon was used. Not knowing what the device was, or lacking words for these new devices which the Mongols were almost certainly unwilling to let non-military individuals examine, it is hard to determine when a medieval author is using a term they were familiar with, such as Greek Fire or Naptha, to refer to a new technology which served a similar purpose. The fact that most chroncilers were not first hand witness, but recording accounts from survivors, means it is hard to  know how many details of a given day or battle’s events were accurately recorded, particularly as in the case of Jan  Długosz, who was writing almost two centuries after the battle of Liegnitz, and was at the mercy of whatever was recorded or survived discussing the battle in 1241.   On the other hand, it can be hard to tell if a source is  just providing a dramatic description of a more ‘mundane’ weapon. Such is the case of the Persian writer Juvaini’s account of Hulegu’s campaign in the 1250s, to which he was a direct eye-witness. Juvaini writes of how Hulegu was provided by his brother, the Grand Khan Mongke, a thousand households of Chinese catapultmen, as well as naphtha throwers. As the siege of the Nizari Assassin fortress of Maymun Diz, covered  back in episode 28, Juvaini mentions a large crossbow-like weapon deployed by Hulegu’s Chinese siege engineers, which he called an  ox-bow, in Persian, kaman-i-gav, a direct translation of the Chinese term for the weapon, ba niu nu, “eight-ox-bow.”. Juvaini writes that it delivered meteoric shafts which burnt the enemy, in comparison to stones lobbed by the defenders, which did little but harm a single person. The passage is as follows:    [A] kaman-i-gav [‘ox’s-bow’ ], which had been constructed by Khitayan craftsmen and had a range of 2,500 paces, was brought to bear on those fools, when no other remedy remained and of the devil-like Heretics many soldiers were burnt by those meteoric shafts. From the castle also stones poured down like leaves, but no more than one person was hurt thereby.   These ox-bows in Chinese warfare, as described by the Wujing Zongyao, could have gunpowder packages attached to the bolts, and were used in the same manner as Juvaini describes. While some historians like Stephen Haw see this as a clear usage of gunpowder, it must be remarked that Juvaini’s tendency for over-flowery language makes it difficult to gauge how literal this passage must be taken, though he was an eye-witness to the siege.   Generally it seems that gunpowder was little used in most of the Mongols’ western campaigns. Likely difficulties in travelling with it prevented them from taking great quantities of it, and at the time of the conquests there was not sufficient knowledge in the west which would allow them to procure more supplies. The matter was very different in the continuing Mongol wars in China, where under Khubilai Khan bombs were a main component of the wars against the Song Dynasty, which continued to employ them as well. Thousands of bombs were made every month in the Song Dynasty, though often they failed to properly supply these to the necessary border regions which needed them. One Song official in 1257 inspecting the arsenals of the border lamented how poorly supplied these vulnerable sites were in these weapons, and how despite repeated requests to the central government, amends could not be made. The Song continued to throw whatever they could against the Mongols as they advanced deeper into southern China, but by then the Mongols not only had ample supplies of these weapons for war in China, but manpower reserves, a powerful military structure and a leadership hell-bent on overrunning the south, driven by the energetic Khubilai who believed in the eventuality of his conquest. Khubilai’s great general Bayan set up ranks upon ranks of huopao during his drive to Hangzhou, lobbing stones to pound down the walls, gunpowder bombs to annhilated gates and towers and terrify the defenders withi. Against such an inplacable foe, the last of Song resistance was ground to dust.   Khubilai employed gunpowder weapons against other enemies as well. Most famously against the Japanese, where archaeological evidence, the account of the Hachiman Gudokun and the invasion scrolls of Takezaki Suenaga demonstrates the Yuan forces using iron bombs against the Japanese. Though as we mentioned in episode 26 discussing Suenaga’s scrolls, the addition of the bomb going off in the scroll was likely made later, as it is in different ink and Suenaga fails to mention such weapons. For such a boisterrous warrior like Suenaga to not mention surviving a terrifying grenade like that is rather unlikely.   It appears that an advance in gunpowder weapons was made sometime in the late thirteenth century. Near the ruins of Khubilai Khan’s summer capital of Shangdu, the earliest confirmed cannon has been found. Bearing an inscription in the ‘Phags-pa script dating it to 1298, a serial number, weighing just over 6 kilograms (13 lb 11 oz) and just under 35 cm (approx. 14 in) in length,  it suggests a product of considerable experimentation and systemization. Earlier, much more primitive and rougher models have been found which from archaological context imply they come from the last years of the Tangut Xi Xia Dynasty, crushed in 1227 by Chinggis Khan. It is probable that the evolution of fire-lances from bamboo to metal tubes was a stepping stone to larger metal tubes capable of larger gunpowder charges and projectiles, brought on by the emergency of the Mongol invasions.  Only in the last years of the 13th century did these models reach a level of standardization and sophistication to become bombards, and more and more sophisticated models are known from over the fourteenth century. There are a few passages from 13th and 14th century Chinese texts which may indicate the usage of these cannons, usually in naval engagements; where muzzle flashes seem to be described when Mongol ships fire upon fleeing Jin ships, or on small vessels at the blockade of Xiangyang launch projectiles, but from ships too small for catapult. Much like the western texts, the Chinese did not yet have a name for this new technology though. Calling them huopao, the same name for the catapults which threw gunpowder bombs, it is impossible to know, unless a description is given, which texts refer to bombs, and which to early cannons.    From 1288 we have perhaps the earliest description of small hand held guns or cannons. In the war against his rebel cousin Nayan, Khubilai Khan led his army against Nayan himself, but attacked from multiple fronts. One such operation was led by a Jurchen commander in Khubilai’s service, Li Ting. Using the word for fire-catapult or cannon, huopao, Li Ting and his small squad of Korean soldiers is described as at night sneaking into an encampment of Nayan’s men and setting off these weapons to great effect. From the context, it is clear that these weapons are too small and mobile to be catapults. In further support of this interpretation, it appears one of the actual weapons has been found. Discovered in 1970 in Heilongjiang province, nearwhere Li Ting’s troops fought Nayan, a small bronze cannon or handgun has been discovered from an archaeological site supporting a late thirteenth century context. Weighing 3 and a half kilograms, 34 cm in length, with a bore of 2 and a half centimeters, these were small, anti-personnal weapons. Not much use against walls, but devastating against men and horses. It is no suprise that Nayan’s rebellion was quickly crushed if Khubilai had men with such armaments at his disposal.   The Yuan Dynasty continued to produce cannon over the fourteenth century. One well known example from 1332 bears an inscription with its date and purpose of manufacture, intended to be used on board a ship for suppression of rebels. By the rise of Zhu Yuanzhang and the Ming Dynasty in the late fourteenth century, cannons and other  firearms were standard features of Chinese armies.  Over the Ming Dynasty, gunpowder weapons continued to advance into more deadly and efficient variants, but did not replace the basic tools of the Mongol conflict in China. Rockets, fire-lances, and bombs were used even into the Qing Dynasty, but supported by cannon, mines and two-staged rockets and even multiple-rockets launchers, similar to the famous Korean hwacha developed during the Imjin war. The Qing too would face fearsome nomads bearing firearms in the form of the Dzunghars, but by  then the military advantage was considerably in favour of the Qing.    We can also briefly note evidence for an even earlier usage of firearms, in the form of some controversial iconographic evidence in China. In the Dazu cave system in Sichuan, there is an extensive carved relief featuring individuals armed with a variety of weapons. One carved figure holds something visually very close to early designs of handguns or handcannons, from which clouds of smoke, and possibly a projectile, seem to be carved leaving. As these carvings dates to 1128, this would push back the development of the fire-arm even earlier, and suggest a much more widespread usage of cannon and gun than previously thought. However, the identification is hardly accepted. Some have suggested it was a later addition to the complex during repairs, while others have argued it is not depicting a fire-arm, but merely a wind-spirit holding a bag of wind. As it currently stands, there is no hard evidence for emergence of true fire-arms until the late thirteenth century during the Yuan Dynasty.   So did the Mongols spread gunpowder westwards? Recipes for gunpowder and even the first gunpowder weapons appear in Europe, the Islamic World and India late in the thirteenth century, after contact with Mongol armies. However, the diffusion is difficult to track due to the already mentioned ambiuigisties in terminology. It’s likely the Mongol armies did not travel with great quantities of powder and were reluctant to share it’s knowledge. It is notable though that when perhaps the earliest recipe for gunpowder is recorded in Arabic, circa 1280 by Hasan al-Rammah, he records most ingredients as being Chinese in origin, with saltpetre for instance called Chinese snow, or rockets as chinese arrows. A common word for gunpowder in Arabic and Persian meant [dawā’ in Arabic, and Persian dārū], a literal translation of the Chinese huoyao, fire-drug [ often shortened to just yao in 13th century] which implies that knowledge was transmitted directly from Chinese engineers in Mongol service. By the start of the fourteenth century, fireworks appear as  objects of regular entertainment in the Ilkhanate, and therefore transmission from the Mongols, in some fashion, seems certain.   In Europe there are tantalizing clues to transmission. A great number of diplomats, travellers, priests and merchants made the trek from Europe across the Mongol Empire and back, and many brought gifts from the Khans with them, or observed closely the Mongol army in an attempt to learn its secrets. The Franciscan friar, William of Rubruck, spent much time with a European goldsmith in Mongol service, William Buchier, the man who made the famous Silver Tree of Karakorum. Buchier appears to have worked often in conjunction with Chinese artisans in his work for the Mongols. Though Rubruck’s account does not describe gunpowder, Rubruck is known to have met, while back in Paris, the first European who did: Roger Bacon, who describes with amazement his experience viewing Chinese firecrackers going off in Europe. Even if the Mongol army itself did not directly or intentionally transfer gunpowder, or use it in quantities to replace their own bows and arrows, they opened the pathways which allowed its knowledge to move across the Eurasian continent. Over the early decades of the fourteenth century, fearsome hand guns and bombards became regular features of battlefield across the continent, the secret to gunpowder no longer restricted to the Chinese government.   Our series on the Mongols will continue, so please be sure to subscribe to the Kings and Generals Podcast to follow. If you enjoyed this and would like to help us continue bringing you great content, please consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/KingsandGenerals. This episode was researched and written by our series historian, Jack Wilson. I’m your host David, and we’ll catch you on the next none. 

這是2008年9月25日的一集節目。從這集節目的標題，可以判斷，這個人很可能不是中國人。節目介紹那年出版的一本新書，名字是《一個熱愛中國的人》（The Man Who Loved China) 作者是Simon Winchester。這個熱愛中國的人，名字叫李約瑟，是中西文化交流史上的巨人。Winchester 為了寫這本書，做了大量的資料查閲、研究和採訪。李約瑟的生平，跨中西文化，貢獻浩大，絕不是一本書可以記錄完全的。所以作者從已婚的李約瑟在中國期間遇到情人魯貴珍的經歷入手。其實李約瑟這個中文名字就是魯貴珍給他起的。李約瑟原名Joseph Needham。魯貴珍的南京口音，“呢”和“勒”不分，所以把Nee 說成了 Lee。李約瑟的中文名就此誕生。英國哲學家羅素的《西方哲學史》，李約瑟是中文翻譯之一。可見其中文之利害。當然，他的宏偉多卷巨著《中國科學技術史》更是對中國文化的不朽貢獻。請聼聼這個人的故事吧。

With all the #Chinabashing going on, it's perhaps important to remember why the #PRC, its people and culture rather than its national entity, matters to the rest of the world. It is easy to lose sight of now but that is why perhaps in June 2020 it's a good time to reprise a previously broadcast interview with Simon Winchester @simonwwriter.  @claudiacragg speaks here with Winchester about Joseph Needham and 'The Needham Question'. The subject caused the most tremendous brouhaha in The New York Times over a decade ago (). At the time, I commented that I can only think those who responded with such vitriol to Winchester knew absolutely nothing at all about Winchester and his work, nor anything about the subject of his new book. In this latest opus, the award-winning Foreign Correspondent, Simon Winchester returns with the remarkable story of the growth of a great nation, China, and the eccentric and adventurous scientist who defined its essence for the world in his multi-volume opus, 'Science and Civilization in China'. Winchester relates how most of us know that the Chinese invented a great variety of objects and devices long before they were known of in the West. Not simply famous things like gunpowder and paper, but also harnesses for horses which had a huge effect on the West when they arrived. Why, though, did Modern Science develop in Europe when China seemed so much better placed to achieve it? This is the so-called 'Needham Question', after Joseph Needham, the 20th century British Sinologist who did more, perhaps, than anyone else to try and explain it. Needham was a British biochemist and was elected a fellow of both the Royal Society and the British Academy. In China, he is known mainly by his Chinese name Li Yuese He was also cited by the United States during the McCarthy era for his investigation into the use of illegal weapons by the US on the Koreans in the Korean War. Winchester, The New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa is a writer and adventurer whose articles have appeared in such publications as the National Geographic and Conde Nast Traveler . He has now written well over a dozen books on travel and history.

Recurriendo a Leibniz, los escritores chinos ofrecieron paralelos entre el I Ching y temas como el álgebra lineal y la lógica en ciencias de la computación. Con el objetivo de demostrar que la antigua cosmología china había anticipado los descubrimientos occidentales. El sinólogo Joseph Needham adoptó la postura opuesta, argumentando que el I Ching en realidad había impedido el desarrollo científico al incorporar todo el conocimiento físico en su metafísica. El psicólogo Carl Jung se interesó por la posible naturaleza universal de las imágenes del I Ching , e introdujo una influyente traducción al alemán de Richard Wilhelm al discutir sus teorías sobre los arquetipos y la sincronicidad. Oigamos el relato…

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here with author Simon Winchester (@simonwwriter) about his latest book, In this, he writes a magnificent history of the pioneering engineers who developed precision machinery to allow us to see as far as the moon and as close as the Higgs Boson. Precision, Winchester says, is the key to everything. It is an integral, unchallenged and essential component of our modern social, mercantile, scientific, mechanical and intellectual landscapes. The items we value in our daily lives – a camera, phone, computer, bicycle, car, a dishwasher perhaps – all sport components that fit together with precision and operate with near perfection. We also assume that the more precise a device the better it is. And yet whilst we live lives peppered and larded with precision, we are not, when we come to think about it, entirely sure what precision is, or what it means. How and when did it begin to build the modern world? Simon Winchester seeks to answer these questions through stories of precision’s pioneers. this book takes us back to the origins of the Industrial Age, to Britain where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John ‘Iron-Mad’ Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. Thomas Jefferson exported their discoveries to the United States as manufacturing developed in the early twentieth century, with Britain’s Henry Royce developing the Rolls Royce and Henry Ford mass producing cars, Hattori’s Seiko and Leica lenses, to today’s cutting-edge developments from Europe, Asia and North America. Simon Winchester, OBE, is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster who resides in the United States. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. As an author, Simon Winchester has written or contributed to over a dozen nonfiction books and authored one novel, and his articles appear in several travel publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic.  In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first as regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but was later assigned to be the Northern Ireland Correspondent. Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast Hour of Terror. After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming The Guardian's American correspondent in Washington, D.C., where Winchester covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency. In 1982, while working as the Chief Foreign Feature Writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falklands Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held as a prisoner in Tierra del Fuego for three months. Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror, was published by Faber and Faber in 1975. The book drew heavily on his first-hand experiences during the turmoils in Ulster. In 1976, Winchester published his second book, American Heartbeat, which dealt with his personal travels through the American heartland. Winchester's third book, Prison Diary, was a recounting of his imprisonment at Tierra del Fuego during the Falklands War and, as noted by Dr Jules Smith, is responsible for his rise to prominence in the United Kingdom. Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Winchester produced several travel books, most of which dealt with Asian and Pacific locations including Korea, Hong Kong, and the Yangtze River. Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman (1998), published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller, and Mel Gibson optioned the rights to a film version, likely to be directed by John Boorman. Though Winchester still writes travel books, he has repeated the narrative non-fiction form he used in The Professor and the Madman several times, many of which ended in books placed on best sellers lists. His 2001 book, The Map that Changed the World, focused on geologist William Smith and was Winchester's second New York Times best seller. The year 2003 saw Winchester release another book on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, as well as the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Winchester followed Krakatoa's volcano with San Francisco's 1906 earthquake in A Crack in the Edge of the World. The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of eccentric Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham, who helped to expose China to the western world. Before The Perfectionists, Winchester's most recent book was The Alice Behind Wonderland, released March 2011. 

In 1952, North Korea and China commissioned one of the most prestigious British scientists of the day to investigate their claim that the United States used biological weapons on the Korean population during the Korean war. The evidence that Dr Joseph Needham found was so damning that the report was immediately suppressed by the U.S. government. Researcher Jeffrey Kaye tracked down the report and has published it online. We speak with Jeffrey Kaye from his home in Hawaii.

In addition to teaching history at the University of British Columbia, Carla Nappi hosts the New Books in East Asian Studies and New Books in Science, Technology and Society podcasts. She is also the author of The Monkey and the Inkpot, a book about the Ming dynasty doctor, herbalist and natural scientist Li Shizhen, who is known for his Materia Medica. Carla joined Kaiser and Jeremy for a wide-ranging conversation covering topics from Li Shizhen to British scientist and writer Joseph Needham, from the history of science in China to podcasting, and from Carla’s voracious book appetite to her decidedly unorthodox approach to teaching. Recommendations: Jeremy: Sounding Islam in China. Carla: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Kaiser: Scalawag magazine.

In this Part 2 episode, Laszlo continues his intro of Joseph Needham in 1943 right after Needham returned from his perilous adventure to the northwest of China to visit the sights of Dunhuang. We'll conclude the life of Joseph Needham in this episode. He truly was, as Simon Winchester called him, "The Man Who Loved China." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this Part 2 episode, Laszlo continues his intro of Joseph Needham in 1943 right after Needham returned from his perilous adventure to the northwest of China to visit the sights of Dunhuang.  We'll conclude the life of Joseph Needham in this episode. He truly was, as Simon Winchester called him, "The Man Who Loved China."

In this long-awaited topic, Laszlo introduces "The Man Who Loved China", Dr. Joseph Needham. A true friend of China for most of his adult life, Needham's contribution was the epic work "Science and Civilization in China". Today this massive undertaking is spread out over 24 volumes, 17 of which were written in Needham's own lifetime. In this Part 1 episode, we only go up to 1943 and the end of Needham's first expedition in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this long-awaited topic, Laszlo introduces "The Man Who Loved China", Dr. Joseph Needham.  A true friend of China for most of his adult life, Needham's contribution was the epic work "Science and Civilization in China".   Today this massive undertaking is spread out over 24 volumes, 17 of which were written in Needham's own lifetime. In this Part 1 episode, we only go up to 1943 and the end of Needham's first expedition in China. 

Journalist, broadcaster, and bestselling author, Simon Winchester, tells the remarkable story of Joseph Needham, an eccentric English chemist who wrote a vast book on Chinese science which remains the longest book about China ever written in the English language. Winchester 19s lecture on The Man Who Loved China was delivered at the Royal Ontario Museum on October 14, 2010.

Journalist, broadcaster, and bestselling author, Simon Winchester, tells the remarkable story of Joseph Needham, an eccentric English chemist who wrote a vast book on Chinese science which remains the longest book about China ever written in the English language. Winchester's lecture on The Man Who Loved China was delivered at the Royal Ontario Museum on October 14, 2010.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Needham Question; why Europe and not China developed modern technology. What do these things have in common? Fireworks, wood-block printing, canal lock-gates, kites, the wheelbarrow, chain suspension bridges and the magnetic compass. The answer is that they were all invented in China, a country that, right through the Middle Ages, maintained a cultural and technological sophistication that made foreign dignitaries flock to its imperial courts for trade and favour. But then, around 1700, the flow of ingenuity began to dry up and even reverse as Europe bore the fruits of the scientific revolution back across the globe. Why did Modern Science develop in Europe when China seemed so much better placed to achieve it? This is called the Needham Question, after Joseph Needham, the 20th century British Sinologist who did more, perhaps, than anyone else to try and explain it.But did Joseph Needham give a satisfactory answer to the question that bears his name? Why did China's early technological brilliance not lead to the development of modern science and how did momentous inventions like gunpowder and printing enter Chinese society with barely a ripple and yet revolutionise the warring states of Europe? With Chris Cullen, Director of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge; Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at SOAS; Frances Wood, Head of Chinese Collections at the British Library.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Needham Question; why Europe and not China developed modern technology. What do these things have in common? Fireworks, wood-block printing, canal lock-gates, kites, the wheelbarrow, chain suspension bridges and the magnetic compass. The answer is that they were all invented in China, a country that, right through the Middle Ages, maintained a cultural and technological sophistication that made foreign dignitaries flock to its imperial courts for trade and favour. But then, around 1700, the flow of ingenuity began to dry up and even reverse as Europe bore the fruits of the scientific revolution back across the globe. Why did Modern Science develop in Europe when China seemed so much better placed to achieve it? This is called the Needham Question, after Joseph Needham, the 20th century British Sinologist who did more, perhaps, than anyone else to try and explain it.But did Joseph Needham give a satisfactory answer to the question that bears his name? Why did China’s early technological brilliance not lead to the development of modern science and how did momentous inventions like gunpowder and printing enter Chinese society with barely a ripple and yet revolutionise the warring states of Europe? With Chris Cullen, Director of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge; Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at SOAS; Frances Wood, Head of Chinese Collections at the British Library.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Needham Question; why Europe and not China developed modern technology. What do these things have in common? Fireworks, wood-block printing, canal lock-gates, kites, the wheelbarrow, chain suspension bridges and the magnetic compass. The answer is that they were all invented in China, a country that, right through the Middle Ages, maintained a cultural and technological sophistication that made foreign dignitaries flock to its imperial courts for trade and favour. But then, around 1700, the flow of ingenuity began to dry up and even reverse as Europe bore the fruits of the scientific revolution back across the globe. Why did Modern Science develop in Europe when China seemed so much better placed to achieve it? This is called the Needham Question, after Joseph Needham, the 20th century British Sinologist who did more, perhaps, than anyone else to try and explain it.But did Joseph Needham give a satisfactory answer to the question that bears his name? Why did China’s early technological brilliance not lead to the development of modern science and how did momentous inventions like gunpowder and printing enter Chinese society with barely a ripple and yet revolutionise the warring states of Europe? With Chris Cullen, Director of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge; Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at SOAS; Frances Wood, Head of Chinese Collections at the British Library.