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“Benefit of Water”: The Approach of Joseph Needham

JOSEPH Needham's Science and Civilisation in China is one of the major scholarly enterprises of the century. The combination of authoritative scholarship with humane concern makes Needham's work not merely exciting reading, but, if one may use the word in a scholarly journal, joyful. The present volume maintains the high standards of its predecessors as Needham continues to demonstrate the ways in which Chinese science and technology have been related to the civilization of China and the world. If each civilization gets the science it deserves, China's humanist civilization, in Needham's view, has deserved well, and its technology has flourished accordingly. And from the scope of China's technological history he draws, like a latterday Confucian, lessons both technical and moral. China's nautical achievements, for example, were more remarkable than has generally been conceded. The absence of "the galley-slave pattern characteristic of Mediterranean Europe for some two thousand years" indicates almost unavoidably the clear technical superiority of Chinese ships and sails, which did not need to use such "organised inhumanity" (p. 626). Chinese vessels ranged "from Basra to Borneo, and from Zanzibar to Kamchatka" (p. 486), and there is even reason to think that the Chinese may have rounded the Cape of Good Hope, intentionally or not, as early as 1420 (pp. 501-502). The "palpable similarities between many features of the high Central American civilisations and those of East and South-east Asia" (p. 542) cause Needham to visualize the intermittent arrival of small groups of Asians in the Americas, starting perhaps in Ch'in times, and traveling by sailing-raft, which would have been "not only the oldest form of transport between the two culture-areas, but one of the first gifts of the Old World to the Amerindian peoples" (p. 551). In more recent times he notes that the Ming navy, again ca. 1420, "would have been more than a match for that of any contemporary European State or even a combination of them" (p. 484), and he gives a fascinating account of the expeditions of Cheng Ho (pp. 487-494), "the Vasco da Gama of China" (p. 502), suggesting that one motive for these voyages was a search for materia medica (pp. 530, 533). The "strange contemporaneity of the great Portuguese and Chinese voyages of discovery" (p. 487) permits Needham to draw another technical-moral lesson with whose general validity it is hard to quarrel. Technically, "the originality of the Portuguese seems somewhat qualified when we remember that of the basic inven-