When Joseph Needham first approached Cambridge University Press
in the late 1940s, he proposed to write a short book on science and
civilization in China. His work evolved instead into a lengthy examination of the history of science and technology in China from antiquity to modern times. A biochemist who shifted careers midstream, Needham is now considered one of the most brilliant sinologists of the twentieth century. He has been described as "a kind of medieval polymath to whom no knowledge [was] unfamiliar, and none to be despised." His multi-volume work is regarded as a profound act of historical synthesis linking the West to the East.
The germ for Science and Civilisation was planted in 1937 in Cambridge, England, when Needham met three Chinese biochemists who were engaged in post-doctoral research at the university. They talked to him about their cultural traditions of language and literature. Many years later, writing under the nom de plume of Henry Holorenshaw, Needham described his initial encounter. It was a "liberation for which he had always been looking ... he found something equal and opposite to all that in which he himself had been brought up, and something for that very reason of compelling fascination."
China, for Needham, was fascinating. From 1942 to 1948 it became his home. As head of the British Scientific Mission in Chungking, he interviewed scholars and doctors. Traveling everywhere, he collected information on Chinese science and medicine. This research formed the foundation of his life's work. He wanted to render "justice at last, as well as sympathy and understanding, to a great people whose contributions to human development have been grotesquely underrated."
In Science and Civilisation, Needham wrote on Chinese discoveries in biology, mechanical engineering, astronomy, earth sciences, as well as firearms, silk weaving, the magnetic compass, time-keeping mechanisms, deep drilling, ship building, roads, iron and steel technology, etc. At every stage he makes parallels between development in China and those in India, Greece, Persia and Europe. "Wisdom," he liked to say, "was not born with Europeans."
The first volume is dedicated to Lu Shih-Kuo, a merchant apothecary in the city of Nanking. He was the father of Lu Gwei-Djen, one of the biochemists Needham had met at that fateful encounter in 1937. After his first wife's death, Needham married his long-time colleague Lu Gwei-Djen. He credited her with being the "hormone or evocator of the present book."
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