CHINA today is doubly fascinating, as an emerging economic superpower and for its ancient civilisation. However, the west used to see it as a curiosity, an intellectual backwater: there was some nice art and some poetry worth translating, but the Chinese were not as modern as us.
Credit for overturning this view goes to the English biochemist turned historian Joseph Needham. His monumental Science and Civilisation in China, published in 1954, revealed a largely unknown hotbed of invention, that brought the world clocks and compasses, printing, gunpowder and many other key technologies. Simon Winchester relates how Needham fell…
