Volume 55, Number 13 · August 14, 2008
The Passions of Joseph Needham
By Jonathan D. Spence
The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
by Simon Winchester
Harper, 316 pp., $27.95
It is now a little over four hundred years since a scattering of Westerners first began to try to learn the Chinese language. Across that long span, the number of scholars studying Chinese has grown, but their responses to the challenges of Chinese script have been generally consistent. Most have just slogged away, with reasonable success, and treated the task as an intellectual challenge on a par with many others. But at pretty much any period, one can trace two other groupings whose views are far more extreme. One such group contained those who came to hate and despise the Chinese language; they found it unlearnable, and grew convinced that the whole language was some kind of plot to snare the unwary, and even to drive poor foreigners mad.
Review, 4574 words
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