Volume 21, Number 20 · December 12, 1974
A Great Explorer
By Philip Morrison
Science and Civilisation in China Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part II: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Magisteries of Gold and Immortality
by Joseph Needham, with the collaboration of Lu Gwei-Djen
Cambridge University Press, 510 pp., $35.00
The tide of printed books which floods our libraries began to rise, we imagine, around 500 years ago, when Master Gutenberg first set the Holy Bible in majestic blackletter. But there is another ocean of printed books, its shores far from most educated readers of English, Russian, or Greek. When the first Mainz Bible appeared, Chinese libraries already held editions of printed works older then than Gutenberg's product is now. Wood blocks of whole pages cut by hand and printed on paper have made the texts of Chinese authors into a widespread literature for 1,200 years. Ambitious government-sponsored encyclopedias, and long series of classical authors carefully and uniformly edited and presented for the educated gentry, were well-known phenomena in China for more than eight centuries. Parchment was not used; and the less enduring paper was relied on there for 1,800 years, so the recorded learning of Chinese necessarily owes very much less to manuscripts than does our own. Mass production and reprinting protects the past well, but very differently from odd finds of scrolls near the Dead Sea or in the caves along the Silk Road; print has shaped Chinese scholarship for a very long time indeed.
Review, 3030 words
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