This is the cover of Science and Civilization in China by Joseph Needham. Question: What is significant about the image of the cover of his book? Read ahead to find out. 

This is the second installment of a series of discussions that are based on Simon Winchester’s book about Joseph Needham, The Man Who Fell in Love with China.  During the Japanese invasion of China, entire universities fled the major cities to the hinterland of China.  According to Winchester, a Chinese professor of philosophy in the city of Chengdu, Luo Zhongshu, while teaching at Oxford University informed colleagues and administrators of the “unimagined step of fleeing” into the Chinese rural environment to escape Japanese attacks. Luo convinced his Oxford audience that there was a great possibility that China’s intellectual survival, especially in the fields of science, was at stake.  The British decided that a team of British academics should be sent to China to meet up with as many of these groups as possible, assess the situation, and make arrangements to provide resources to help them.  Joseph Needham was one of two candidates recommended for this incredible assignment.

Three years later, on February 24, 1943, Needham flew from Calcutta on an American C-47 flying over the Himalayas landing at the Kunming military airstrip in southwest China.  Finally he was there, after several years of preparation which included learning to read, speak and write Chinese, along with the five other languages that he spoke.  A month or so later, Needham moved to Chongqing, the capital city of China, which as Winchester points out, was where his work began.  And did it.

Within a few months he planned and went on his first journey from Chengdu south to Chongqing by way of a zig-zag route visiting science sites, and tasting the culture of China, a kind of preparation for a bigger and more vast trip he would take very soon. During this short trip he came across the temporary home of the University of Wahan, which was more than 600 miles from its normal home, and here he gave his first lecture (in Chinese); he also discovered in a small town of Lizhuang, an Institute of History in Lizhuang, which according to Needham was much like the Royal Society in London.

Thus he was ready to take his first real expedition to bring “good cheer,” “boost morale,” “wave the British flag,” and a hidden reason, “to learn about Chinese Communists.”  

His first great expedition would take him from Chongqing to the Dunhuang, a distance of more than 1,000 miles by truck, over poorly constructed road, over bridges, across streams, and onward to this outpost of Chinese civilization.  And its this outpost that I want to use to explain what’s significant on the cover of Joseph Needham’s volumes of Science and Civilization, and what Simon Winchester used as the end pages for his book, The Man Who Fell in Love with China. 

Needham was interested in getting to Dunhuang because at this location there are 493 man-made caves known as Magao Grottoes which were discoverd by a monk (Wang Yuan Lu ) in 1900. They are located in Rattling Sand Mountain, and they were chiseled by Buddhist monks starting in AD 366 and continued through three dynasties to AD 1279 – 1368. The smallest cave is about a foot tall, while the biggest is about 40 meters high. But it was one cave that Needham was particularly interested in, and that was cave 17.

Cave 17 held a copy of the Diamond Sutra, the world’s oldest surviving dated printed book, dated at AD 868, and Needham wanted to see cave 17. The book is composed of seven strips of yellow-stained paper that were printed from carved wooden blocks and pasted together to form a scroll more than 5m long.

Needham reached the cave after months of travel, and found cave 17. Later, when he published his first volume of Science and Civilization in China, he would use the Diamond Sutra as the cover of his first and subsequent volumes. Simon Winchester used the same art work on the end pages of his book, The Man Who Fell in Love with China.