Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology. Pt. 7: Military Technology; the Gunpowder Epic by Joseph Needham

Abstract

Book Reviews Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology. Pt. 7: Military Technology; the Gunpowder Epic. By Joseph Needham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. xxxiii + 703; il­ lustrations, tables, notes, appendixes, bibliographies, index. $99.50. In this volume Joseph Needham takes up the third of the triad of inventions—the others being printing and the magnetic compass— that have been celebrated as China’s most important contributions to “world” technology. The history of gunpowder and firearms, like that of printing, has long been subject to expert scrutiny. But here, as in Needham’s other volumes, Chinese-language sources have been uti­ lized to a degree quite unprecedented, and the product is an almost complete reformulation of the matter. This review will deal principally with what seems to me the core of it. The question of the origins of gunpowder has been pretty much settled by earlier scholars in favor of China; that of firearms, less certainly. Needham’s argument that both originated in China is embedded in an elaborate history of “the gunpowder epic” in both the East and the West. The matter, according to Needham, should be considered in terms of three “transmissions”: (1) firecrackers, ca. 1265 (to Roger Bacon), (2) fire lances, bombs, and rockets, ca. 1280 (to Hasan al-Rammah and Marcus Graecus), and (3) the metal bombard and handgun, ca. 1300 (known in the West through the famous “can­ non” illustrated in an English manuscript [Walter of Milamete] of 1327). Needham begins with “Greek fire,” identifies it as essentially distilled petroleum, and believes that it did not originate in China. It reached China by about a.d. 900 “or rather earlier,” and came, through the intermediation of Arabic merchants, along the sea route, and then up through East Asia from the south to the north. But the Chinese version of the auxiliary “flame-throwing apparatus” employed a dou­ ble-acting force pump and used gunpowder, as “a slow match,” to ignite the petrol. The pump was described in a book dating from a.d. 919, and the “slow match” in a work of a.d. 1044—according to Need­ ham, “the first appearance” of gunpowder. Gunpowder was one of a number of spectacularly flammable mix­ tures that originated “from the systematic, if obscure, investigations of Taoist alchemists. ... It is often said that with all thejars of purified substances on the shelves, the gunpowder constituents were probably Permission to reprint a book review in this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 943 944 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE mixed for the first time ‘by chance.’ ” Needham denies that they “worked with no theories at all” but, having himself worked mightily at the question, can only ask “Who can tell what train of thought the macrobiotic experimenter was following when he did it?” (Macro­ biotics, dealt with in volume 5, part 3, was the school of Chinese alchemy concerned with life-prolonging elixirs rather than gold making.) In any case, Needham finds the history of gunpowder to a degree the history of references to mixtures of ever-increasing saltpeter con­ tent and dates “gunpowder fireworks” as early as 1185. A study of recipes for powder composition leads him to note that European formulae are about right from the outset, while Chinese recipes show evidence of experimentation, suggesting that gunpowder was im­ ported to Europe and required no significant development there. Although “full possession” of gunpowder, which China had attained by the 13th century, led to its use in all the usual situations, “it pro­ duced no perceptible effect upon the age-old civil and military bu­ reaucratic apparatus” because “there was no heavily armored knightly cavalry in China, nor any aristocratic or manorial feudal castles either . . . another case of the socially devastating discovery which China could somehow take in her stride, but which had revolutionary effects for Europe.” But the bomb originated in the first use, in the 12th century, of high-nitrate powder and the iron casing. (The Chinese called the result the “thunderclap bomb”; Needham says that one of its advan­ tages was that the enemy couldn’t throw it back.) By 1221 the Chinese were using “cast...