Corbis

FEW people, other than scholars, will be familiar with the story of the Cambridge don whose study of China's scientific history helped to change the West's appraisal of a civilisation once thought hopelessly backward. By the time Joseph Needham died in 1995, he had published 17 volumes of his “Science and Civilisation in China” series, including several that he wrote entirely on his own.

The Chinese began printing 600 years before Johannes Gutenberg introduced the technique in Germany. They built the first chain drive 700 years before the Europeans. And they made use of a magnetic compass at least a century before the first reference to it appeared elsewhere. So why, in the middle of the 15th century, did this advanced civilisation suddenly cease its spectacular progress?

So powerful has Needham's contribution been to the historiography of Chinese science that this conundrum is still known as “The Needham Question”. Even the Chinese themselves use it: the phrase in Mandarin is Li Yuese nanti.

Simon Winchester's lively biography (see article) focuses on what drove Needham to wrestle with this issue. In 1936 three Chinese assistants came to work in his biochemistry laboratory. One, Lu Gwei-djen, who came from Nanjing, began teaching him Chinese, which ignited Needham's interest in the country's technological and scientific past. He retrained as a Sinologist and took a job in Chongqing as Britain's scientific emissary.

Mr Winchester draws much from Needham's diaries which describe an unconventional lifestyle, an open marriage and numerous extra-marital affairs, as well as exotic adventures travelling across China in search of its science.

Among Needham's destinations in his Chevrolet truck was Dujiangyan, a city badly hit by the recent earthquake in Sichuan Province. There he was able to study a huge irrigation project that was created 2,300 years ago and which still stands today, though now cracked by the earthquake. At that time, only the Mesopotamians had made such strides in controlling their rivers, Mr Winchester says.

Needham's focus on China's achievements naturally won him praise there. The Republican government granted him one of its highest honours shortly before it was overthrown by the Communist Party in 1949. But Needham also had strong ties with China's new rulers. This controversial relationship threatened to blight his career. His participation in a Chinese-led inquiry into alleged American use of germ warfare during the Korean war, together with his failure to be more sceptical about what many believe to have been Soviet and Chinese fakery, prompted many of his peers in the West to shun him.

Needham's Cambridge college, Gonville and Caius, however, retained its faith in his scholarship and gave him extraordinary freedom from normal academic duties to pursue his book-writing.

Needham never fully worked out why China's inventiveness dried up. Other academics have made their own suggestions: the stultifying pursuit of bureaucratic rank in the Middle Kingdom and the absence of a mercantile class to foster competition and self-improvement; the sheer size of China compared with the smaller states of Europe whose fierce rivalries fostered technological competition; its totalitarianism.

With its unreformed one-party system, its rote-learning in schools and state control of big businesses, “new China” is hardly a haven for innovative thinking. Yet the Chinese continue to fret about the Needham question. A Communist Party chief of a middle school in central China recently said that it deserved deep thought and that the answer lay in an education system that fails to emphasise improving “character”. A former government minister also referred to Needham's lament that China had produced no idea or invention of global impact for more than 500 years. Its contribution henceforth, the official said, should be “harmony”.

Work on “Science and Civilisation in China” has pressed on since Needham's death. A variety of authors continue to contribute on topics that stretch from mining to agro-industries and forestry. The latest, out this year, is part 11 of volume five. Each part is a book, in this case a 512-page tome on ferrous metallurgy by Donald B. Wagner, the 24th book in the series.