Customer Reviews

The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There are both good and bad aspects of this book. First, it is an overall look at China's ancient technology. Not a bad idea. However, it is terse, and not very in-depth. I would recommend reading Sterling Seagrave's Lords of the Rim, which has added information regarding Needham's research - like the wonderful look at China's naval expertise and their huge ships that plied the seas (with room for horses and gardens), which Genius of China does not mention. Genius, however, is a great resource for folks who know nothing about China's ancient scientific discoveries, and is, therefore, an incentive to study further.

I disagree with one reviewer. I do not find Temple distainful of Western thought and scientific expertise. One has to remember the difficulties Europe was going through prior to and during the Renaissance and Reformation in regard to fighting for the freedom to study science openly - without the fear of inquisition. England, having divorced itself from Rome, was freer to read, experiment with, and discover the truths behind the Chinese knowledge - much of which was coming out of the Orient through the returning missionaries. Even though the Protestants abhorred the Jesuits, they were very interested in learning and using what the Jesuits had discovered while in China. Understanding a little more about Western history during this period illustrates why the West was "behind" the Chinese in their scientific endeavors. In addition, many of these European scientists made their own experiments derived from that knowledge and did not give credit to the Chinese.

In addition, Needham and Temple have cleared up some anomolies that appear in David Tame's The Secret Power of Music, by giving us a better understanding of how the tuned chung bells were used to regulate China's measurements. The pitched pipes in a hermetically sealed room turn out to be a "superstitius absurity or a long-standing case of fraud". The authors do not make any reference to Tame's "Yellow note".

For anyone who can't afford hundreds of dollars to buy all of Needham's volumes on this subject, I think Genius is a good place to start.

This book is a compendium of interesting Chinese innovations in science and technology, scattered across several millennia of history, attractively illustrated and for the most part clearly described. There are no references to which one can turn for more information on specific topics. It's an antiquarian's book - - a bit in the spirit often seen among Chinese antiquarians, in fact.

What it is not, unfortunately, is a coherent history of the development of Chinese thought and practice in science and technology. Nor does it provide a well-founded account of how Chinese science and technology influenced and was influenced by other societies.

There is a brief but graceful and interesting introductory essay by the late Dr. Joseph Needham, FRS, the notable biologist who developed a great enthusiasm for Chinese scientific and technological history and authored a remarkable multi-volume survey, Science and Civilisation in China.

The author of the present work unfortunately repeats and greatly compounds the worst weaknesses of Needham's history, with exactly the opposite effect to that he intends. If he knows of no early European examples of a particular development (which often is simply because of gaps in his knowledge of the relevant history) then he automatically ascribes the eventual European development to diffusion from Chinese sources. This is "post hoc ergo propter hoc" run amok, and the logical fallacy is transparent even to those readers who know little of the historical facts. In many cases it is indeed likely that diffusion was important for European development, but by his summary treatment of the causal issue, the author will lead many to doubt it.

One sifnificant example shows what is at work here. Temple (on pp. 55) tells us rather breathlessly that the Chinese were using water power to operate blast furnace bellows by AD 31 -- a genuinely significant achievement worthy of note. Then he claims that European metallurgical use of water power did not come until the 12th century, when water powered hammer forges. Finally he jumps to the conclusion that the innovation traveled from China to Europe and was a major factor in the European Industrial Revolution.

The problem with this is that he simply has his facts altogether wrong with respect to Europe. Water power (for agricultural uses) dates probably to the 2nd or 3rd century BC in Europe. By the 1st century AD it was being used in mining and metallurgy, and by the 2nd century widely so. Thus water power appeared at least as early in Europe as in China, and perhaps a good deal earlier. Moreover, it was used far more widely for agricultural purposes, where Chinese techniques remained resolutely manpower-intensive up until very recently. (Indeed, Temple's book, with unconscious irony, shows many photos of human-powered machines in use in China during the modern era.)

This sort of distortion occurs repeatedly throughout the book -- it would be easy to document scores if not hundreds of instances.

(For books documenting Greek and Roman technological developments, search in Amazon for the following ISBNs: 041594189X, 0804748055, and 0801414393.)

Study of the history of Chinese innovation is extremely important at many levels for a clear understanding of the mechanisms of technological and social change. Unfortunately, this book does more to retard than to advance it.

Temple has really concisely summarized some of the best topics from Needham's mammoth work. He gets to the point, his explanations are clear and it is profusely illustrated (always a plus). Although of course we all know China was a gajillion years ahead technologically from the rest of the world, I was shocked to learn that they had a natural gas industry, had isolated phermones, and other astounding accomplishments.

The only reason I can't give this book 5stars is because of Temple's attitude. It's like he has not only to proev China's cool as his thesis, but also that Europe sucks. Yes, China's cool. Yes, Europeans were millenia behind. And I don't care that you note that. But do you have to lambaste them just cause they weren't so quick on that intellectual trigger. It's a mocking tone that didn't sit well with me.

By and by however, I grew used to Temple's constant degrading of Europe and grew just to laugh at it. Towards the end of the book he too lightens up and tells some jokes that are actually funny. One time though he may have gone to far. He mercilessly mocks the Chinese is the section on the first hermetically-sealed laboratory. If he hadn't been such a champion of the Chinese throughout, I might have been insulted for them.

Oh well.

It's a good book and definately worth the bucks. It may be paperback, but it's super high quality on sturdy, glossy paper.

Personally, I am a bit disappointed in its coverage which seems not so in depth... But nevertheless sufficient for the layman to at least catch a glimpse of what the ancient Chinese has achieved. By profession, I am a trained Engineer and am currently seeking a Masters in Theoretical Physics. And of course I am a Singaporean Chinese. From young, I was taught alot of Chinese Maths and Chinese algorithmic methods .. which were dry and boring then..and which was more often than not confusing. Now it was confusing not because it is not good but rather we were taught Western methods that stresses different computational methodology.. But the difference is that the Chinese method can sometimes do it faster!!..For example: what is 1 + 3 + 5 +..+ 17? Chinese method would just point to the 9th finger and give the answer as 81. I have often wondered just what do the Ancient Chinese know that I do not... And so I set a course to find out as many things I could about my ancestors..(which many people may look down on)..First.. I needed to find out about Chinese Mathematics Achievments, the extent of their knowledge..I am not at all convinced about the allegation that it was imported from elsewhere.. simply because China was geograpically isolated and there are no countries around which it could borrow knowledge from ...At its height, it was the most advanced .... (until Qing Dynasty and the jesuit input: By then the Chinese had deteriorated...). that China had indeed some impressive achievements: that of discovering Zero...( shown in 2002) the knowledge of Phythagoras, that of being the first in solving n-Degree Equation..that of solving Similar Triangle..and more.... And all these could be gathered from the net.. Second, I wanted to find out just how advanced the Science were... THere were readers who alledged that it seemed magical and perhaps foolishness.. I beg to differ. Isn't modern Chemistry playing around with different chemicals or mixing anions with cations that reacts to give a different compound?? And more than that, I wanted to find out the extent of knowledge importing and exporting from China.. if.. I am wrong... But I was then led to a few books :
The year the Chinese discovered America :1421 by Menzies, and when China ruled the seas.. by Louise Levathes..
And I was led to more sites in the internet.. and more recent discoveries in Singapore itself that proved that China has had extensive trade with her neighbours.. And readers of the following books will find that China has had perfected the technique of latitude and longitude crossing...that implies that China was not isolated...A check with Temple's findings were done in 2000.. when I went to China on an "expedition trip"...I admit I was very impressed with the Great Wall.. even as an Engineer...So.. I guess I have to give my forefathers some credit here... And this book serves as a beginning.. No less!!
I recommend more reading on the subject though... for those interested..

This is a nice compendium of Chinese achievements, but it is seriously hampered by the chip on Temple's shoulder. In order to prove the genius of China, he constantly denigrates European achievements. A good half of the entries end by calculating how many years in advance of Europe the Chinese were with the achievement in question. This could have been done once or twice for effect, but to repeat it so often is needless (and pointless) piling on. Every Chinese discovery is shown to be the root of a European discovery, however tenuous the link. Thus, the Chinese invented a toy helicopter and a kite, therefore modern aviation is totally derivative of them. But if the Europeans were the first to come up with an idea that they did not translate into practical use, then it is to Temple a mere trifle that only the Chinese developed to its full potential.

Another issue with the book is that it doesn't give any kind of chronological account of scientific developement in China. It's not what the book sets out to do, so this is more a remark than a criticism. It set me wondering about who Chinese scientists were, what was the relationship among science, engineering, and tinkering, when were the key periods of scientific innovation, whether they had a prolific early period comparable to the Greeks, and other issues. I'm especially curious because so much of Chinese science seems, like European alchemy, to be only half a step removed from magic and another quarter step from pure silliness. It's always astounding how people who believed in alchemical ideas could be great inventors, and the same held in China (where Taoism produced the leading scientists, from what I can gather from this book).

It is an interesting book, covering a wide range of scientific topics. (Of course, it's just culled from Needham, so it's not as though the author had to do a lot of research.) Subjects as diffuse as mining, medicine, number theory, and warfare are covered in different chapters. I'm not an expert on science, so I often learned a lot about the individual inventions -- as so often happens in the modern world, we take for granted the extraordinarily ingenious inventions of an earlier age, which seem simple only in comparison to the even more wonderful machines we have today.

This book should not be judged by itself, but rather as an appendix to Simon Winchester's excellent book, "The Man Who Loved China" which is a biography of Joseph Needham, the British scientist who fell in love with a Chinese student, who introduced him to the genius of her old culture.
Now, the key word here is 'love', a feeling which makes people see qualities that might not exist in reality and, ignore defects, otherwise obvious to others.
The book is a series of - unfortunately too brief - descriptions of Chinese contributions to science. Most of them are absolutely astounding, such as the drilling to incredible depths for salt and natural gas, the invention of the decimal system, or the vaccination for smallpox.
However, the reader should try to control his or her enthusiasm, since some of the presented inventions and discoveries have not been scientifically verified and confirmed, while in other cases, the author seems not to have understood the subject very well.
There is no verified proof that human sex hormones could be isolated from urine as described, or that the extracts could be used to treat the sick.
There is no proof that Chinese workers hired during the 19th century in the US steel industry were metallurgy experts, rather than just low paid laborers, as implied in Simon Winchester's book.
The most outrageous claim, is that the so-called South Pointing Charriot, was the "first cybernetic machine".
All there was to this invention, was a complicated gear system including a differential gear, which indicated if the charriot was going along a straight line, or in a circle. However small errors in wheel diameter and imperfectiond in terrain, would have made it totally useless as far as going in the same direction. There was nothing in the way of a feedback system, if that is what was meeant by "cybernetic", unless we consider the driver as part of the loop, in which case all of us who drive, are also cybernetic machines.
There is a very good explanation on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pointing_Chariot .
The author gives a description of the Mercator projection as a projection of the Earth sphere, from its center, on a cylinder, which is totally wrong, and calls it deridingly "presumed invention of Gerardus Mercator".
This description can be found in incompetently written high-school text-books, which misses the main idea, that it is a complex mathematical mapping of a sphere onto a cylinder, which preserves angles and shapes unmodified. In other words, as the latitude scale increases as we go north, so does the longitude scale. A good description of it is also on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
The described geometrical projection, looks similar, but it does not have this essential property of the Mercator projection, which makes the Mercator map a true invention.
As other reviewers have said, there is a tendency in the book, to minimize Western contributions, it seems even at the price of misrepresentation.
Another description titled "Essentials of the steam engine" borders on hallucination. It is about a water powered engine with a piston and valves, which is indeed a creative design, but it is not a steam engine. There is no mention of water vapor under pressure whatsoever. It doesn't make any sense. Why not call it what it was, rather than try to ignore a great invention produced in the West?
The author, at least, gives credit to the Babylonians for inventing the concept of printing. They were imprinting inscriptions on wet clay tablets, by rolling a cylinder with the carved text. Such cylinders can be seen at the Louvre Museum in Paris. So basically, the concept of repeatedly tranferring text from an engraved object to a compatible medium, was invented somewhere else, rather than in China. The Chinese perfected the concept and invented the movable type.
However, since the Chinese writing involves about 5,000 ideograms, printers needed up to 400,000 bronze characters!
There is no attempt to compare this mess, with the 26 letter alphabet invented by the Phoenicians, which was adopted by all other peoples in the West.
The author makes no attempt to explain why the genius of Chinese development in science stalled in the 15th century.
However, he repeatedly mentions how the Chinese bureaucrats were hijacking from the true inventors and entrepreneurs, any invention that seemed promising. Nationalized were the production of salt and natural gas, the production of cast iron, the production af wine and beer, the use of letters of credit and of paper money, the production of sulphur, etc, etc
A good analysis of this destructive attitude towards business, can be found in Etienne Balazs's book, 'Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy'.
After hundreds of years of this practice, the Chinese inventors and entrepreneurs finally got the message and stopped creating - a message for those in love with the idea of government ownership of industry, also known as...socialism.

I really don't know much about Chinese history and ancient technology of the world. But this book gave me lots of information about ancient technologies of Chinese and Greeks.
Although I believe many Great inventions Chinese made does not get credited to Chinese such as Crossbow and firearms. But this book seems give too much of credit to Chinese invention and how it affected western technologies because many inventions are done independently.

Overall it is a good book and Chinese people should be proud of what their ancestors acheived.

If you have read Simon Winchester's The Man Who Loved China which tells the story of Joseph Needham's discovery and passion for Chinese science, then Robert Temple's book, The Genius of China, is an excellent next step. You can see what you've been reading about. Temple has collected from Needham's multi-volume study many of the inventions which are illustrated with often excellent photos.

Perhaps it is inevitable that discovering what China had developed so very early in history would prompt comparisons with European development, but we really don't need to go there. Simply seeing what was done in China over 3000 years, which is what this book is about, is amazing.

There is evidence that Chinese got around to inventing umbrellas in the 4th century CE. It rains a lot in China. What took them so long? In contrast, in the first century BCE Chinese were drilling for brine and converting it to salt by heating it with the natural gas they found in the same drill holes. Temple takes several pages to describe the drilling process--done with bamboo cables--and the transportation of methane gas in air tight, jointed bamboo tubes for miles to towns and villages. They were not casual in the drilling. The average well depth was about 3000 feet.

Well, if a civilization has at least fifteen major discoveries each century for some 2500 years you will have time for the magnetic compass (1st c.), seimographs (130 CE), the kite (5th c. BCE), the rudder (1st c.), the flame thrower (10th c.), the iron plough (6th c. BCE), the chain drive (10th c.), playing cards (9th c.), brandy (7th c.), and the circulation of blood (6th c. BCE).

If Robert Temple's 300 pages are not serious enough for you, you can key into Amazon's search engine Colin A. Ronan's The Shorter Science & Civilization in China. Some of the used volumes are available at less than $15. And if that doesn't do it for you, try Cambridge University Press for Needham's original volumes, but heavy lifting is required here. Volume 1 is a princely £139 (that's British pounds if your computer doesn't deliver the right character) plus shipping.

Despite the heavy, glossy paper, Temple's book is beautifully bound. It lies flat as you read it. There are four pages of a chart showing invention or discovery with the dates of first use. I wish the publisher had not chosen to print the table of contents in black ink on dark red paper...even though it looks nice. And the striking illustrations are probably the reason it isn't available on the Kindle. Frankly, there are some books that I wouldn't want to read it on my Kindle. This is one of them. For eighteen bucks it's a heck of a deal.

Let me start by saying that I read this book while I was in college, which was about ten years ago, so I can't recall all the details. I know I enjoyed it for a little while, until I noticed that Robert Temple often has no idea what he is talking about, or perhaps he simply ignores reality when it doesn't fit with his story.

Temple argues, for example, that inflation is not possible without paper money. At one point, he talks about a very clever chemical process that was invented in ancient China, and at the end he admits that there is absolutely no evidence that the process he describes actually worked.

If you are into steampunk, or if you aren't interested in actual facts, this is a really great read. There are a lot of nifty ideas and clever devices, but reality is never allowed to get in the way of the story of just how awesome China was. If you have a lot of time and money, check out Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, or maybe the Shorter Science and Civilisation in China. I'm sure there are plenty of good, reliable books on ancient Chinese inventions. This is not one of them.

Wow. This is an incredible book! Like many readers of popular modern science, I constantly underestimate the inventiveness and technology of ancient man. This book really highlights that. Also, it's an amazing inventory of creativity and inventiveness that the current China seems to be regaining. Imagine very modern inventions like glow-in-the-dark paint and natural gas mining being invented before the First Century AD!
I read this as a way to get familiar with the technology of one of the most inventive people and times in history so that I could use it in conworld creation. I was NOT disappointed! The idea that they had movable type and spill-proof lanterns were revelations to me. Not to mention the quality of their ceramics and lacquer.
However, you've really got to want this information to read this book. I found the author's style to be quite dry and academic. In some cases, it even seemed rather biased in favor of the Chinese, but, as my wife pointed out, that's to be expected considering the subject matter.
All in all, though, the author's writing skills are not enough to keep me from heartily recommending this book to anyone interested in the technology of the ancient world.