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Simon Winchester: How to speak Chinese. And he spoke it and read it and wrote it extremely
well, and the British government sent him as the official British government emissary
to China during the war with Japan. And then he conceived of this idea that the Chinese,
from a lot of sort of epiphanies that occurred to him in China, must have created so many
or achieved so much scientific distinction long before anyone in the west, that he decided
to write a book called "Science and Civilization in China", 24 volumes, 4 million words.
Bob McDonald: Yes, and it was astounding what he found, was that China had found all these
scientific discoveries long before Europe did. Like what are some of the things that
he saw?
SW: Well, the classic ones is... Francis Bacon made this remark in the 17th century, that
the three creations that defined modern civilization were the compass, printing and gunpowder.
And the assumption was, that Bacon made, was that the compass had been discovered in let's
say, the Levant or maybe an Arabian country, about the 11th century. The printing, well
we knew that; Gutenberg and Caxton in the 15th century. And gunpowder, probably an Arab
invention, probably in the 10th or 11th century. Well, neither was able to prove absolutely,
conclusively that the Chinese had invented the compass two centuries beforehand. It pointed
north, not south but that's no great difference. Printing...
SW: Well first of all gunpowder, they had used it for belligerent purposes, making fragmentation
grenades in the 7th century AD, 300 years before anyone in the west. And printing, the
first printed book discovered in the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang in western China by this
remarkable man, Aurel Stein in 1917 or so, is in the British Museum now, 868 AD. So 600
years beforehand, and you could go on to the most ludicrous thing. Toilet paper for instance,
I think if we think about toilet paper, the invention of it or what the Americans call
bathroom tissue...
[laughter]
SW: Was invented probably in Victorian times. But Needham was able to show that sheets of
perfumed, soft paper for this specific purpose was manufactured in China mainly in sheets
three feet by four, which seems a little sort of...
[laughter]
SW: Over-egging the pudding...
BM: What were they eating?
[laughter]
SW: But then he also... He found papers showing that the smaller ones, sort of three by four
inches, for the somewhat more delicately shaved posteriors, he said of the Beijing aristocracy,
were manufactured in 1340. So they've done a lot of things and before we did.
BM: ***-terotocracy.
[laughter]
BM: Okay. So then what happened? If China had done all these things so many centuries
before Europe, why didn't they become the great technological innovators? Like what
happened?
SW: Well, I think the answer to that is wait and see. They stopped, there's no doubt about
it, that coincident with the European Renaissance, the sort of energy behind their inventive
zeal, began to evaporate. And they didn't do much for quite a long period. But, and
this was called the Needham Question, what suddenly happened? Why did they stop inventing
things? Why was the torch passed to the Europeans? And there are many answers for that. But what
seems to have happened subsequently, like now, is that ever since Deng Xiaoping made
that famous speech "to get rich is glorious," suddenly the tide of invention has regained
momentum. And now China, according to a piece in The Economist just two weeks ago I think
it was, is now number two if not number three, if not number two in the world in the number
of patents being filed, soon will overtake the United States.
SW: The universities are brimming with brains and ambition and money. Chinese students are
going back now to great institutes of Physics and Chemistry, which of course are rapidly
ceasing to be in the west despite your best efforts with radio programs like yours. Science
is evaporating. Physics is a dead art in Britain today. I don't know what it's like in Canada,
but it's not doing too terribly well in the United States either. So it's almost as if
China is regaining what she had once practised and in the long sweep of Chinese history,
5,000 years, if there was 400 years where not very much was happening, that's just a
blimp on the radar screen. They're nurturing back big time, and I should think they will
regain their position.
BM: I'm sure they will. Simon Winchester, thank you very much.
SW: Thank you very much. Thank you.
[applause]
SW: Oh, thank you. Thanks.
[applause]
BM: So we would like to open this up to you. If you have questions for Simon, we'd like
to hear from you. There's a microphone in the centre aisle there, please use it so that
we can hear you and so that this can be broadcast as well. This is being broadcast somewhere.
Well, thank you. Yes, sir?
S?: Hi. First of all, Mr. Winchester, thank you for your wonderful books. They've provided
many hours of pleasure. I just finished reading "The Man Who Loved China" and spent a portion
of this week in saying, "Honey, can you guess when the Chinese invented the flamethrower?"
And she was frequently off.
[laughter]
S?: Not that I would have been any better before looking at the appendix of the book.
In the course of all of the research you've done with I guess a large mix of primary,
secondary sources, interviews, what's the sort of single most astounding finding that
you've come across when you learnt it, or discovered it or someone shared it with you,
your mind was absolutely blown, and you were most excited to share with your readers either
in your books or in the course of your journalism?
SW: Well, I think the thing that most stimulated me from the research on the Atlantic book
was the linkage between... It's a very long story, and I'll try and do it very quickly.
Britain in 1916 was losing the Battle of the Atlantic. It was unable to shoot at German
submarines that were torpedoing us. We were running short of ammunition, specifically
cordite, and because we had run out of one particular chemical component, acetone...
Nail polish remover, effectively. We used to buy all our acetone from Germany, and clearly
they're not going to sell it to us if we're at war with them.
[laughter]
SW: The editor of the Guardian, the paper I used to work for, a chap called CP Scott,
would have lunch every Tuesday at the Northern Liberal Club with someone he found interesting.
And in August 1916 he had lunch with a man called Chaim Weizmann who said, among many
other things, he was Professor of Biology at the University of Manchester and a white
Russian, said, "I have come up with a technique for producing acetone in large quantities."
SW: They were amazed, they brought him down to London. He set up in the Nicholson's gin
factory in East London using horse chestnuts collected by children who played Conkers.
Acetone came out of the spigots in huge amounts just as he had forecast. It was put into carboys,
sent down to the cordite factory in Dorset, loaded on the ships. By the winter of 1916,
the Royal naval guns started firing again, the submarines were destroyed. We could rightly
say by February, March 1917 that we were now winning the Battle of the Atlantic, the tide
had quite literally turned in our favour, all to do with acetone.
SW: So, it was decided that the British government must honour this man, Chaim Weizmann, and
because he was foreign, because he was white Russian, they decided that the person that
should bestow this honour on him was the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour. And so
Balfour invited Weizmann to come down from Manchester, said, "Thank you, we all owe you
an enormous debt. We'd like to make you a knight." And Weizmann who knew Balfour said,
"I don't want an honour for myself but I am secretary to the English League of Zionists
and I would like a declaration from your government that you would look with favour upon the establishment
of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine." And Arthur Balfour said, "I think we can do
that."
SW: Come November the 17th, after obviously lengthy discussions with Cabinet, the Balfour
declaration was written to Lord Rothschild, the President of the World Zionist Federation,
with a copy out of gratitude to the man that started it all, Chaim Weizmann, that His Majesty's
government would look with favour upon the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish
people in Palestine, the Balfour declaration which lead 31 years later to the establishment
of the state of Israel. So Israel, and I didn't know this when I wrote the book but it checks
out entirely, was formed because of a quirk or a quark of chemistry in the North Atlantic
Ocean in 1916. And that to me was quite amazing.
BM: Chemistry, kitchen chemistry.
SW: Yeah. Okay.
BM: Just...
[laughter]