Monthly Archives: January 2009

Needham and Hong

Friday, January 16th, 2009

I wrestled more with Spence’s God’s Chinese Son than Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China. Spence’s story of the Taiping Rebellion reads as an incredibly prosaic history book to me. Winchester is a breezy and quick-witted writer while Spence feels more deliberate and metered. Winchester could be seen as rather circumlocutious to Needham’s already heavily [...]

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The Discovering Of China

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

Then they discovered the magnetic properties of the Earth and created the compass. So take that Europeans. J.N. seemed to run off with great speed toward the first of his eleven expeditions (p 165). Among his deigned responsibilities Winchester lists for Needham, the furtherance of his academic career seems to be the only one not [...]

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