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 [...]
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 [...]
According to Winchester, Volume IV, Part I of Needham’s oubliette magnifique describes the Chinese etymological circumstances surrounding the vastness of Chinese words for oranges. Really, how British. How Sapir–Whorf hypothetic of him to lay out the importance of verbogensis and cultural importance of a concept or concrete item. It is here that fascinated Needham. In [...]