The East Asian History of Science Library/Needham Research Institute as an intellectual hub in the late 1970s and 1980s

Gregory Blue

University of Victoria, Canada

Abstract During its first decade and a half, the East Asian History of Science Library/Needham Research Institute served both as the centre of the Science and Civilisation in China project and as a meeting point for discussions involving a wide range of researchers. Some of these were working on the history of science, technology and medicine; some were members of Joseph Needham’s and Lu Gwei-Djen’s broader networks; and some came seeking the views, guidance or assistance of the institute’s founders on diverse topics. In the institute’s first 6 years in particular, a series of delegations from China visited as that country embarked on re-expanding academic relations abroad in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. This article recalls the institute’s ambiance during those years, key individuals who were involved and some of the kinds of interactions that took place there.

Keywords History, China, United Kingdom, East Asia, international relations, history of science, technology and medicine, social history of science, Joseph Needham, Cambridge University, Needham Research Institute

In its early years, the atmosphere at the East Asian History of Science Library (EAHSL) resonated with the wide-ranging interests and the extensive social networks of Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen,respectively, the institution’s founding director and deputy director. Those who knew them well might recall Needham sometimes plaintively declaring that he was ‘just’ a historian of science, technology and medicine: There is little question that his steadfastness in pursuing those particular subjects gave a necessary grounding to his remarkable discipline and prolific output as an author.1Without that focus and discipline, the successive tomes of his Science and Civilisation in China (SCC)2project probably never would have appeared and would certainly not have been produced so consistently and at such a high standard of scholarship. Nonetheless, Needham was always a man of multiple dimensions - a public proponent of scientific rationalism, an Anglican lay reader and process theologian, a lifelong Labour Party socialist with a strong anti-imperialist bent,and yet a devotee of traditional college protocols and prerogatives.3Moreover, SCC itself embraced an ample array of subjects and was based on voluminous ranges of evidence. Accordingly, researchers from many different disciplines were steadily drawn to him and to the institution that he and Lu had founded. Some came to partake in the breadth of vision the SCC project embodied; others came to access the rich documentary materials that the library possessed. In either case, Needham’s generosity in sharing his insights and materials, including texts he was still working on, went hand in hand with his devotion to promoting understanding of the comparative history of science and, most particularly, of the relevant but hitherto long-neglected East Asian traditions.

Early in 1977, as a graduate student working in Belgium on political philosophy, I found myself trying to puzzle through how academic Marxist interpretations of ancient and imperial Chinese history might relate to the weaponized versions promulgated during the late Cultural Revolution. Hoping to get some enlightenment on the matter, I wrote to an ‘old China-hand’ in Britain whom I understood to be in touch with what was going in the People’s Republic.Unbeknownst to me, he was also a trustee of the East Asian History of Science Trust (EAHST) that Needham and Lu had established in the 1960s to support the SCC project.

My letter was passed along and, in due course, I was surprised one day to find a letter from Needham suggesting I visit him in Cambridge to consult on issues related to Marx’s notion of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’ and Needham’s concept of ‘bureaucratic feudalism’. To my good fortune, we hit it off, finding that we shared many common concerns. That fall, on his invitation, I joined the EAHSL team. Joseph Needham, his wife Dorothy and Lu Gwei-Djen kindly accepted my wife and myself immediately into their inner circle, which in turn welcomed us with warmth and generosity. Cambridge would become our home, and the Needham Research Institute (NRI) mydanwei, for the next 13 years, until the end of Needham’s directorship. I remember those years, when China and the rest of the world were undergoing rapid transformations, as times of intellectual discovery, excitement and, especially in the NRI’s first decade, optimism: It is from that personal vantage point that I here consider the functioning of the institute then. That there were other things in the air as well during the last decade and some of the Cold War and that various tensions and discontents emerged within the institute itself can go without saying: Those matters are not my concern here. As for the three decades at the NRI following the period I worked there, others are far better placed to discuss them.

By the time Needham and Lu, who had long been his chief collaborator, officially combined the Asiarelated portions of their personal libraries to form the EAHSL in 1976, Needham’s generosity was already well established from the welcomes he had accorded over three decades to researchers who had visited his fellow’s rooms at Gonville & Caius College, where the SCC project had grown from its emergence as a prospective publishing venture in the late 1940s.

The project’s roots famously ran deeper still. In 1938-1939, Needham and Lu first envisioned a modest volume on the history of Chinese science that would complement the studies Needham and Walter Pagel had been promoting within Cambridge University on the history of science in the West(Needham and Pagel, 1938). The scope of the China project grew dramatically thereafter, as Needham systematically set about working out a theoretical framework he considered suitable and gathering relevant materials. Those were tasks he pursued ‘on the side’, throughout his wartime mission to China(1943-1946) as director of the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office (SBSCO), when he had the opportunity to get to know many of the country’s prominent researchers. These were Lu’s colleagues in the Chinese scientific community before her 1937 departure for doctoral studies in Cambridge. Her guidance and advice to Needham in approaching them proved invaluable for the success of the SBSCO mission. The pair’s newly conceived historical project provided rich soil for personal and intellectual connections forged in many an informal conversation with Chinese interlocutors. In 1946-1948, when Lu was back in China, she too collected important materials and sent them to Cambridge for the project.

Needham continued deepening his thinking about SCC during his stint as founding director of the Science Division of UNESCO in Paris (1946-1948).As a lifelong Francophile, he happily made use of opportunities to cultivate relations not only with the French scientific elite, but also with leading scholars interested in comparative and world history, and with sinologists opening new vistas on the history of Daoism and on Sino-Western contacts.

Subsequently, soon after his return to Cambridge in late 1948, Needham and his then-most engaged collaborator Wang Ling, a young historian of science who had been one of his wartime assistants in China,sketched the contours of what they then planned as a seven-volumeSCCseries (Needham, 1954-present).The originally envisioned volumes 4 through 7 would famously become subdivided over time into a series of physical volumes, in many cases weighty tomes in their own right, so that the series now,although not quite finished, already comes to 25 discrete books. Nonetheless, the outline of the subjects Needham and Wang devised still largely applies,comprised of 50 thematic sections covering what they saw as the entire gamut of sciences and technologies ranging from mathematics to medicine,with contextualizing forays into relevant philosophical traditions and socio-economic conditions that varyingly affected scientific-technical development in different parts of the world in premodern times.

With the first volume of the series having appeared in 1954, by the time the EAHSL was formally constituted in 1976, eight physical volumes had already been published. By that time, the encyclopaedic scope of the project had made it renowned,and the series was celebrated internationally as a monument of scholarship. Its academic value and pioneering significance underwrote Needham’s induction into the British Academy in 1971 and his election as president of the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science from 1972 to 1974. The fact that he had conceived the project as a study of the history of Chinese science, technology and medicine undertaken in the comparative crosscivilizational framework he and Lucien Febvre had conceived in the late 1940s in their first iteration of UNESCO’sScientific and Cultural History of Mankindfurther enhanced his new institute’s intellectual appeal. With such a profile, it was hardly surprising that the institute quickly became something of a magnet for researchers.

Needham called the EAHSL a ‘working’ library,and it functioned operationally as a research institute, one largely geared in its first two decades to producing theSCCseries. Its trustees’ initiative in naming it the Needham Research Institute a few years later was thus an appropriate clarification,celebrating the director’s accomplishments(although Needham found the renaming rather‘blush-making’) while playing on his fame as a fund-raising move.

Of the factors that worked to make the institute an international hub of scholarship and reflection,several stand out in addition to the breadth of the founders’ vision and personal connections. One was the striking expansion in research in the late 1970s and the 1980s on the history of science, technology and medicine in East Asia. That growth in the field is evidenced by the fact that the first international conference on the history of science, technology and medicine in China, held in Leuven, Belgium in 1982, involved fewer than two dozen participants,whereas the sixth, organized by Christopher Cullen at and for the NRI in 1990, brought together over 200. Over the course of that upsurge of interest, the NRI functioned as something of a disciplinary pilgrimage site, drawing researchers wishing to pay their respects as well as use the library.

A related factor in the institute’s attractiveness in those years was the nature and organization of the book collection as a ‘working library’: not that it had so many holdings that could not have been found elsewhere, even in the West, but rather that the rich holdings it did have were (and are) rather uniquely accessible. To a considerable degree, that accessibility was due to the first librarian, Philippa Hawking,who managed to turn Needham’s and Lu’s personal collections into a usable collective tool, not least by painstakingly cataloguing all published holdings. In the course of her labours, Hawking incorporated two key features of the ‘working library’ approach Needham took pride in: namely, that the library stacks were open (to bona fide researchers), and that items on a given subject were shelved together irrespective of language, that is, without East Asian language materials being segregated on their own, as is most often the case elsewhere in the West. Given the institute’s active specialist acquisition policy, and the fact that authors and publishers from around the world frequently provided copies of new publications relevant to the institute’s mandate, the EAHSL’s stacks were a treasure trove for SCC collaborators and other researchers alike.

At the same time, one must recognize the importance of the vigorous correspondence, with a diverse array of people, that Needham carried on from the late 1940s and into his final decade as director, as another factor in building the institute’s aura as an engaged centre of scholarship in the field to which he devoted what he referred to as his ‘second half-life’.

A further obvious attraction of the NRI was its location - for Cambridge itself, with its density of specialist scholars with so many kinds of expertise and with its wealth of academic resources, was a huge draw. To cite a single instance among many,Needham’s friend, Abdur Rahman, whom Needham had known since Rahman was a young anti-colonial scientist in mid-1940s India, and who eventually served as Indira Gandhi’s science advisor under her premiership, would regularly visit Cambridge both for historical and science-policy consultations with Needham and for cosmological discussions with Sir Hermann Bondi, master of Churchill College through most of the 1980s.

At a more mundane level, many researchers visiting the institute for more than a short stay found it invaluable that Needham was regularly open to providing a letter of introduction that would open the door to accessing the vast holdings of the main university library. Aesthetically, of course, Cambridge also features both beauty and the strong romantic allure, for which it is renowned throughout East Asia as well as elsewhere. On top of that, politically, especially in the institute’s first years, a visit to the NRI was a way for delegations from China to express respect for Needham as a very ‘old friend’ of their country, one who was incidentally the founding president of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (established in 1965).

One can glean a sense of the character of the early EAHSL - inter-disciplinary, international and multigenerational - from the stream of visitors during its first months, even before its formal inauguration,which would bring EAHST trustees and the university’s top brass together at the beginning of 1977.

Characteristically for Needham, the first signature in the official guestbook is that of his wife Dorothy, the celebrated biochemist and historian of muscle biochemistry, whom he sometimes referred to as the only other person he was certain had read all theSCCvolumes to date, since she proofread them. Along with her name in the guestbook, one can find those of Carol and Nathan Sivin, the latter then in mid-career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and completing his contribution to SCC on alchemical theory. As close friends and associates of the Needhams and Lu, the Sivins visited more or less annually over the following decades. On this occasion, they were joined by Douglas King of Singapore. Frederick F Kao, editor of theAmerican Journal of Chinese Medicine, also made an appearance early on. Not long after, Lu Gwei-Djen’s close old friend Muriel Platt dropped by, the widow of Benjamin Platt, Lu’s director of nutritional research at the Lester Institute of Medical Research in mid-1930s Shanghai.

By the end of the year, a string of senior figures had visited: Derk Bodde, the eminent University of Pennsylvania intellectual historian of China, the Japanese historian of science and technology Yoshida Tadashi of Tohoku University, the political historian Charles Curwen from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Witold Rodzinski, historian of China and former Polish ambassador to Beijing, the Stanford historian of Chinese art Michael Sullivan, and the theologian James Burtchaell, then provost at the University of Notre Dame.

At the same time, notably interspersed in with the names of such established figures are those of thenyoung scholars with prominent careers ahead of them. Among the first to visit were the archaeoastronomers Richard Stevenson, a long-time friend of the SCC project, and David Clark, then of the Mullard Laboratory, the United Kingdom’s largest space science research facility, as well as Nicholas Isbister, the Freud biographer, who shared Needham’s interest in psychoanalysis and the history of psychology. Also present were the now-distinguished historian of Chinese art, Craig Clunas, then a doctoral candidate at Edinburgh, the young Peter Lee (Li Lisheng), an industrial chemist with Coca Cola, who would go on to play important roles in both the United States and Hong Kong trusts, and the budding East Asia-inspired garden architect Ulrich Hausmann,who a dozen years later would bring us chunks of the Berlin Wall as mementoes of its fall.

In the EAHSL’s first days, Francesca Bray likewise signed in, one of the first two young members of the core team then forming up at the institute. Her volume on agriculture (Bray, 1984) becameSCC’sfirst to be fully authored by someone other than Needham. Not long after, Dieter Kuhn, a young German sinologist specializing in textile history visited. A year later, he too joined the core team; in time he would go on to contribute theSCCvolume on spinning and reeling (Kuhn, 1988). Before the year’s end, Nick Menzies, later the author ofSCC’streatment of the history of Chinese forestry practices (Daniels and Menzies, 1996), had put in an appearance.

The strategy of recruiting a new contingent of collaborators followed from Needham’s realization that the SCC project, as it was unfolding in practice,was more than he and his original team from the 1950s - most prominently, Wang Ling, Lu Gwei-Djen, Kenneth Robinson and Ho Peng Yoke (Ho Ping-yū in Needham’s transcription) - could complete on their own. From the outset, he had in principle constructed the team as cross-cultural on the ground that the kind of wide-ranging and in-depth comparative study he envisioned would be impossible to execute without the knowledge and expertise of people from different backgrounds. By the mid-1970s, the experience of the series’ first volumes had shown the fecundity of this approach while also amply demonstrating the extent and richness of the material to be analysed.

Moreover, since the 1960s, Chinese studies as a field of research had been booming, and a new generation armed with new levels of specialized training was emerging. Needham was effectively riding this wave when he set about enlisting his contingent of young collaborators who would contribute to the new institute’s character, whether as members of EASHL’s core group of research associates or as contributors based elsewhere who would periodically visit. Both types contributed significantly to the institute’s ambience as it developed over the following years.

So too did the institute’s quarters, which shifted to accommodate a larger number of researchers (in increasingly comfortable surroundings) while evolving towards a distinctively cross-cultural personality in architectural terms. For its first 2 years, the EAHSL was housed in a nondescript one-story prefab structure, with an open-plan layout, located at the main site of the Cambridge University Press on Shaftesbury Road. There, the sole signs of any East Asian presence were the exterior signage with the library’s name and Chinese seal, plus a plaster stupa.When the press began preparing for its massive new administrative edifice, the Edinburgh Building, on that same site 2 years later, the institute moved around the corner to a roomier three-story Victorian building at 16 Brooklands Avenue that before the 1960s had housed the Faculty of Oriental Studies.Finally, in 1986, the permanent Needham Research Institute moved to Sylvester Road, at the southwestern corner of the Robinson College grounds in west Cambridge, where its richly appointed premises,red brick with Chinese features, have been described as an ‘East Anglian/East Asian’ composite stylistically.

The decade of fundraising required for that evolution was itself an international affair involving the efforts of three distinct supporting trusts. The original EAHST in the United Kingdom was aided financially from 1979 by a counterpart in Hong Kong4that devoted itself with great success to raising the bulk of the construction funds. From 1978 on, the British trust was supported as well by a corresponding American body5that channelled generous operational funds from the National Science Foundation,monies that were intended to move the SCC project towards completion. Those funds were supplemented in the 1980s by further substantial operational support provided to the British trust directly by the Japanese National Institute for Research Advancement.

The consistently international character of the SCC project was brought home to me during my second visit to the EAHSL in the late summer of 1977, when Needham literally walked me through the list of collaborators he had signed up to work on the series’ remaining volumes (‘literally’ in the sense that he explained the tasks to be done over the course of a long, fascinating stroll through ‘the backs’ of the colleges along the Cam). He expressed his hope that I could help keep him in touch, through correspondence and otherwise, with the growing cohort of collaborators. Having encounteredSCC’s weighty tomes as a graduate student and recognized it as a monument of scholarship, I had for some time implicitly assumed it to be a nearly finished product, but Needham had disabused me of that notion and alerted me to its status as a work in progress when, during my first visit, he had presented me with hefty binders containing drafts by Ray Huang and Derk Bodde for volume 7, sections 48 and 49,respectively.6He was interested in theoretical feedback and in deepening the conversations the three of them had held the previous summer. As we ambled around the Trinity and Johns lawns on my second visit, he detailed the institute’s function as the hub in the complex international research network that was ‘SCC in process’.

At the centre of that network was the EAHSL itself, with the core team as it shaped up in 1976-1977. Administratively, the institute was headed by a three-person management committee consisting of Needham and Lu, plus Peter Burbidge, Cambridge University Press’s production manager and the first chairman of the EAHST. He was the person who had steered theSCCseries through the press’s editorial and printing processes ever since volume 1. That three-person committee oversaw the institute’s dayto-day affairs, handled employment matters and liaised with the respective trusts. In addition, through the late 1970s, after the Cultural Revolution in China, and once Needham was no longerpersona non gratain the United States after the Vietnam War,he and Lu travelled extensively through East Asia and North America to share and promote the work of the institute, and raise funds for its permanent building. Frankly, much as Needham loved to travel, such trips wore on them, especially as Dorothy Needham was increasingly affected by Alzheimer’s disease from around 1983 onward.

In terms of research, however, Needham enjoyed and was stimulated by the younger members he brought into the institute. From the EAHSL’s 1976 opening, Philippa Hawking and Francesca Bray were both, each in their own ways, dynamic and positive presences. Hawking was prominent not only as librarian and gatekeeper, but also for her Japanological expertise and translations on the history of silk textiles. As the institute’s first full-time younger researcher, Bray played a pioneering role in opening avenues for the new cohort as she embarked on her decade of contributions to the institute while establishing herself as a leading specialist in the history of agriculture, agricultural technologies and related policy matters and as a gender historian. For the EAHSL’s first year, the young linguist Robin Brilliant was also present, constructing SCC’s standard conversion table betweenpinyinand Needham’s idiosyncratic version of Wade-Giles romanization. I joined the team in the fall of 1977, coming from my philosophy studies at Leuven to focus on Western theories concerned with patterns of socio-economic change in diverse societies. Dieter Kuhn joined in December that year, shortly after earning his doctorate at Cologne, to contribute to theSCCsection on textiles.

Over the following years, the core team underwent various changes while remaining central to the SCC project. Dieter Kuhn remained absorbed in working on his volume on spinning after taking an academic position in Heidelberg late in 1980.Philippa Hawking left at about the same time and,over the following decade, was succeeded in turn as librarian by Michael Salt, Carmen Lee and Liang Lien-chu, the last of whom also pursued her research on the history of Chinese hospitals in collaboration with Lu Gwei-Djen.

In 1980, after a career in the colonial civil service and at the Education Division of UNESCO, Kenneth Robinson was re-enlisted onto the team to serve as editor coordinating the burgeoning contributions to volume 7. Shortly afterward, Toshio Kusamitsu came to the team as a fresh post-doc with the primary task of engaging with Japanese materials on textile history; he remained for several years working on issues related to volumes 5 and 7.

Around 1983, Peter Burbidge brought Trevor Gardner, Cambridge University’s recently retired treasurer, onto the EAHSL management committee to help put the institute’s finances on a sounder financial footing and better regularize employment conditions for library and research staff. This was a prudent move, but, unfortunately, after Burbidge’s sudden death, it led to administrative rifts over the NRI’s future, with negative effects on morale.7

In the mid-1980s, the historian of medicine Ma Boying from Shanghai’s First Medical University joined the team to collaborate with Lu and, to a lesser extent, Needham. The end of the 1980s saw a new vibrancy in the spirit of research emerging, as Geoffrey Lloyd of the Cambridge Classics Faculty began his long comparative engagement with Chinese science, encouraging such studies among his associates internationally, and as monies from American and European foundations began bringing in fresh young researchers on fellowships, a wave that fortunately continued through the 1990s and early 2000s, and indeed beyond.8

Needham knew from long experience that academic collaborations are often unpredictable, and that each is likely to have its own unique trajectory9:Some prove incredibly enriching and productive for the partners; others can be delicate, tenuous, difficult affairs.

Certain senior individuals associated with the project, including some (certainly not all) on the British trust, were sceptical of the abilities of young scholars in particular to contribute as collaborators.That objection never seemed to phase Needham much. After all, he knew well that Wang Ling had written the bulk of the mathematics section forSCC’s volume 3 as his doctoral dissertation, that Kenneth Robinson had composed his section on physical acoustics as a mature student at Oxford, and that Ho Peng Yoke had been recruited as a fresh post-doctoral scholar.

In any case, the strategy of enlisting new collaborators quickly showed itself to be a success. Bray’s volume on agriculture (volume 6, part 2) appeared in 1984, Tsien Tsuen-hsuin’s on paper and printing (volume 5, part 1) in 1985 and Kuhn’s on spinning and reeling technologies in 1988 (volume 5, part 9). That success also proved to be strategically enduring.Christian Daniels’ and Nicholas Menzies’ shared volume, in which they, respectively, treat agricultural industries and forestry, would be published in 1996.Peter Golas’ volume on mining appeared in 2000,Donald Wagner’s on ferrous metallurgy in 2008 and Georges Métailié’s,SCC’s second volume devoted to botany, in 2015.

All these authors were recruited by Needham during his 1976-1991 term as NRI director. All but Bray completed their contributions while working remotely, with editorial processes carried out in Cambridge at the NRI, which functioned as the SCC project’s hub, and then at the press.

The progress on those volumes allowed Needham and Lu to focus their own energies on subjects dear to their hearts. This they occasionally did on their own, as was the case both with their major study of acupuncture and moxibustion (Lu and Needham,1980)10- one they intended to eventually revise into a volume ofSCC- and with their critical review of scholarship on the history of material and cultural transmissions across the Pacific Ocean (Needham and Lu, 1985). More often, they worked in collaboration with established associates, as was the case with two furtherSCCvolumes, namely, that devoted to botany (Needham et al., 1986a), on which they worked with their old friend and associate Huang Hsing-tsung, one of Needham’s wartime assistants in China, and the volume devoted to gunpowder technologies (Needham et al., 1987), on which they collaborated again with Ho Peng Yoke and Wang Ling. Needham co-authored a further volume devoted to military technologies (Needham et al.,1994) with Robin DS Yates of Dartmouth College and, later, McGill University.

Many of the collaborators Needham told me about during our summer walk along the backs went on to produce outstanding studies in theSCCseries.Others whom he was enthusiastic about fell by the wayside: some because other obligations or health problems did not allow them to complete the work the series required (e.g. Ursula Franklin (Toronto) on non-ferrous metallurgy, James CY Watt (Boston) on ceramics, Hans Ågren (Gothenburg) on mental disease, Janusz Chmieliewski (Warsaw) on language and logic), others because their analysis did not square sufficiently with the understanding Needham,often influenced by other members of the network,had of a subject (e.g. WB Fisher (Durham) on China’s physical environment and its social significance, Derk Bodde (Philadelphia) on the significance of the outlook of the literati elite), others still because of differences over conditions of publication and/or NRI policies and practices. Nonetheless, people Needham had roped into the project, even temporarily, in various cases made contributions that reverberated in the institute and, through it, had an impact on thinking within the SCC network, and sometimes beyond it.11

The reader might wonder what kinds of operative relationships and types of communication were in effect among members of the NRI/SCC network. Honestly, the relationships varied widely.A point worth noting, though, is that some important members of the network never did visit the institute or visited only perfunctorily. One notable case was that of Hu Daojing in Shanghai, with whom Lu and Needham remained in touch via correspondence and, after the Cultural Revolution,via visits in Shanghai. Another was that of Tsien Tsuin-hsuen who, as chief librarian at the University of Chicago, had ready access there to all the sources he needed.

Few NRI research associates and SCC collaborators were ever in a position to observe much of the relationships among the shifting memberships of the three trusts, although such relationships clearly did substantially affect life at the institute and work on the SCC project. That is, a rather large gap did generally exist, for whatever reason, between members of the three trusts and the research staff, although it was by no means wholly unbridgeable. Each of the three trusts featured striking personalities - to mention just a few, F Peter Lisowski, professor of medicine at the University of Hong Kong, who had strong anthropological interests, the financier Stephen Keynes, great grandson of Charles Darwin and nephew to the famous economist, the Quaker geologist Brian Harland, who had spent World War II in Chengdu, and the pacifist Chicago banker Erwin‘Bud’ Salk, who once had served as a bodyguard for Paul Robeson. Fascinating as such personalities were, opportunities for researchers and staff to engage with them remained distinctly limited.

The same cannot be said of researchers’ interactions with other members of the institute and with visitors. Needham regularly encouraged and promoted consultation among his collaborators, and within the institute, he and Lu adopted from the beginning the practice, which they had previously known at the Dunn Institute of Biochemistry,12of having everyone participate together in morning coffee and afternoon tea breaks. That included the directors, all staff and any visitors, whether long or short term, who were present at the appointed time.These informal occasions, characteristically relaxed and lively, featured open conversation on all manner of subjects and for a good decade constituted excellent occasions for members of the institute’s broad networks to get to know one another.

While the EAHSL/NRI in its first years was an institution geared primarily to producing volumes of theSCCseries, it was also always this and more. As such, it attracted a wide variety of users and visitors.A full, descriptive account of the individuals involved is impossible here, but a sketch of some major categories of people gravitating to the NRI can give an impression of their diversity.

One may start by noting that, while they hailed geographically from many different countries, most of the visitors came from Europe (including the United Kingdom), Asia, North America and the Middle East. Beyond this, they were of course differentiated in the first instance by whether or not they were collaborating on the SCC project. They also differed according to whether they were visiting for library research or for meeting with members of the team, or with other visiting scholars. Of course,such categories were hardly exclusive. In addition,as often happens with academics, an SCC collaborator visiting the NRI on their own funding (as was most often the case) might have devoted part of their time to work on SCC and part to other projects.

Similarly, many SCC collaborators made short trips simply to consult with Needham and Lu, or other project colleagues, but on other occasions they would visit to carry out library research. Some visitors thus returned numerous times. Some were longtime associates of the project or the directors, and others were new collaborators. Naturally, those who made research trips stayed for varying lengths of time. Some researchers settled in for relatively long stays of 6 months or a year or more - for example, on a sabbatical leave and/or research fellowship. Others came instead for medium-length stays of several weeks to a couple of months. The majority came for short stays of between a day and a week. The length of stay(s), number of visits and duration of association could all play roles in determining visitors’impact on the institute and their closeness to the core team.

Even brief visits could have a fascination. As a seasoned international intellectual, Needham was in touch with many public figures who esteemed his work and insights and who would seek him out and/or gladly agree to participate in events he organized.I vividly recall glancing up from the computer in the NRI catalogue room in 1985 to find him giving a tour to Romila Thapar, the eminent historian of ancient and medieval India, and leading her over to introduce us. The institute in the late 1970s and through the 1980s was a place where one could find oneself having tea with Owen Lattimore, Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime representative to Chiang Kaishek; Raysun Huang, vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong; the American IT and cybernetics pioneer John Diebold; Fang Lizhi while he was at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei; Joan Robinson, the left-Keynesian professor of economics at Cambridge; the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi; the historian of pre-1919 Chinese anarchism and later of the ancient east Mediterranean, Martin Bernal; the historian of traditional medicine Ma Kanwen; the comparative literature specialist Elinor Shaffer;the astrophysicists/cosmologists Carl Sagan and Douglas NC Lin; or the Labour MEP and head of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, Ken Coates.The presence, however occasional, of distinguished figures of diverse interests and expertise was a notable facet of life at the NRI.

Recurrent visitors who stayed for a week or more naturally tended to have a greater impact. As young SCC collaborators, Donald Wagner and Georges Métailié were in the habit of coming at least once a year, and were closely integrated with the core team. Eventually, both also arranged to come for extended stays. Robin Yates, working on the history of military technology, made periodic visits through the 1980s. In addition, Nathan Sivin,by then at the University of Pennsylvania, and Nakayama Shigeru, Thomas Kuhn’s one-time student who instituted the history of science programme at Tokyo University in the 1960s, regularly came to the NRI from the mid-1970s and through the 1980s, most often for several weeks during summers, conducting research on projects of their own. As established historians of Chinese science,both brought fresh research questions, deeply considered views about issues dealt with in theSCCseries, and engagement with the most recent trends in the scholarly literature. Both were also committed to helping raise funds for the institute in their respective countries. As long-term intimates of the SCC project - Sivin was an SCC collaborator13;Nakayama, an associate of Needham’s since the mid-1950s14- they could voice critical comments frankly in ways that benefitted the institute (e.g. on library acquisitions strategies) and were stimulating for younger collaborators to consider (e.g. on issues ranging from the relation between Daoism and traditional science to the pressure from funders for stepping up the timetable for publication of the remaining volumes ofSCC). Also appreciated was the Sivins’ generosity in annually hosting a summer tea on Grantchester Meadows for NRI members and their families.

The NRI’s long-term visitors, that is, those who came on sabbaticals or fellowships, for example,included a substantial number whose presence affected the atmosphere positively. My impression was that this was the case for both Derk Bodde and Ray Huang (Huang Renyu, or Huang Jen-Yü in Needham’s transcription). Before my time in the institute, as mentioned above, they held a series of lively three-way conversations with Needham during their stays in 1976. Those exchanges were important for solidifying their own thinking on aspects of the ‘Needham Problem’, and for spurring Needham himself to feel the need to engage other collaborators to help him refine his analysis of Chinese socio-economic history for volume 7.15One of the consequences of that impulse was the recruiting of Timothy Brook, whose stay of 6 months in 1978 and another month in 1979 made him a familiar presence, and set the stage for Needham to appoint him in 1987 as coordinating editor of volume 7, section 48, on imperial China’s socio-economic structure. (Unfortunately, the plan for that section, which was then expected to constitute a volume in its own right, broke down in the early 1990s.)

Another consequential visit was Wang Ling’s nearly year-long stay starting in December 1977.Returning to Cambridge unannounced for the first time in 20 years, and armed with a sheaf of critical comments on the draft Ho Peng Yoke had written asSCC’s treatment of the history of gunpowder,Wang persuaded Needham that the subject needed considerably more work. Needham’s choice to invest time over the following years in that direction meant, however, that, to Lu Gwei-Djen’s abiding disappointment, he was not able to work with her to the extent she had hoped on the history of medicine.

Other long-term stays in 1976-1979 helped strengthen the institute’s connections with East Asia.Hashimoto Keizo’s completion of his doctoral work on Chinese astronomy was important in this regard due to his closeness with Needham, even though he did not usually work at the institute. Another enduring connection for the Needham institute was forged with Japanese academia through the year-long sabbatical stay of Nakaoka Tetsuro of Osaka City University, who had earlier worked on the Japanese translation ofSCC’s astronomy section and was now focusing on late Tokugawa and Meiji Japanese technological development and social-political changes.He and his family quickly endeared themselves to the entire institute.

Similarly, in 1980, Li Wenlin of the Mathematics Department of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing was fondly received as a pioneering visitor from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as he proceeded good-naturedly on his fruitful 2-year stay at the institute. This enabled him to become a participant in the first international conference on the history of Chinese science. Not long after, the historian of mathematics Lam Lay Yong of Singapore, an old friend of Needham’s, and her associate Ang Tien-se of Malaysia spent productive sabbatical years connected with the institute, where they were much appreciated.

New visitors from Western countries made an impact as well, as the institute approached and entered its second decade. In the mid-1980s, Peter Golas, for one, brought perceptive observations and lively conversation to the NRI during his sabbatical year, spent working up portions of hisSCCvolume on the history of mining. In 1986, Catherine Jami visited the institute briefly after its move to the permanent building and, over the following years, made several extended visits there to work on the Jesuits of the Kangxi era. In this way, she inclined the NRI towards research on the Chinese reception of modern science, a subject that had previously not been covered much in theSCCseries.

Recurrent visitors who came for only short consultations were so many that I must confine myself to several especially concerned with the history of science in their own parts of the world. Deserving of particular mention are two key members of what Dhruv Raina has called ‘Needham’s Indian Network’, namely, Abdur Rahman and Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya. Both were from the National Institute for Science, Technology and Development in New Delhi, and both were of central importance for the introduction of the history of science as a discipline into South Asia.16The first, already mentioned above, visited every couple of years or so,often more for discussions with Needham on science policy and the role of science in society than strictly on the history of science, despite his active research and publication record in the latter area. It was he who, while discussing the South Asian experience,impressed on Needham the new dangers posed by religious fundamentalism for both science and the maintenance of social peace. Chattopadhyaya, on the other hand, visited perhaps only twice during the 1980s, but when he did come, he was intent on getting into the ‘brass tacks’ of approaches to the comparative history of science.

If South Asian scholars faced particular challenges in striving to explore the history of science and technology in the Indian context, they were not alone in connecting with the NRI as they sought to explore the historical records of their own societies.Two other short-term visitors, Ahmad Yusuf al-Hassan and Donald Hill, visited in the early 1980s to discuss and get advice on their innovative projects on the history of Islamic technology (Al-Hassan and Hill, 1986). More significantly, in the 1970s and 1980s, the institute also cultivated contacts with scholars working on the history of science and technology in Korea, long a subject of interest to Needham, particularly with regard to astronomical traditions (see Needham et al., 1986b) and the history of printing. Visits of varying lengths by Song Sang-yong (Hallym University), Park Soong-rae(Han-kuk University), SongYoung-gon (Seoul National University) and Kim Ki-hyup all contributed to firming up that connection in a fast-growing field.

In sketching the profile of the NRI as a hub, the preceding paragraphs have focused on the diversity of individual scholars who visited. To get a fuller picture, however, one must also recognize that the institute regularly received visits by delegations and working groups interested in subjects related to its areas of research.

Most prominent in this regard were delegations from the PRC: In weighing the NRI’s place in the international republic of letters, an important point to note is that 1976, the year in which the institute was founded, also happened to be the final year of the Cultural Revolution. China’s (re-)opening to the world beyond its borders, which had begun haltingly in 1973, now began to widen, again with initial hesitation but eventually quite dramatically. The fact that Needham and Lu had long and varied experience of China and Chinese ways, and that he, very publicly,and she, more quietly, were both well-known supporters of engagement and dialogue with China,seems to have made the NRI an appealing destination for delegations venturing culturally and politically into uncharted political waters.

In August 1978 - that is, in the run-up to Deng Xiaoping’s second official return to power17- Hu Dingyi, the cultural counsellor at the Chinese embassy in London, who was well known to Lu and Needham, paid the institute an official visit. Between then and November 1982, when Lu Jiaxi, as president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, visited for the first time (he would return 5 years later near the end of his term), at least 20 delegations of experts from the PRC visited the NRI. Ignoring the context of the previous 12 years, one might not have expected the November 1977 visit by a study group on metal corrosion and protection to have been of great importance. But Needham and Lu - recognizing it as the first official scientific delegation to the United Kingdom since 1966 - regarded it as highly significant. Dr Lu, who for reasons of health had long disciplined herself to control her emotions, could not help being tense and excited. Happily, the visit came off as a relaxed and successful event.

In the 4 years after Hu Dingyi’s visit, the NRI welcomed all manner of official delegations: a photochemical delegation, a crystallography delegation,a laser physics delegation, a joint Academia Sinica/Royal Society delegation, a delegation of book importers, another of publishers, another still of foreign language specialists, a national medical sciences delegation and so on.

For me, two of those delegations are most memorable. The first was a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences delegation visit in May 1980, on which the renowned archaeologist Xia Nai served as deputy head. He complained sharply to Needham of having to cope with budget austerities under the Four Modernizations. The second visit I have in mind remains even more vividly in my memory, namely,that of the Chinese Academy of Sciences delegation headed by Zhou Peiyuan, then president of Peking University, a highly personable character who had worked with Einstein between the world wars.Poignancy was given to that September 1982 visit by the inclusion in the delegation of Cao Tianqin,another of Needham’s wartime assistants. After his distinguished doctoral work in biochemistry in Cambridge after the war, he and his wife, the renowned physicist Xie Xide, who had trained at MIT, returned to China to take part in the socialist construction. By early 1962, Cao was vice-president of the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, and Xie was professor of physics at Fudan University, but both were ousted from their positions during the Cultural Revolution. It was the refusal of the Chinese authorities to let the Needhams visit them in 1972 that focused Joseph’s mind on the harm the Cultural Revolution was doing to Chinese science and to the country.18Cao’s 1982 return to the town where he had earned his doctorate was moving. That same year, he co-published afestschriftin Shanghai (Li et al., 1982) celebrating Needham’s 80th birthday -that is, honouring the man he had been persecuted for having associated with.

Over the following years, as travel between China and the West became normalized, the number of delegation visits to the NRI dropped off rather steeply,but between 1977 and 1983, the role of the NRI as an iconic site for intellectual contacts between China and the West was palpable.

In addition to such official delegations, the significance of which may be said to have been generally ceremonial, the NRI also had working meetings with groups of experts of various sorts from time to time. Several of these are memorable to me. The first was a team led by the French historian Charles Morazé, which came to consult over 3 days in 1981 on the preparation of a new UNESCO History of Mankind. Curiously, Morazé’s team included Colin Ronan and Christopher Cullen, both of whom would go on to have important roles at the NRI. Another meeting that sticks in my mind was the international workshop hosted in April 1982 by the NRI and organized by the United Nations University’s‘Socio-Cultural Alternatives’ programme headed by Anouar Abdel-Malek (Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Paris), who was passionate about the need for inter-civilizational dialogue and had accordingly a decade earlier raised awareness of Needham’s approach to cross-cultural understanding in the francophone world with a substantial profile inLe Monde diplomatique(Abdel-Malek, 1974). The 1982 workshop was an occasion that drew on Needham’s allure to bring together such reputed figures of diverse ideological orientations as conservative University of Chicago historian Donald Lach, Indian social scientist Barun De(Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta),‘new cartographer’ Arno Peters (University of Bremen), Kenyan-American political scientist Ali Mazrui (University of Michigan) and Cambridge political theorist John Dunn.

A third notable meeting, held on a much smaller scale over 2 days in September 1983, was with a working-group from the Ruhr University in Bochum.The group was headed by the China scholar Bodo Wiethoff, who was in the process of developing a major centre for the history of Chinese science and technology in Germany’s industrial heartland.

Still more memorable from my perspective is the March 1987 visit to the NRI by the former Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella and his entourage. Ben Bella, with his desire to get a better understanding of the relations between science and religion in the Arab-Islamic context, and with a conviction about the value of inter-civilizational dialogue, had been alerted to Needham’s work by his friends, Anouar Abdel-Malek and Ken Coates, the MEP. Within two years,Ben Bella raised funds for an inaugural workshop in celebration of opening of the NRI’s permanent building on Sylvester Road. That event, which was held in September 1989 at the NRI and Robinson College and was devoted to ‘The Dynamics of Oriental Societies’,was designed to promote fresh comparative discussion on issues to be treated inSCC, volume 7.

Finally, one last visit I cannot resist recalling is that of a film team from the Japanese national broadcaster NHK in July 1989. Led by the film-director Igarashi Kyotei and centred on the historian Tsuneishi Kei-ichi (Kanagawa University), the team was working on a documentary on the Japanese Imperial Army’s Unit 731, which, during World War II, developed biological warfare techniques that Needham had documented at the time. Unscripted at tea-time,Needham spontaneously entertained the assembled company with a rousinga capellarendition of the opening verse and the chorus ofL’Internationale.

Let me cap this article with a simple conclusion:By the time Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen stepped down in 1991 as the NRI’s directors, the institute had functioned for a decade and a half as a significant international centre promoting innovative scholarship, and as a site where researchers and analysts of varying orientations from many parts of the world came together for comparative historical reflection and dialogue. However much historical researchers were beginning to feel a creative need to enrich the field by moving ‘beyond Joseph Needham’,19it seemed nonetheless entirely fitting that the NRI was chosen as the site for the September 1990 announcement of the formation of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research,authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. Blue (1997) lists Needham’s historical, philosophical, religious and political publications. A list of his scientific books and papers is found in Li et al. (1982:703-711).

2. Following Needham Research Institute (NRI) practice, I italicize the title of the series, but not the name of the project.

3. See Blue (2002) for an overview of his life and career.

4. Formally incorporated in 1981 as the East Asian History of Science Foundation (Hong Kong) and recently renamed as the Joseph Needham Foundation for Science & Civilisation Hong Kong.

5. The East Asian History of Science Foundation USA,established under the joint leadership of the seasoned US diplomat Phillips Talbot and Clifford Shillinglaw,senior vice-president of the Coca-Cola Company,who served as the foundation’s first chairman. After three decades of vigorous fundraising, this body was dissolved in 2008.

6. Respectively on socio-economic and intellectual factors Needham considered as possibly inhibiting the emergence of specifically modern science. In his view,socio-economic structures were decisive in this regard.

7. Gardner’s (1998) account of the rift in his memoirs is insightful but not complete, overlooking, for example, how differences in political backgrounds and orientations exacerbated the situation.

8. On Mellon Foundation grants in the early 2000s in particular, see Needham Research Institute Fellowships (n.d.).

9. One finds a striking case, possibly known personally to Needham, in the partnership of the Cambridge mathematicians GH Hardy and JE Littlewood as profiled in Wilson (2002).

10. This work was unique among their joint publications in having Lu Gwei-Djen as lead author.

11. To take just a few examples: Ursula Franklin’s(1999)The Real World of Technology, Derk Bodde’s(1991)Chinese Thought, Society, and Science: The Intellectual and Social Background of Science and Technology in Pre-Modern China, Ray Huang’s(1996)China: A Macro History, Timothy Brook’s(1999) ‘Capitalism and the writing of modern history in China’, and Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1999) ‘The West, capitalism and the modern world-system’.Some of these works may have had a greater impact outside of theSCCseries than they would have had within it.

12. On the Dunn Institute, see Weatherall and Kamminga(1992: 34-62).

13. As noted above, he contributed toSCC, volume 5,part 4, on alchemy (Needham et al., 1980), and later as editor, to volume 6, part 6, on medicine (Needham and Lu, 2000).

14. Together, they organized and edited thefestschrifthonouring Needham on his 70th birthday, see Nakayama and Sivin (1973).

15. See Sivin (2013) for an insightful discussion of the significance of this question.

16. See e.g. Rahman (1987, 1999); Chattopadhyaya(1986-1991); also Raina (2015). Given that other writers share their names, readers may want to know that this Rahman was born in 1923 and Chattopadhyaya in 1933.

17. At the historic Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China,which aimed to draw a line beneath the Cultural Revolution.

18. For strategic reasons, he kept his powder dry. The public expression of his assessment came in an extended article inNature6 years later; see Needham(1978).

19. A sense captured later in the decade by a special issue of the History of Science Society’s journalOsiris; see Low (1998).