Reviews 127

Joseph Needham and Robin D. S. Yates, with Krzysztof Gawlikowski, Edward McEwen, and Wang Ling, Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 6: : Missiles and . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xxviii, 601 pp.

S. R. Gilbert

[S. R. Gilbert is currently writing a dissertation entitled "Wen and Wu in the Military Examination Essays ofthe Qing Dynasty. "}

don't believe I've read quite so much about moats, fortifications, and sieges I since last I opened Tristram Shandy. And then there are the sections on bows, , trebuchets, arcuballistae, and poliorcetics. By the time I had finished the book, the variety and fearsomeness of the innumerable it catalogs gave me real cause to doubt the assertions made early on that the Chinese were a people opposed to war who often refused to have recourse to organiz.ed violence. Surely the relationship between a long-lived antimilitary discourse and a record ofwar­ making as extensive as China's has to be considered in slightly different terms. As Joseph Needham conceded some time ago, the organizational framework adopted when he set out on his great project in 1948 could only survive all of the subsequent expansion in content through a bit of fudging. So it is that a book whose three sections touch not at all on chemistry has been issued as part of Volume 5, which is dedicated nominally to chemistry and chemical technology. The first section is a history of Chinese military thought and presents a number of provocative hypotheses. The second is a treatise on bows, crossbows, and their hyperthyroid kin- and giant crossbows mounted on frames. The third is a thorough description of the different types of technology used in early warfare, from walls to poisonous gases. Other sections of Science and Civilisation in China (hereafter SCC) have already described -based weaponry (Volume 5, part 7) and naval weaponry (Volume 4, part 3, pp. 678ft), and there is a section on shock weapons (*~A) in the works (Volume 5, part 8). In many ways the volume under consideration is a supplement to the gun­ powder volume, though the tone is noticeably less epic. As is often the case, the longstanding SCC team at Cambridge has been supple­ mented by the addition of a number of experts to produce this book. Robin Yates's name has been added below Needham's on the book's spine to indicate the importance of his contributiol}-indeed, the entire section on early poliorcetics is the work of Yates alone. As Needham himself points out in a typically personal author's note, Yates is especially well suited to the task he has taken on because his doctoral thesis examined the military chapters of the Mozi !1-f-, a crucial source for the study of sieges in early China. I have come up with some reconstructions that differ from Yates's and will present them below.

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Krzysztof Gawlikowski, a Polish scholar affiliated with the lstituto Univer­ sitario Orientale in Naples, collaborated with Needham in the writing of the first of two subsections on military thought. These studies of the textual and popular traditions are particularly strong in the analysis of the military canon, an area where Gawlikowski is a real expert. The authors posit the transition from an age of theory (Sunzi 7*' -=f to Sanshiliu Ji .::. +R gt) to an age of compilation (be­ ginning in the Tang dynasty). The latter tradition, with its exemplars the :ii\~I!~ (compiled by Zeng Gongliang it0 ff in 1040) and the Ming dynasty Wubei zhi .iBJ!il'~ (compiled by Mao Yuanyi ;fjcfj'! in 1621), provided the material for the lively discussions of military technology that sprang up in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Harder to defend is the authors' description of military theory's cyclic flirta­ tion with superstition-resistance, embrace, resistance. It appears, rather, that while the Sunzi and Wuzi ~ -=f did break with the past by forbidding the use of prophecy on the field of battle, this was not part of a larger rejection of supersti­ tion or even of prophecy-it was, as Mark Lewis has suggested, part of the change to a form of warfare in which only the commander did any thinking or deciding. Furthermore, my own research on traditional Chinese troop formations or zhenfa Ii$$ has convinced me that those who wrote on this theme, including writers who lived during the time of Sun Wu 7*' :ii\, were deeply influenced by what Needham would have considered unscientific views. As to the suggestion that changing modes of warfare reflected something "close to rationalism," this may be true but the corollary that some sort of foundation for science was thereby laid seems to me misguided. The foundations of science are many, and while some innovations are set upon Cartesian principles, others are as indebted to re­ ligion for their first principles as to any other mode of thought. For despite Needham's image of science as a great river into which all of the world's traditions feed, the truth is that science is in some places a stream, in others a rock, and in still others a mist-in short, there is no one science but a plurality of sciences. Nonetheless, the authors of this section have emphasiz.ed a number of crucial and often ignored aspects of military culture. For me, the most important of these is the per­ meability between the civil and military spheres. The frequency with which, throughout much of Chinese history, military officers had civil responsibilities, and vice versa, must be given greater attention if we are to come to a proper understanding of the relationship between Confucian and non-Confucian thought and practice. Books continue to be written about Wang Yangming .3:.~~, for example, without seeing his largely military career as central to his thinking. All who wish to begin to speak about China's military culture, or even Confucian culture, should read pages 1 through 100, paying particular care to pages 67-100.

Edward McEwen and Wang Ling (who died in 1994) collaborated with Needham to write the history of bows, crossbows, and such ballistic machinery as arcuballistae and trebuchets. The examination of the bow is rather brief,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:20:05AM via free access Reviews 129 largely because of the relatively limited transformations the bow has undergone. "The Chinese bow, from the earliest times to which we can trace it back, has been a composite reflex bow" (p. I 02). A composite bow is made by laminating different materials together-in the Chinese case the constituent elements are sinew, horn, and either wood, cane, or bamboo. A reflex bow is bent so that the direction of its curvature changes along its length; such bows have greater lever­ age and power than regular bows with the same draw weight. The authors discuss dif­ ferent woods and glues used in making bows, present translated passages from ancient sources about bows, and describe Chinese arrows and the thumb-rings used by all Chi­ nese archers to avoid pinching the skin of their hands. The section on the is more extensive and more interesting. The origins of the crossbow are considered, as is its rise to prominence in the as the standard of the foot soldier. Next, the development of its various elements (especially the trigger, arming mechanisms, and sights) is de­ scribed, as well as the subsequent and quite marvelous modifications to the ba­ sic crossbow-these rendered it capable of firing several bolts at the same time (this was a Song innovation) and of firing repeatedly thanks to a special maga­ zine of bolts and an arming lever: ultimately the weapon was able to fire twenty bolts in fifteen seconds (pp. 156-63). The authors conclude this subsection with a feat of considerable speculative audacity, as they hypothesize the role of the bow and crossbow in fostering the spread of Confucian thought. I should like to describe this hypothesis, since it shows that Needham's imagination (and this must be the brainchild of none other than Joseph Needham, regardless of whom he shares credit with on the title page) was as fertile as ever as he worked on the last section of SCC to go to press during his lifetime. Needham begins from the fact that there was a tempo­ ral gap of some centuries between the appearance of commoners armed with powerful crossbows in Chinese armies and the spread of iron plate armor. Pre­ viously, soldiers had enjoyed the protection of armor made of lacquer, rhinoc­ eros hide, seashell, paper, or some such stuff but only rarely has metal armor been found that antedates the Han dynasty. From the Han on, the wealthy and eminent were safe from the bolts and arrows of the lowly born, but before they found such protection these men were quite vulnerable, to judge from the num­ ber of nobles done in by the arrows of the subordinate classes in the Zuo zhuan :ti:fl. Needham then proposes that under such circumstances "the people had to be persuaded, rather than cowed by of arms-hence the importance of the Confucians" (p. 181 ). This is the main hypothesis this volume has to offer in terms of the relations between technology and society. The following subsection treats ballistic machinery. Both European and Chinese armies fought armed with large crossbows mounted on frameworks and carts----the classical tenn for these machines is arcuballistae. Related to the arcuballista was the trebuchet, a activated by a sudd~n pressure on the short end of a lever. Though

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:20:05AM via free access 130 Chinese Science 15 (1998) it has been slightly modified, the section on the Chinese trebuchet first appeared, in 1976, as a contribution to a volume honoring Lynn White, Jr.

The book's most lengthy section is that devoted to poliorcetics, or siege warfare. And this is but the beginning of the story, since Robin Yates has detailed the forms and equipment of the Chinese siege only up to the Song dynasty, when the introduction of into siege warfare shook things up. Though Chinese fortifications do not seem to have ever achieved the sort of complexity we see in seventeenth-centuiy Italian forti­ fied cities, there was by the time of the Mozi a highly complex variety of defensive and offensive devices and regulations at work in sieges. Siege warfare is considered first from the perspective of the besieged and next from the perspective of the besieger. For both sections the author often relies on the evidence provided in chapters 14 and 15 of the Mozi and on the catalog of defensive and offensive devices provided in chapters 10 and 12 of the first part of the Wujing zongyao. He has also drawn widely on classical sources, histories and collectanea, as well as Western, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese research on cities, art, philology, and a number of other fields. As with all parts of the SCC project, this subsection is rich in comparative material. The author begins with an archaeological survey of early Chinese cities, distin­ guishing them carefully from their Occidental counterparts. Chinese cities were sur­ rounded by rectangular walls made of stamped earth and rubble and faced with brick and stone. The height of the walls varied a great deal, with 11.5 meters as an ideal stan­ dard height, but it was important that the upper width be large enough to permit men to handle the various weapons they deployed when defending the walls. Parapets-­ wooden balconies with exposed rooms and towers-were set atop the walls and often there were lower walls outside the main walls, at which men with drums, flags, and crossbows might watch for the approach of hostile . Drums and flags were used to alert those within the city walls of imminent threats. Moats, ditches, palisades, and various other impediments to attack ringed the walls. Gates were carefully reinforced with iron and guarded by specially chosen men. Often the gates were supplemented by portcullises-mentioned in the Zuo zhuan as having occurred as early as the seventh century B.C. Bridges outside the city walls were often built over defensive trenches lined with stakes. When a trigger mechanism was released, these bridges flipped as one turns over one's hand, throwing anyone and anything on them into the trenches below. Towers were not only an important element in the fortifications of cities-they were often found some distance within the city walls, where they provided police with a view of the marketplace, and might rise dramatically over fortified manor houses. The num­ ber of towers along the city walls recommended by the Mozi is staggering. There are comer towers, towers "for sitting and watching," long cong fft~ watchtowers, earthen towers, standing towers, wooden towers, and open-topped lu fff towers. By

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:20:05AM via free access Reviews 131 my calculation, this means that a city wall approved by a fastidious Mohist would have had a tower of some sort every eighteen meters.1 Among the panoply of offensive techniques described are the familiar (mining, battering rams, ramps) and the less well-known (flooding, watchtower carts, and pipes through which noxious smoke was introduced into mines). Almost as interesting as these technical descriptions are the examples given of what must have been a quite elaborate set of laws governing the city under siege. Those entering the latrines dug just within the city walls were, for exam­ ple, to be gagged (p. 317, note g), while those named to guard the city gates were not permitted to carry axes, saws, or other boring and hacking tools (p. 343). Such details contribute to our understanding of the tremendous anxiety that must have been widespread in cities under siege.

Since Lynn White, Jr. published his classic collection, and Social Change, in 1962, and before that, as White himself was at pains to indicate, with the work of Marc Bloch, the relation between social and techno­ logical change has occupied the most inventive and talented scholars involved in technological studies. A more recent development has been the growth in stud­ ies of the social construction of technological systems, in many ways the step­ child of White and Bloch's field. To a degree more or less explicit in different parts of Science and Civilisation in China, Joseph Needham has seen himself as working in this tradition, and indeed his contributions to this field have been widely acknowledged. It is unfortunate that in a section dedicated to military technology more has not been done in this direction. Some controvertible hy­ potheses have been offered, but little more, and those only in one subsection. The need for careful reconstruction justifies spending a moment considering an error in the section on fortifications. This is the reconstruction of the "chhu ~ shield" on pages 406 and 407. Though the Mozi is quite clear in its explana­ tion that "the chhu [qu] are fifteen chi R tall, three chi of which is buried" [*XliW ~R ], the author mistranslates this, making the chhu "15 feet long" (p. 406), thereby causing himself all sorts of trouble. For if the shields were both, as he says, 15 feet in width and spaced 7 feet apart, there would be a quite puzzling amount of overlap. Indeed, spacing of 15 feet would be expected under the circumstances. The author's suggestion that "it seems reasonable to conclude that the shields overlapped considerably" (p. 406) strikes me as an inadequate defense of such an unlikely reconstruction. This is an instance of failing to bal­ ance text against an imagined reconstruction of warfare in material reality. I

1 I have derived an average perimeter length of 12 kilometers from the four wall lengths provided by the author for Shangcai (p. 252), Xintian (p. 249), Loyang (p. 250), and Ling­ shoucheng (p. 250). I have then divided this figure by the total number of towers recommended by the Mohists, some 668 towers (including the towers built over each of the four city gates), though possibly the figure should be 713 (pp. 374-75).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:20:05AM via free access 132 Chinese Science 15 (1998) believe that a similar error is responsible for the conjecture that the wheels at the ends of the stiles of the "wooden flying ladder that avoids thundersticks" (text at p. 284, noted; illustration at p. 285, fig. 123) were added to permit the ladder to be rolled over the defensive "thundersticks" tossed down walls-the wheels are far better explained in a different place by the same writer when he discusses the addition of wheels to facilitate the raising of ladders against the walls (p. 453). A number of the book's errors and shortcomings are due to the nature of the SCC project. For some time it has been clear that the collaboration such an en­ terprise demands has resulted in less than complete consistency across single sections. This has, in the present case, led to occasional contradictions. The most obvious occurs as the authors of the subsections on archery and on poliorcetics discuss the history of armor in China. On page 275 Robin Yates asserts that iron chain mail "made its first appearance towards the very end of the Warring States but reached its apogee in the Six Dynasties period," a statement flatly-and correctly-contradicted by Wang Ling and Edward McEwen, the authors of the earlier section, who state on page 180 that "chain mail does not occur until the Ming." An additional problem is that of repetition. The authors of any such project have to contend with two different types of readers, the rather determined soul who reads the whole book straight through and the more selective individual who desires only, for example, to learn about counterweighted ladders. The first kind cannot bear very much repetition; the second demands a whole universe in her grain of sand. And so there is repetition, there is repetition. Thrice we are told in twenty-four pages that it would take, according to Sun Wu, six months to build a ramp outside the walls of a besieged city (pp. 422, 442, 445). A related problem has led to separate discussions of "swallow-tail torches" (yan wei ju ~~:I:§) and "pheasant-tail torches" (zhi wei ju *~:I:§) when a single com­ bined discussion would have been preferable. Greater coordination between the authors of the various subsections, on the other hand, would also have improved the quality of the book. For instance, there are inter­ esting accounts of the crossbow's origins as a trap for animals (pp. 135-46, esp. p. 135) and of unmanned crossbow ambushes triggered by a tripwire (figs. 46 and 48, and see also text p. 157); a review of these passages might have inspired the author of the later subsection to conclude that the objects called qi Ji ~ ~ known to have been used both in the tomb of the first emperor of the Qin ~~ !l!lff and in fending off ramps in siege warfare (p. 444) were crossbow traps. It is an unfortunate aspect of the SCC project that its sections are so long in the writing that by the time they appear they are already somewhat dated. This is especially true of the first two parts of this book. When he reads in a book pub­ lished in 1994 that two books published in 1969 and 197 l "appeared too late to be of help to us in the first writing of this sub-section" (p. 184, note a), what can the reader feel but frustration? And so it is not surprising that whereas the work of Xu Baolin ~Hf f,f on military books has long since eclipsed that of Lu Dajie ~:lifffi, Lu continues to be cited here (p. 27).

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During the last decade a number of important studies of China's military have appeared in English and more are due to appear soon. These include Ralph and Mei-chOn Sawyer's translation of the Wujing qi shu ff:\~-1::::if (Seven mili­ tary classics), their promised general history of warfare in ancient China, the SCC volume under review as well as the other volumes on military technology mentioned above, Joanna Waley-Cohen's studies of Qing military culture, and Mark Edward Lewis's Sanctioned Violence in Early China, not to mention many studies on modem China's . And yet we are still trying to resolve the most basic questions about this field of inquiry. A selective reading of canonical texts has suggested that China was somehow different from the cultures more familiar to native readers of English, that the Chinese were op­ posed to war and did all in their power to avoid it. This is, in fact, the assertion made in sections b4, c3 and c4-5 of the book under review. War in China and the war that China's armies exported to foreign lands were, I agree, imagined and executed in specifically Chinese ways, but it is simply untrue that pre­ revolutionary China was not a bellicose empire throughout its history. As was noted in a recent work on Chinese "strategic culture,"

In a massive compilation of internal and external historical wars from the West­ ern Zhou (ca. 1100 B.C.) to the end of the Qing dynasty (1911) scholars at the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences uncovered a total of3,790 recorded wars. In the Ming alone there was an average of 1.12 external wars per year through the entire 270 plus years of the dynasty. 2

If there is something truly unusual about China, it is the thoroughness with which civil officials expunged martial culture from their world, even though these same men often held military positions.

2 Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), p. 27. While I have many deep reservations about Johnston's insufficiently historical approach (what, for example, did the military classics mean to readers in the Ming dynasty?) as well as his mechanical approach to texts, I am sympathetic with his commitment to checking the import of ca­ nonical texts against military decisions made by historical agents.

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