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: Military Technology: Missiles and Sieges. 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, crossbows, trebuchets, arcuballistae, and poliorcetics. By the time I had finished the book, the variety and fearsomeness of the innumerable weapons 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-catapults and giant crossbows mounted on frames. The third is a thorough description of the different types of technology used in early siege warfare, from walls to poisonous gases. Other sections of Science and Civilisation in China (hereafter SCC) have already described gunpowder-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. Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:20:05AM via free access 128 Chinese Science I 5 (1998) 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 Song dynasty Wujing zongyao :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 crossbow is more extensive and more interesting. The origins of the crossbow are considered, as is its rise to prominence in the Han dynasty as the standard weapon 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 force 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.