LJM Impression

It is a pleasure, and an honor, to know LJM.

We have been knowing each other for almost two years. Initially we met at a welcome party at K's house at Harvard. Later I participated in a course he and K co-taught in EALC. We also had several individual meetings that engaged topics both within and beyond academics. He is indeed fascinating to talk with.

Now since I came to Taiwan, I have more opportunities to meet him and his family. He is truly a generous, humble, and caring person, a remarkable teacher and a genuine friend to me. Last night, I went to his place to have a farewell dinner with him, and had a long conversation with him. Most of time, our topics have nothing to do with academics.

LJM talked about how our personal lives tangle with family background, especially our relation with our parents. Our personality is fundamentally shaped by how we were raised, and in his view, we tend to project that onto our relation with our partners, whether we are aware of or not. Marilyn Monroe is a beautiful woman, but she divorced three men in her short life. This possibly results from her constant, sometimes excessive, demand of love and attention from her partners because she did not have it when she was young. She was an orphan. The thought is Freudian, but I reckon the reasoning based on my own experience. I wonder, sometimes, to what degree my own life, especially my emotional life has been influenced by my relation with my parents. Quite a lot, I believe.

Furthermore, LJM talked about scholars in general. He thinks that all scholars in the world are perfectionists, but perfectionists of two groups. That is, the obsessive-compulsive type (强迫型) and the narcissistic type (自恋型). The former has a close-to-impossible standard for their academic achievement, so he/she continues working for that goal without feeling satisfied. The latter feels strongly about self-capacity, and constantly demands others' positive evaluation and applause to reinforce that conviction. The two types work from different directions to achieve perfection: the former from within oneself - he/she may be a bit machinist; the latter from outside - he/she strives for external recognition.

How about myself? I believe that I am a perfectionist, 80%OC, 20%N. For most times, I work for my own sense of fulfillment, even that engages a bit of maconism. Other times, I image situations in which my contributions, often veiled by my humbleness and low-key behavior, are eventually recognized and appreciated by the world. No matter how low-key I am, I believe there is a trace of ambition in me, reflected by a desire for recognition. Ah, the vanity of being a scholar!

I don't know how to handle these sentiments. As a student, I have been enjoying my academic life, especially in the past year of traveling-study(游学). But once I graduate and get a job in the academics, I may understand more what LJM talked about. Everyone has a dark side in himself. And for a scholar, this dark side may manifests in powerful ways precisely because scholars are also alike. Even I perceive myself as a nice and easygoing person, can I survive in this world without revealing my dark side. I still believe there is a possibility of doing that. But only time can tell. I have been hiding in the schools throughout my life, so the test is in front of me. It is a bit scary to look forward, but I have no other ways...

At least I have some role models, like LJM himself.

Taiwan Impression

Without notice, I have been in Taipei for more than a month. The life here is certainly comfortable. I live in an apartment in the east part of the city, not far from the famous Zhongxiao Road (忠孝路). Behind my place is the Four-Animal Mountain (四獸山), from which I can have a nice bird-view of the whole city. It is not far from Academia Sinica, the research institute where I study as a visiting scholar. 

This is my first time to visit Taiwan, so my cultural adventure continues. Compared to London and Paris, this is a much more familiar environment: the language is the same, and the food is exceptionally delicious. True, it is not so exotic, but it is no less interesting. Here are some of the highlights:

Even before I came to Taiwan, L recommended Chengpin for me (誠品), a chain bookstore initiated in Taiwan. I went there in the first week of my stay in Taipei. The reading environment is comfortable and welcoming. Many people go there just for reading, not buying. The Dunnan store is open 24 hours/7 days, attracting voracious book-lovers from all corners. The book collection, for a historian like me, is not so spectacular, but this welcoming reading environment is unique. With the withering of chain bookstores in the West, the Chengpin phenomenon is quite interesting. One Saturday night, I stayed there until 2AM. Well, I wanted to stay overnight because it sounds cool, but my body didn't allow me. So I went out, grabbed the city bike, and cycled home along the quiet Zhongxiao Road. On the way, I stopped by a small restaurant to eat something quick but delicious. When I arrived home, it was already 3AM. Well, life couldn't be more enjoyable.

Since the topic is on bookstore. Let me say a bit more. There are plenty of more small-scale bookstores in Taipei, which I have yet to explore. Early today, I took a walk with L in the NTU area, and visited a bookstore that sells rare books (舊香居). The place is quite inviting, with nice sofas and reading facilities. The rare books, most of which were published in the early 20th century, are displayed on the nice bookshelves. They are pricy as well, only for the genuine bookworms! L showed me a work of Mao published in the 1940s. It costs more than 10,000 TWD. That is quite a fortune. Well, for a poor student like me, I cannot afford that. But flipping though these old books certainly is pleasant. There are some other bookstores on the Chongqing Road (重慶南路) and NTU area, which I am eager to explore.

Cafés in Taipei. There are many. L recommended some on the Zhongshan Road (中山北路). I also found some near where I live. Usually I am not a café person. I found that I become most efficient at a place that is quiet and non-intrusive, like at home and in a library. On the other hand, the cafés I visited have their own characteristics. The owners are usually friendly and interactive; the coffee is tasty, though I am not an expert on that; the interior design is individualized and quite artsy, or at least very cute, a vintage of Asian stores. For me, the last factor is the most important. I have been to many cafés in Paris, most of time using them as a working place. But one café in particular, called "La Caféothèque," is quite nice: it has a whole wall of plants in the room, vitalizing the place nicely. Although I haven't found one like that in Taipei, many cafés I visited have their own styles and orientations, making a person like me, who enjoys coffee only at the surface level, become more engaged. That is what is so nice about Taipei: it beautifully conglomerates traditional culture with modern sensitivities from the West.

The cultural life in Taipei is vibrant. I am amazed by the diversity of art programs available here. Tradition arts like the Peking opera and Kun play are flourishing, but there are also many western plays and dances that are shown on the regular basis. Pina Bausch's troupe will perform later this month. The tickets are sold out long time ago, so I have to go to Gaoxiong for that matter. Two weeks ago, I also went to see a piano performance by Alexandre Tharaud, the handsome French pianist who performed in Michael Haneke's acclaimed "Amour." How could I expect my French connection continues here in Taipei?! Well, the situation is like this: the pianist is French; I saw the movie "Amour" in London; and now I saw his performance in Taipei with a Taiwanese girl. Woo, the world has truly become global. But in this global context, there is still room for local artists, as it should be. My Taiwanese friends recommended to me quite a few local dance troupes including the famous Cloud-gate dance troupe (雲門舞集), 光環舞集, and 優人神鼓. Along the world-famed artists in the major arenas, there are also places where local artists can present their more independent and experimental works. I haven't explored any of this, but my experience before (I was impressed by a small performance in Beijing four years ago) made me have good feeling for this type of production. Just early today, as part of our city excursion, L and I walked around the area of Treasure Hill (寶藏巖), where independent local and foreign articles present their art work. It is an interesting place to visit. We needed to climb up and down along the narrow paths that meander along the hill to visit many little houses where the art works are displayed. The place attracts young people, who go there to interact with the artists and sometimes with the art works themselves. Not far from this art village is the 觀音亭, a site for religious offering. The juxtaposition of these two very different cultural sites is fascinating. 

Well, I guess there are many more manifestations of this amalgamation in Taipei because of its complex history: It has Chinese traditional culture at its root. No matter how contemporary politics in Taiwan tries to present that culture to their own calculation, I think the cultural link across the strait is undeniable. Moreover, it was colonized by Japan for half of a century so the Japanese influence is everywhere (the architecture, the food, the shopping centers, etc). Then the Western influence is also obvious perhaps due to the close ties between Taiwan and America after the WWII. One example is that the majority of the researchers in the Academia Sinica have a PhD degree in the US or in Europe. That has become a no-brainer in Taiwan. Finally, an increasing attention to the indigenous peoples (原住民) in the recent years. Altogether, these four aspects interweave, sometimes in harmony and other times with tension, making the society highly dynamic and vibrant. That is what makes Taipei such an interesting city. 

More than 60 years ago, a Taiwanese writer 吳濁流 wrote a novel titled The Orphan of Asia (亞細亞的孤兒). I doubt that many people in Taiwan these days still consider themselves orphans. Nevertheless, the cultural and political identity of Taiwanese is still a central subject in contemporary discussion. As a person from mainland China, obviously I am sensitive to the subject (same for my Taiwanese conversationalists as well). But I, as an outsider, came here first to observe, to contemplate, not to judge. 

[Well, It's been a while since last entry. It is hard to keep this as a routine, but I will try...]

         

Au revoir, Dunhuang!

Today is the last day for me to read Dunhuang manuscripts in Paris. As I walked out the BnF à Richelieu, I felt quite special. From Nov.19, 2012 to today (Jan. 25, 2013), I have been to this reading room (Manuscrits des orientaux) many times, reading through 33 medical manuscripts from the Pelliot collection. When it is time to say goodbye, I somewhat felt melancholic, as if departing from an old friend. After the routine of summarizing today's reading at a nice café, I took a random promenade in the 2ème Arr, and walked into a very nice market street (Marché Montorgueil). Looking at many beautiful bakeries and chocolate shops, with the familiar melody of Kitaro's "Mirage," my mind went back to the days I spent at BnF with my old friends (yes, they are very very old)...

After I finished my research in London, I came to Paris in early November to continue working on Dunhuang manuscripts. I didn't expect too much at the beginning, given my experience in London. I only read five manuscripts there. Perhaps I could read a bit more here in Paris, I thought at the time. And the goal is different. Because all manuscripts here have been digitalized with good quality images, I don't have any justifications to consult any manuscript because the textual information is lacking or of low-quality. They are all there online. Therefore I switched my focus from the content to the format, that is, to study the ex-textual features of these manuscripts. For example, the quality of paper, the size and collation of leaflets, the basic form of the manuscript, the red marks, the grid, the handwriting, the recto/verso information, among others. I am not an expert on manuscript culture, but I was eager to give a shot.

The experience is quite fulfilling. The most important, thanks to the generosity of Madame Monnet, the librarian at the manuscript department, I was able to consult many more manuscripts here in Paris, altogether 33. In London, since that was the first time for me to read Dunhuang manuscripts, it was a "wooooo" kind of jaw-dropping experience. And I certainly focused more on the content rather than the format of those five manuscripts. Here in Paris, the initial excitement receded, replaced by a more mature sensitivity to examine these manuscripts more professionally. The room is perfect: it is small and cozy. The reference books are just nearby. Madame Monnet is quite present. And sometimes I met interesting people in the room. It made the whole reading experience very enjoyable.

So what is my routine of reading these manuscripts. I usually consulted 2 to 3 manuscripts each day, and 5 to 6 manuscripts each week. I tried to arrive there at 10am, the time it opened, and stay until 6pm, the time it closed. Before entering the library, I always listened to Kitaro's "Mirage." Maybe it is too sentimental, but for me it was a ritual that helped settle my mind to the right mood. And I was never tired of listening to it, because it made me imagine a bright future. Then I entered the room, and usually read some books to get the basic information about the manuscript I was about to read (typically Despeux's, MJX's, and the French catalogue). After that, I came out to wash my hands, re-entered the room, and started reading the manuscript. Each one took me about 2 hours or a bit more. For lunch, a sandwich from "Au 140" near where I live is perfect - quick and convenient, since I didn't want to waste time on this. But a café inside the building was necessary; it warmed me up, bringing energy to me. Then, the same process again for the afternoon reading. After the work, I would meander to a café nearly, summarizing all my discoveries for the day. After that, if it is a Wednesday or Friday, I would walk to the Luvre, which is not very far, and enjoyed a nocturnal section there. From the medieval Chinese manuscripts to the gorgeous Western arts, that transformation excited my soul!

To be honest, I don't know how much of my work here on Dunhuang manuscripts will be eventually incorporated into my thèse. Maybe not too much, my intuition tells me. But this experience is surely one of the most unique in my life. I don't just mean the reading experience of these precious scrolls and cahiers, which is an essential part. I also mean the ambient parts - the nice library, the kind Madame Monnet, the diligent Sakamoto san who works on paper in Dunhuang, the nice neighborhood around BnF, the walk along the seine and inside the Luvre. All of these, together with the core experience of reading the manuscripts, are perfectly integrated and become one memory, the memory that I will cherish for the rest of my life. It is also a motivating force for me to continue walking on the pathway, assuredly and steadily, that I chose some time ago and never regret.

Au revoir, Dunhuang. I hope that I will see you again, perhaps not in the near future. But you are always with me, in my heart, driving me to move forward...  

 

The Great Saint Bernard (II): History

The Great Saint Bernard is located at a strategic pass that is on the highest point of a route that offers the shortest passage across the Alps, hence connecting the Northern and Southern parts of Europe. The passage is the shortest, but not easiest, since the travelers need to climb up to 2500 meters , and often against inclement weather, to make the pass. My friends and I only hiked five kilometers, and that is already an odyssey for us. Think about the people in the past who travelled all way along without any modern devices. To use a Chinese term, this is the pass of demonic gate (鬼门关).

It appears that from the time of antiquity, if not earlier, people at the region already used the passage to cross the Alps. Among them are Celtic people who left artifacts along the route. Particularly they threw offerings, especially coins, into a pond near the site of the monastery to pray to the God Poeninus to bless their travel. This tradition continued in the Roman period. With its military and economic power, the Romans constructed a road on the passage, which we can still see the trace of it during the summer. Based on the account of Raphael, a cheerful monk in the monastery, in the Roman time, the area had a warmer climate and the tree lines were higher than what we have today. This probably gave the Romans an easier time to build the road, though still an amazing achievement given the technology they had at the time. Moreover, the Romans also built a temple dedicated to the God Jupiter at a place not far from the monastery (in Italian territory), and two "mansiones" that rendered shelters for travelers and animals respectively. These structures are lost long time ago, but archeologists found many artifacts including the tiles, the coins, and the various offerings around the site. Just early today, Ed found a small piece of tile that is presumably produced in the time of Romans. How cool is that!

After the fall of the Romans in the fifth century, the temple fell into disuse, and eventually was destroyed. We don't know much about the history of this place in the Haut Moyen Age (fifth to the tenth century). Then came the figure Saint Bernard, who in the early 11th century came to the place not far from the Roman temple and began to build a hut to help the travelers to cross the Alps. He survived the first winter in the hut. Today we can still see the trace of the hut built by him a thousand years ago. This is the start of the construction of the monastery. In the following centuries, more rooms were added to expand the monastery, the last of which was done in the late 19th century. Today the Great Saint Bernard monastery has become a multi-structure place including the church, the hostel, the hotel, the animal room, the museum, and a room to preserve corpses (closed). In the summer time, this is an attractive tourist site, since people can easily come here by car and go hiking in the nearby mountains. 

But we should not forget that the primary function of the monastery, as conceived by Saint Bernard, is to help people to cross the Alps. Spending some time here in winter is quite helpful to understand that goal. We already had the first-hand experience how difficult to walk a few kilometers in snow, against wind even with modern facilities. In the old days, the difficulty is unfathomable. We saw a video made in 1936 showing how the monks in the monastery rescued travelers from the avalanche, with the help of a special kind of guide/rescue dogs who are big and strong. They were given the name of Barry. There is a story in the 19th century that tells a heroic dog, Barry I, who rescued a boy who was abandoned by his companions as they crossed the Alps. The exhausted boy fell into sleep in the snow. The dog found him and kept licking his face to try to wake him up. The boy was hence saved, and he wrote an appreciation letter to the monastery that is still kept in its archive.

The humanitarian function of the monastery diminished in the second half of the 20th century when a tunnel was built connecting Switzerland and Italy. People don't need to climb up to the pass of Grand Saint Bernard to cross the border. But the monastery continues to operate, in the word of the monk Raphael, not to satiate the physical hunger, but to satiate the spiritual hunger. Indeed, the rapid moderation and globalization in the 20th century have fundamentally changed the way of living. The life becomes faster, more efficient and comfortable, but at the same time more stressful and materialistic. A place like the Grand St Bernard, hidden in the mountains and faraway from the mundane world of anxiety and haste, becomes a rarity, and increasingly attracts people from all over the world. My friend Ed. found this place when he was on an archeological trip organized by Stanford to research on the Roman remains left at the pass of the Grand St. Bernard. He immediately fell into love with this place, and came back many times. Two and a half years ago my friends Ed and Margo got married here. And now they brought me here to experience its unique natural beauty and warm hospitality. I, too, become very attached to the place.

The Great Saint Bernard (I): An Incredible Hike

December 20, 2012. A memorable day in my life.

On this day, I, together with three friends, hiked up to the Grand Saint Bernard, a monastery at the border of Switzerland and Italy. 

I have done many hikes before, not without difficult ones. Just a few days before, I did a day-hike with my friends in the Black Forest in Germany. But this one is probably the hardest in my life. Precisely this very hardness makes the day memorable.

I was in the Alps during the summer, studying French in Grenoble. That is one of my most pleasant summers, with plenty of enjoyable hikes, good food, and very nice weather.

But the Alps in winter are quite different. Particularly for this winter, there are so much snow in the mountains that transformed the whole landscape. When we got off the bus at the beginning of the trail, the hostility of the mountains felt imminent. The whole world is white. Underneath our feet are six meters of snow. The mountains only expose themselves at the top, the rest completely covered by snow. It was not snowing, but the strong wind powerfully threw the snow up to the air, darkening the sky above us. We couldn't see the sun.

This harsh weather doubled, perhaps even tripled the difficulty of this five kilometer hike. We were on snowshoes (called rackets in French), and moving very slowly against the wind. A few minutes after the start of the hike, I already felt tired. I knew that this was a bad sign. This is my first time to take the trail, and obviously there are no signs telling you how far you have walked (even there are such signs, they are probably buried in the snow). Ed told me that it takes only a couple of hours to reach the monastery. Yet after walking about an hour, and I still felt I was nowhere, I started to realize that the hike was much more difficult than I originally fathomed. That was not a very pleasant feeling.

And I was not very prepared. I didn't try my ratchets the day before, so they felt like a new machine under my shoes (they are certainly essential for the hike). I didn't eat much before the hike, confidant of taking care of a two-hour hike with an empty stomach. Most seriously, I didn't adjust my backpack very well, so all the weight landed on my shoulders. Oh, my poor shoulders! How unfairly I treated you, and what an excellent job you have done! Even worse, among other unnecessary things, I carried four books in my backpack, a typical bookworm behavior. Well, the legend goes that Henry Widner died from the Titanic shipwreck because of his foolish act of trying to save some of his books on the ship. I hope that my fate will not be like that.

The thought that I could not make it never occurred to me. I was confident that I was able to finish the hike, just with more time and difficulty. There are some comforting factors: Among the four of us, the only four hiking on that morning, Ed is a very experienced one who took this hike many times. Likewise Margo is also familiar with the environment. For her mom Tania though,  this is her first time, to take the hike, but she was determined to make it. Well, if she can make it, why cannot I?

Perseverance is the key. I am not a very sportive person, so my physical body has not been challenged quite often. This time it was quite an extreme. One step after another, slowly but steadily, I was moving toward the destination. There were not too many thoughts in my head during the hike. Perhaps the physical challenge really cleared up my mind, with a concentrated goal to finish the hike. Most of the time I was thinking about the strategies to execute the hike. Should I count the number from one to one hundred as a unit of hike? That didn't work out. Should I inhale the air from the nose and exhale it from the mouth? That didn't work out either because I soon ran out of breath after I did that a few times. The experience resembled that of my running a 1500-meter track: towards  the end of the run, my leg became so heavy and my breath was so out of control that I had to drag myself with great effort and mental strength to finish the run. But when was the last time I did that? Perhaps in college, which means more than a decade ago?

The hike also reminded me of another one I did almost thirteen years ago, with my family. We went to hike up to the top of the Long-White Mountain, a dead volcano in Northern China. It was also during the winter, perhaps in January. We hiked against the strong wind (yes, the wind is ubiquitous) and eventually reached the top. A different time, a different place, but a similar experience.

It is a hard experience. I cannot help comparing this to a pilgrim's experience. After all, we were heading to a monastery. For a pilgrim, physical difficulty, or even suffering, is a means to achieve spiritual elevation. That is why we see Tibetan monks prostrate their bodies every three steps on their way to a sacred site. It is interesting to think of the relation between the body and the mind in this case. My own experience during the hike clearly revealed that an intense bodily experience has purifying effect on the mind. On the other hand, practices such as meditation certainly have beneficial effects on our bodies. Well, this mind/body discussion almost becomes hackneyed, isn't it?

Back to the hike. It was hard, but this doesn't mean it was utterly miserable. Even under such a harsh condition, nature revealed her beauty to us. The mountains are truly magnificent, with their peaks piercing into the sky. The wind constantly blew off the snow at the peaks of these majestic mountains, creating a beautiful halo on them. At one moment, we even discerned the sun, hidden behind the heavy mist created by the wind. In this utterly white world, even a hazy and distant sun gave us a sense of warmth, and hope.

Finally, after three hours hike, we reached a hub where we took a rest. The hub seemed to be a haven for me. I filled my stomach crazily; the food never tasted better. I adjusted my backpack, making it less of a burden. It was cold in the hub, and without moving, our bodies became cold quickly. So we continued the hike soon after this much-needed rest. The remainder of the hike was significantly easier. Soon after the start of the second half, we saw the monastery from afar, which was certainly an inspiration. With a clear visual cue, the hike became easier. Even for the last part, which has this ominous name of the "Valle de mort," I did not experience much of a challenge. At around three in the afternoon, we reached the monastery, finishing a five-hour hike with five kilometers covered. One kilometer per hour, that sounds quite slow. But my dear readers, try yourselves and you know what I am talking about. For me, it is truly an once-in-a-life experience. 

As proposed by Ed, we did a group hug together to celebrate our incredible achievement. From now on, we will stay in the Grand Saint Bernard monastery for a week and spend the Christmas here (yes it is here because right now I am sitting in the salon of the monastery to write this piece). It is time to explore this very interesting place. 

And history rolls in.

Needham's material

The Needham Research Institute (NRI), located on the west side of Cambridge, is a household name for the historians of East Asian Science and Medicine. This is the place where Joseph Needham, the founder of the field, together with his collaborators conducted research for his massive project of writing the first comprehensive work on the history of Chinese science, technology, and medicine. Initially conceived as a single book by Needham, the project rapidly expanded with an engagement of a group of international scholars. The final product, finished in 2004 after Needham's death, is a 25-volume gigantic work Science and Civilisation in China (SCC), which became the foundational work in the field.

When I entered the field of the History of Science in China in 2005, I was aware of Needham's works, not by reading the SCC directly, but by reading the scholarship produced in the so-called post-Needham era. This scholarship, starting from the eighties, reevaluates and critiques Needham's works, especially on his famous question about Chinese science, often referred to as the "Needham question." So what is the Needham question? Here is a quote from his 1943 draft on the SCC project: 

"Why, therefore, did modern science, i.e. our theoretical body of scientific thought, universally applicable to nature and commanding universal assent, develop in west Europe, not in China"

A big red question mark follows. 

Immediately after, Needham speculated the answer:

"answer: social and economic background requires investigation"

This is the core of Needham's historiographical orientation; he intended to find the answer, through the production of the SCC, to this fundamental question: Why did China fail to develop modern science, given all her glorious achievements in the pre-modern era? 

Later scholars, some of whom were collaborators of Needham, started to challenge this grand question. They argued, under the influence of post-modernism, that it is problematic to use modern science as a universal criterion to measure Chinese science. Since the latter operates in a drastically different philosophical and cosmological system, it is better to study it in its own historical and cultural context. This alternative approach, which may be labelled as cultural relativism, is my entry point to the History of Science. 

This is not the place to adjudicate whether Needham was right or his critics, though generally I am more comfortable with the latter group. I plan to write another piece on this issue using Edward Wilson's book Consilience as a jumping board. So readers, if you are interested, wait for some time.

Back to the NRI. After Needham's death in 1995, it has continued to be an important research site, equipped with an excellent library, for scholars in the field. Since I came to the UK, I have visited it three times, participating in its seminars and checking books in the library. Today is the fourth time, and my task is to check some research material Needham gathered over the years for the pharmacology section of the SCC. Although they are not essential for my own work, it would be fun to read Needham's notes and letters, paying my due tribute to this magnificent man. Moreover, I might gain a more nuanced understanding of Needham and his works after reading his archives.  

So what did I find? The first one that caught my attention is a letter Needham wrote in 1968 to Dr. Storen, a toxicologist in Western Germany, about lead poisoning in China. Dr. Storen cited S. Colum Gilfillan's work, which argued that lead poisoning in ancient Rome, through the pipe system, was responsible for the decline of Roman civilisation and the rise of men of genius (this later became a book with a telling title: Rome's Ruin by Lead Poison). The argument, typical at the time, has a strong technological deterministic touch (Marxism was in its full force). Dr. Storen asked Needham whether he found a similar phenomenon in China. In Needham's response, he first confirmed that lead was plentifully used in ancient China and Chinese was aware of its detrimental effect. He then showed his hesitancy to embrace Gilfillan's argument, since he "should be very disinclined to attribute either the 'decay of Rome and other Mediterranean civilisations', or the appearance of men of genius in them, to any one such single factor as chronic lead poisoning." Any historian these days would agree with him. And lastly Needham stated, and this is the fun part, "The idea that 'genius' might have been missing in Chinese culture is for us simply laughable." Whether Needham misunderstood Gilfillan, I don't know, though I wouldn't be surprised that Gilfillan's argument had Eurocentric sensitivities, a dominant scholarly orientation at the time. We may say, therefore, that one of the most significant contributions of Needham's project is to put Chinese science on the table for serious scholarly inquiry, not anymore as a culture at worst hopelessly backward and at best exotically enticing. Remember, when Needham started the SCC project, he was working against the tide. Half a century passed, and now we take for granted that the history of Chinese science is a legitimate and important branch of knowledge pursuit. For this, we solute to Needham. [On the other hand, we ought not to over-glorify Needham's achievements since his works are also imbued with political agendas, as any piece of historical writing.  His leftist worldview and his close relation with the Chinese government found testimonies in his works. But this will await another entry to elaborate.]

Now let's move to another piece of Needham's material. This time we find a note he wrote about two alchemical recipes including his calculation of the amounts of chemical components therein. The note itself is not very special; it must be one of the many that Needham used to produce his work on the history of Chinese chemistry and alchemy, one of his favorite subjects. But let's flip the paper over, and see what is on the other side: it is a book review published on the newspaper The Observer in 1959. The review, titled "From Marx to Freud," is on the book Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History by Norman Brown. Suddenly I felt that I bumped into an old friend, since I read several chapters of this book a few years ago in my advisor's class. It is obvious that Freud's influence on humanities studies was immense in the fifties: This book is all about using Freud's psychoanalytical approach to study history. I wonder whether Needham ever paid attention to this review when he wrote Chinese alchemical recipes on the other side of the paper. If so, what did he think? [It would be interesting to explore Freud's impact on Needham's works, if there is any.]

A third piece, this time a clip from the magazine Times in 1976, kept in Needham's pharmacology folder. The title of article: Psychology: Poison theory in Salem witch hunt. If you check my previous records in this blog, you will find an entry I wrote in the summer of 2011 about my visit to Salem and a bit of history on the notorious witch hunt. Now the question is: What was the real reason for those young girls who turned mad overnight? It could be simply a joke, staged by these not-so-innocent children so perfectly. But the article proposed a different explanation, grounded on material base: those children ate molded bread that was infected by ergot, a type of fungus. The report, based on a recent research published in the journal Science, summarized the major scientific evident that supported the explanation. So now we have travelled from the fifties, when psychoanalysis was in its prime, to the seventies, when the focus turned to the material base of our mental process. This turn became more definitive from the eighties, when brain science replaced Freud's approach for studying psychology at least in natural science. Having this fascinating article in his folder, Needham was probably thinking whether the same explanation could be applied to Chinese case. The article states revealingly: "A puzzling feature of the Salem trials has been the vividness of the testimony, which is hard to explain if, as is now widely believed, the witnesses' tales were fictional. That could be accounted for if they were in fact describing the symptoms of poisoning." Hallucination, witchcraft, poisoning. Whether this connection is convincing or not, it is certainly arresting. 

If we continue fumbling Needham's folders, another interesting letter emerged. This is a letter written in 1973 to Needham by the historian Donald Wagner, who was in Kyoto at the time. In the letter, Wagner asked some specific questions about a paper that Needham presented in a Daoist Studies conference in the previous year. In particular, he mentioned a plant called Rauwolfia 萝芙木, a medicine used as a tranquilizer and anti-hypertensive. Wagner pondered why this plant medicine was not included in Chinese pharmacopoeia. And here is Wagner's explanation, based on his knowledge that Rauwolfia could cause serious side effects: 

"It seems that one of the great problems in the introduction of modern medicine in many parts of the world is that modern therapies often have unpleasant side-effects like these, while traditional therapies generally do not. It might easily be that the compiler of a pharmacopoeia was careful to exclude cures which he felt were worse than the disease."

     

This comment speaks directly to my research topic, which is the history of Chinese pharmacology and toxicology. Does Chinese medicine have no side effects? I doubt it. All drugs are thirty percent toxic, a Chinese saying claims. Another goes: If a drug does not make the patient feel dizzy [a sign of its potency and toxicity], it cannot cure the severe illness 药不瞑眩 厥疾弗瘳. Medicines and poisons are intertwined in Chinese medical culture, from its early stage. For one example, mercury is included as one of the good medicines in the earliest Chinese pharmacopoeia Shennong bencao jing 神農本草經, even if its toxicity is fully acknowledged. Taking a recent example, Chinese medicines containing aristolochic acid (AA) 馬兜鈴酸 was banned in Europe and the US because some scientific research showed its connection to kidney cancer. This generated a heated debate between practitioners on Chinese medicine and the scientific community, which is yet to be settled. All I want to say is that it is not so easy to separate medicines from poisons. Chinese pharmacological tradition, as modern medicine, not only acknowledges that, but tries to put that concept into best use in practice. How Chinese doctors did this is what I am going to study in the following years.

Leaving the topic of drug/poison behind, now let's go to the last page of the last folder I checked today. It is a folder containing notes or articles on the biographies of Chinese doctors. This last page is simply a file title, that is, Biographies or 傳. But below this title, I found another title -- 祝由, which was later crossed out. Why did Needham place biographies and incantations together? More curiously, why did he cross out the latter, presumably an afterthought? Any person who is interested in Needham's general historiography would be interested in this. One likely explanation is that Needham initially established the category, trying to find some material interesting, but eventually he didn't find any, or to be more exact, anything that fit in his framework. Recently I talked to a professor at Cambridge, who when he was a student fumbled through Needham's material, just as what I did. To his surprise, he did not find anything on Chinese zoology. As he thought more, he found it not so surprising: Chinese accounts of animals are full of strange creatures and mythical figures, which Needham must find hard to correspond to biological species in western science. Better to leave them alone. The same logic can apply to Needham's attitude to incantation, a topic I myself am quite interested in.

Anyway, it is about time to stop this long piece. I believe this is my first experience of reading archival sources. For a student studying the History of Chinese Science, nothing seems more fitful than starting with Needham's material. Certainly it was enjoyable to read them especially when unexpected connections popped up from time to time. As I walked out of the NRI, I saw the burial site of Needham's ashes, together with those of his two wives, under a beautiful tree. The idea is quite oriental, I shall say. That is, to bury ashes under a tree so that the dead starts to live again in this new form of life. Life continues in such perennial transformations. If Needham ever believed the existence of soul, his soul is certainly manifested in this robust and luxuriant tree.                  

        

                        

Dunhuang, London

My liaison to Dunhuang can be traced back to high school era. During the busy period of preparing for the National Exam, I bumped into an article titled “Mogao Caves” 莫高窟by Yu Qiuyu. The beginning of the article stroke me: In 366AD, a monk called Lezun 樂尊went to the area of Dunhuang. When he arrived there, it was getting dark. As the sun was setting down, it shone light onto the mountain that Lezun was facing. The reflection of the sunray from the mountain suddenly presented Lezun a phenomenal image: he saw thousands of golden Buddha emerging in front of him. Taking this as a clear message from Buddha, the monk realized how special this place was and began to construct caves in which he offered service for Buddha. Hence the beginning of the Mogao Caves.     

Whether this story is true or not, nobody can tell. But certainly it has the appeal, for monks following the footprint of Lezun, and for a teenager living at the end of the 20^th century, that is, me. What Lezun witnessed, we might say from our modern perspective, is a religious experience. The image of Buddha in his mind somehow, with the timely aid of external force, transformed into a physical image, a “real” presentation in front of his very eyes. There is something mysteriously beautiful produced from this process, isn’t it? The dessert, the setting sun, the mountain, and most importantly, the light, the combination of them creates a surreal scene. That scene, obviously, is created by the account of Lezun, and further beautified by Yu Qiuyu. Yet that scene, my first association with Dunhuang, has been engraved on my mind ever since.

Perhaps at the same period, or a bit earlier, I encountered the music of Kitaro 喜多郎. His silk-road album, based on the namesake NHK documentary, was quite impressive, and I immediately became a fan of a song called “Mirage” on that album. The rhythm feels vast and grandiose, but at the same time a melancholic sensitivity for something that is forever lost. The music fits Dunhuang perfectly.

I always wanted to go to Dunhuang. I used to tell my friends that it is the number one place in China I want to visit. Because of this, I have been postposing the trip, saving the best for the last. I hope I can wait until a perfect time, at a perfect age in my life, to pay the tribute.  

The pilgrimage still hasn’t happened yet. But something else happened, which made the past four days very special in my life.

Fast winding of time forward, from teenager to adult. Almost twenty years passed. Now I am studying history. Unplanned but possibly a play of fate, I began to work on medieval Chinese history, which inevitably brought me to the Dunhuang manuscripts. Although it is hard to explicate, I can try to rationalize this choice. Maybe deep in my heart I am always longing for something mysterious, strange, or even spiritual that cannot be easily explained by the material world. There is something beautiful in that realm that attracted me throughout my life. Medieval history is full of strange things: miracle tales, ghost stories, unrestrained behaviors, etc. It might be a cliché already: the period from the Six Dynasties to the Tang is as confusing as exciting; it was a world free of controls, producing all kinds of extraordinary things 異相. This attracts me.    

So here I am, in London, the British Library, reading some Dunhuang manuscripts. These are obviously very special documents, preserved in the cave 17 and later scattered all over the world. The collection at the British Library, often referred to as the Stein Collection, mainly contains the Buddhist scriptures. Although they are not directly related to my work, there are from time to time some non-Buddhist materials embedded in these scriptures. Medicine is no exception.

3 October, 2012. A Wednesday. A day to be remembered in my life. This is my first time to read a Dunhuang manuscript, making it my first time to read any manuscript prior to the 10^th century. Yes, these manuscripts are indeed very old (from the 5^th to the 11^th century). Honest speaking, I don’t think the content of these manuscripts are essential for my research. Nevertheless, the very act of taking a look at them, together with touching them and smelling them, is an illuminating experience. In fact, this is a ritualized research for me. I don’t mean that I bowed before opening the scroll. That would make a scene in the library. I mean I somehow “experienced” these texts as objects, which brought me closer to people in history. Look at them! The writings by the monks who lived more than 1000 years ago have been preserved, unedited, to our own time, and to my very hands. When I read these manuscripts, I cannot help imagining the monks who wrote them; the historical distance between me and them suddenly collapsed. Look, the handwriting of this scroll is not so neat. Are you doing it in a rush or are you not very well educated? See, the drawing of that scroll is quite interesting. Why do you draw these animals along with the talismans? How do you use them? Of course there are no answers from the other side of the dialogue. But never before did I feel so close to the people who lived in so early an era. Anyone who reads these manuscripts cannot help imagining his/her relation to these copyists. And imagination is a powerful thing.

Since the library does not allow taking photos, I needed to copy these manuscripts, by hand. It sounds laborious, and it is, but it is a very special experience. It is part of the ritual. Think in this way: Most of the Dunhuang manuscripts are copies of Buddhist scriptures, made by the pious monks. So what I did in the library is essentially the same as what these monks did more than 1000 years ago. I entered history for a moment, and became part of them! Moreover, as I was doing this, I realized how important copying is. It slowed down your mind, giving you more time to digest the meaning of the text. Perhaps the motivation of those monks to copy down the scriptures is not so far off from mine. [In Japan, this is still an active practice. When I was in Kyoto, I found some temples offered opportunities for visitors to copy scriptures.]

So in the past few days, I have been sitting in the library, copying these manuscripts (five altogether), quietly and carefully. It is a sublime experience. Under one hand, I held the millennium-old manuscript (The oldest one I read was written in 545 AD, the time of the Western Wei西魏. That is almost 1500 year-old.). Under my other hand, a pencil was copying down the text, word by word, line by line, on a modern notebook. Just be absorbed in the text. Nothing else. For two manuscripts, it involved drawing the animals and talismans, which was challenging for me. I may not catch the very spirit embedded in these pictures, but I was giving my best try.

Hence the highlight of my London trip, if not of my life. Saying farewell to my friends in medieval Dunhuang here in the UK, I hope I will meet them again in Paris soon. 

The picture below: the British Library, view from outside.