Top Highlights

• In years to come Joseph Needham would emerge from these travels as unarguably the foremost student of China in the entire western world,
• In 1911, with the suddenness of the gallows, the ancient Chinese empire had fallen
• The country that was then beginning its long struggle to emerge from thousands of years of imperial rule was in a terrible state. It was shattered by the bitter rivalries of a dozen regional fiefdoms; it was seething with the conflicting ambitions of newly imported ideologies; greedy foreign powers were gnawing away at its major cities and at its o...
• By the 1920s, when Chinese warlords were battling furiously with one another, when millions were dying in an endless succession of civil wars and millions were suffering from poverty of a kind that was hard to imagine elsewhere, the country was widely regarded by most outsiders with a mixture of disdain, contempt, and utter exasperation;
• He found that over the aeons the Chinese had amassed a range of civilizing achievements that the outsiders who were to be their ultimate beneficiaries had never even vaguely imagined.