The man who unveiled China

Abstract

Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (1900-1995), the sole architect and author of what is universally acknowledged to be the greatest and most authoritative of all books about China in the English language, is now far better known in the country about which he wrote than in his homeland where he wrote it. This autumn marks 60 years since Needham began work on what would become his masterpiece: an enormous series of books entitled Science and Civilisation in China.