I bought my first volume of Joseph Needham’s monumental series, Science and Civilisation in China, from a street vendor in Rangoon in 1976. How Volume IV, Part 1 (Physics) got to Burma is anyone’s guess. Several years into my training as a sinologist by then, I knew that Needham’s books defined the history of Chinese science, and that they could be read for pleasure as well as profit. I also knew that I would never have another chance at a volume of SCC for £2. It sits today on my bookshelf alongside the seventeen of its siblings that I have managed to acquire in the intervening years. 

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