Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521315609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
A section of Volume IV, part 1 and a section of Volume IV, part 3 of the major series:

Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521467735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This fifth volume abridgement of Joseph Needham's monumental work is concerned with the staggering civil engineering feats made in early and medieval China.

Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521292863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Volumes I and II of the major series: China: its language, geography and history ; Chinese philosophy and scientific thought.

Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674794399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
The world's preeminent authority on Chinese science explores the philosophy, social structure, arts, crafts, and even military strategies that form our understanding of Chinese science, making instructive comparisons along the way to similar elements of Indian, Hellenistic, and Arabic cultures. A major portion of the book concentrates on Taoist alchemy that led not only to the invention of gunpowder and firearms, but also, through the search for macrobiotic life-elixirs, to the rise of modern medical chemistry.

Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521058018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1146

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Book Description
After two volumes mainly introductory, Dr Needham now embarks upon his systematic study of the development of the natural sciences in China. The Sciences of the Earth follow: geography and cartography, geology, seismology and mineralogy. Dr Needham distinguishes parallel traditions of scientific cartography and religious cosmography in East and West, discussing orbocentric wheel-maps, the origins of the rectangular grid system, sailing charts and relief maps, Chinese survey methods, and the impact of Renaissance cartography on the East. Finally-and here Dr Needham's work has no Western predecessors-there are full accounts of the Chinese contribution to geology and mineralogy.

Author: Colin A. Ronan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521338738
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Digesting the main sections of Volume IV of Dr. Needham's magnum opus, this book is concerned with the immense advances made in early and medieval China in mechanical engineering. It discusses in simple but eminently readable terms the status of engineers, their tools and materials, then basic mechanical principles, followed by machinery powered by animals, man and even by steam, vehicles for land transport, six centuries of hidden clockwork, windmills and aeronautics. Since China was far ahead of the West in ancient and medieval times, this volume helps make clear the immense debt owed by Western civilization to the Chinese. Such debts included the important mechanical principles of transforming rotary motion to a to-and-fro motion of a crank and vice-versa. They invented the first efficient harness for horses and the first mechanical clocks.

Author: Benjamin A. Elman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674036476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.

Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022636920X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In The Water Kingdom popular science writer Philip Ball navigates the turbulent and often confusing currents of Chinese history and culture by tracing peoples' relationships with water, from pre-historical founding myths to today. Water has been an enduring metaphor for philosophical thought and artistic expression in China, and from the Han emperors to Mao, the ability to manage water became a barometer of political legitimacy. Attempts at controlling China's vast waterways has involved engineering works on a scale unmatched the world over - for better or worse. Yet the strain that economic growth is putting on the country's water resources today may be the greatest threat to China's future. In characteristic style, Ball delivers an original portrait and as yet unseen cultural history of a country that becomes easier to understand when water is brought to the table.

Author: Timothy G. Reagan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135615675
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
This text provides a brief yet comprehensive overview of a number of non-Western approaches to educational thought and practice. Its premise is that understanding the ways that other people educate their children--as well as what counts for them as "education"--may help us think more clearly about some of our own assumptions and values, and to become more open to alternative viewpoints about important educational matters. The value of this informative, mind-opening text for preservice and in-service teacher education courses is enhanced by "Questions for Discussion and Reflection" and "Recommended Further Readings" included in each chapter. New in the Third Edition: *Chapter 2, "Conceptualizing Culture:" 'I, We, and The Other,' is new to this edition. It is a response to feedback about the problems inherent in our general discourse about "culture," and in addition provides an example of a culture that is near to us but nevertheless alien-the culture of the Deaf-World. *Chapter 9-which deals with Islam and traditional Muslim education-has been substantially revised. *The subtitle of the Third Edition has been changed to Indigenous Approaches to Educational Thought and Practice, reflecting not so much a change in the emphases found in the book, but rather, a recognition of the growing scholarly interest in indigenous peoples, their languages, cultures, and histories. *Various points throughout the text have been expanded and clarified, and chapters have been updated as needed.

Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521070607
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 1190

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Book Description