ABSTRACT
Taoism was responsible for the development of science in China: those who explore the more than twenty volumes of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China (the first volume of which was published in 1954) encounter this message again and again. This huge and massively documented compendium is often described as a definitive survey of China’s technical activity—although its author emphasized that it is a tentative reconnaissance. That Taoism was a scientific philosophy is one of Needham’s celebrated theses.
