Joseph Needham : Letter from Joseph Needham to Dorothy Needham, 1 September 1952

Needham, Joseph, 1900-1995

Joseph Needham

<p style='text-align: justify;'>This letter belongs to a collection of letters from Joseph Needham to Dorothy Needham while he was a member of the International Commission on Bacteriological Warfare in China and Korea in 1952. Written from the Peking Hotel, it describes the last stages of writing and printing the report and visits within Beijing to the Pei Hai [Beihai] Park and the Tung An Shih Chhang [Dongan shichang 東安市場] market to buy books. Other matters include meetings with friends, including the engineer Yap Chu-Phay [Ye Zhupei 葉渚沛], visits to the Ming Tombs and the discovery by Feng Chia-Sheng [Feng Jiasheng 馮家昇], an expert on military technology, that Needham’s copy of the Wu Ching Tshung Yao [Wu jing zong yao 武經總要] was an unknown second edition of 1439. Needham subsequently presented it to the Academia Sinica Library .</p>