ONE of the world's leading experts on Chinese civilisation, the scholar Joseph Needham, has died at the age of 94.
Needham, a former master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, had completed 15 of a planned 24 volumes on science and civilisation in China.
His volumes encompassed history, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine, shipbuilding and navigation, clock-making, agriculture, paper, printing, engineering and gunpowder.
Last year he opened a British exhibition on Chinese medicine commenting: 'This is not something dead, something purely historical. It is a system, used by 700 million people, still in full vigour . . . something yet to be combined with Western medicine in the modern medicine of the future.' He had a host of academic and other awards from learned institutions across Asia as well as extensive connections with universities in China and Hong Kong and was an honorary Doctor of Science of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He was also a member of the National Academy of China.
He made his reputation during the 1930s as an embryologist, but after World War II he helped set up the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation and attracted much fury when, on an international committee, he claimed America had used germ warfare in Korea.