An Epic of Technical Supremacy: Works and Words of Medieval Chinese Textile Technology.

• Author: Falkenhausen, Lothar Von

An Epic of Technical Supremacy: Works and Words of Medieval Chinese Textile Technology. By DIETER KUHN. Riggisberg (Switzerland): ABEGG-STIFTUNG, 2022. Pp. 488. CHF 120.

Before embarking on his academic career as a Sinologist, Dieter Kuhn completed professional training as a textile manager (Textilhetriebswirt), thereby acquiring a thorough familiarity with all aspects of textile materials and textile-manufacturing technology. This attracted the attention of the late Joseph Needham, who recruited him, as many others of the best minds of Kuhn's generation, to collaborate on his legendary Science and Civilisation in China project. Kuhn's still-authoritative monograph on Textile Technology: Spinning and Reeling appeared in 1988 as volume 5, pt. 9. Ever since, the academic world has been waiting for his follow-up volume (5, pt. 10), which was to treat looms and weaving technology. Due to changing directions in scholarship on the history of science and technology, the sprawling series inaugurated by Needham now stands as a magnificent torso, and Kuhn's second volume, like several others previously announced, is no longer slated to appear. Instead, Kuhn has given us, in the present work, a summation of his decades-long in-depth research into Chinese textile-making technology. No longer beholden to the straitjacket of Needham's system (which, for reasons that may have made sense in the early 1950s, placed textiles under "Chemistry and Chemical Technology"), the author follows the evidence where it leads him. Richly illustrated and attractively produced under the auspices of the Abegg Foundation--a worldwide leader in the study of historical textiles--the result is an ambitious book that sets new standards for this exceptionally difficult field of research.

The title is somewhat misleading as to the true scope of the work. While medieval China--in particular, the innovations of textile technology in the course of the Song (960-1279) economic transformation and their eventual transmission to Europe--may have provided the author with a point of departure in his intellectual quest, the book's coverage actually begins about 5,000 BCE with an indepth consideration of Neolithic finds, continuing at a similar level of thoroughness from period to period all the way through the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing dynasties (1644-1911); only the history of China's modern textile industry is left out. Moreover, the book is by no means confined to China; following (and...