China Seminar | 13 March 2014

The Man Who Loved China: The Extraordinary Life of Joseph Needham

Simon Winchester

China seminar is privileged to have as our speaker Mr. Simon Winchester, a New York Times best-selling author, to share with us about his book The Man Who Loved China. In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Mr. Winchester brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world’s most technologically advanced country. Both epic and intimate, the book tells the sweeping story of China through Needham’s remarkable life, an unforgettable tale of what makes men, nations, and, indeed, mankind itself great – related by one of the world’s inimitable storytellers. Mr. Winchester is New York Times best-selling author and former foreign correspondent for The Guardian and the London Sunday Times. He spent more than 30 years traveling the world as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian and the London Sunday Times, with 15 of those years based in Asia, including New Delhi and Hong Kong. In 1997 he moved to America where he is now a full-time author. He has written 26 books including The Professor and the Madman, The Map that Changed the World, Krakatoa and The Man Who Loved China. In 2006, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and was elected an Honorary Fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, in 2009. He married to the former NPR producer Setsuko Sato and lives in New York and on a small farm in the Berkshires, Massachusetts.