 Hello, welcome. My name is Benjamin Penny. I'm from the Australian Centre on China and the World. My guest today is Professor Benjamin Elman, the Gordon Wu 1958 Professor of Chinese Studies from Princeton in the United States. We're very lucky this year that Ben has agreed to deliver the G.E. Morrison lecture. The G.E. Morrison lecture is the longest standing public lecture at the A.E.N.U. In fact it began before the A.E.N.U. began in the early 1930s. When the A.E.N.U. was formed in 1946 the then Vice Chancellor decided to reinvigorate the Morrison lectures and it's been going annually ever since. The list of lecturers from Australia and from overseas represents the cream of Chinese studies, historical studies, contemporary studies, humanities, social sciences and so on. The cream of scholars from around the world. So it's an incredible honour for us that Professor Elman has agreed to give the Morrison lecture for this year. He's visiting Canberra just for a few days but we have an opportunity to have a short discussion now. So welcome Ben. Thank you. Your lecture tonight is about the development of science particularly in the city of Shanghai in the second half of the 19th century into the 20th century. So I thought I'd just begin by suggesting to you that Shanghai was a pretty incredible place in the second half of the 19th century. It was a test base for the Chinese government under the Manchus and also for those that were coming in Brits and others that were working to try to modernize China from the outside. Shanghai was in many ways three stories. One was the Qing dynasty government which was in the south and then in the north the Europeans particularly the British had taken on personal power in certain kinds of areas and they were putting together a kind of not friendship society. They hated each other initially but they worked together against the type of typings in the 1860s and 1870s and that sort of forged the beginning of a link of you help us we'll help you and the British felt that the forces felt that they could gain advantages of access to the Chinese government under the Manchus through this aid package they had constructed where British, Scots, Americans came to work in Shanghai in the customs office. And the customs office was an opening to modern finance, modern policies and major policies and major finance at that time because the Qing had a lot of money and at times it had paid exorbitant losing battles and losing wars amounts of money but they had to pay out indemnity every time they lost the war. So the British advised them in terms of modernizing the trading mechanisms that the Qing met with the outside world and so it was an interesting dialogue between British and Dutch British and other Europeans who worked in the customs office working with the Chinese magistrates who were in Shanghai working with them as well and Shanghai was the one place this experiment could go on. It went on in Hong Kong to a degree but Hong Kong still was far south from the government and where many of the things were happening and Shanghai was placed right in the center of the most prosperous region the Suzhou region where it was a minor district. It now became a special action area and the British and others Chinese Gordon served the military there was hired by the the Chinese and Manchus to build up a military power against the typings and ultimately opened the door to modern mechanization modern warfare modern naval forces and like in that area so it became a kind of interesting interaction where I think there was genuine appreciation for each other and the Manchus and the Chinese major officials saw this as an opportunity to catch up with the rest of the world they had to pay indemnities how should you pay them and so they came up with a scheme for using the interest from their donations and other programs to pay for the debt that was owed over a period of 20 to 30 years so it was a remarkable mutual interaction at the place yeah so the the kinds of people the kinds of foreigners who are in Shanghai so you've mentioned Brits and Americans other Europeans there were some Australians there too so we're talking about well we're talking about military people that you've already mentioned we're talking about governmental people consuls and translators and interpreters and bureaucrats of various sorts but we're also talking about missionaries aren't we and the missionaries from largely Protestant churches although Shanghai of course we shouldn't forget was one of the great centers of the Catholic church in in China as well but they weren't just bringing what they saw as the word of God that's right they were also bringing a lot of I mean a lot of these missionaries spent their time if we look at what they actually did they were translating works of medicine as geology of astronomy of cartography and so on and so forth and and in a way it was a real a passage of information a passing of information from the west that's right to China through scholarly work through publication well this was not the British and Europeans in the northern European scene were not the ones to begin this process the various Jesuits that came from Spain and came from Italy they tried to do similar kinds of things in the 17th 18th century but then they lost out to the people's office the people office disbanded them and they were left with next to nothing and then the interference of various outside forces that lead to open war made the dialogue between the part the Catholics and the Chinese pretty much Moot and the Jesuits that survived remained in China who was protecting them from the other areas in the 19th century the various Brits and others that came in they were mediating a second stage and they were operating with Chinese officials and they were coming for the church and coming for these different kinds of faith but in the end they wound up working for the Chinese government this had happened with the Jesuits as well the Jesuits were for God and country and for faith but in doing this they began to recognize that they the Chinese would respect them more when they could demonstrate their prestige in astronomy and mathematics for the Jesuits and for the Europeans and particularly the British in the 1860s 70s and 90s industry the rise of the engineer the rise of science and technology in the newer forms that hadn't existed before this was what the products in particular were very important for and so it was the ironic church brought in church fellows to promote Christianity in the 1860s 1870s but the Chinese recognized these people were very knowledgeable in these areas of medicine science and engineering in particular so the rise of the engineer in China formally as opposed to kind of an ideal person who knew how to deal with things and build things or whatever the the new post calculus big groups of engineers technically trained came from this interesting dialogue from the 1860s in the type of rebellion to defeat the type things the newer technologies were employed and the new naval ships were employed so it was an interesting mutual admiration society and the Chinese you know gave in a little to the products and interests of these fellows but for the most part got that they wanted in terms of you do you do this and we'll pay you sure you mentioned medicine i think medicines are really interesting things because one of the things that the Protestant missionaries brought in particular many of the missionaries or medical missionaries some of them were some of them were preachers and scholars and so forth people who translated the bible and that kind of thing but some of them opened clinics and i'm i remember one particular case one of the the great scholarly missionaries joseph edkins when he was in p king he worked with a medical missionary and some of the sources around his career indicate that which diseases they preferred to treat and they said that that you know they because they were bringing medicines that the chinese didn't have so one of the things that was easy to cure was skin diseases the chinese may not have the medicines but they had the illnesses that's right so one of the advantages they had ironically over the british and others from europe coming in dealing in a wintry climate with different kinds of parasites is that the chinese were dealing with their local tropical and tropical parasites so the british and others who came in these weren't the oxford cambridge don's medicine they weren't staying in europe in england and france they were going with the the training mechanisms the the policies of the government to help do these kinds of things and so they were themselves knowledgeable about the diseases but had didn't have the diseases in cambridge didn't have the diseases abundant they found the diseases in china were with all what we're finding now from the parasites in this current crisis go back much earlier to the main native main crises interacting with central asia interacting with malaria in southern southern china south in southeast asia so these aspects were bringing the the the americans and the brits for the most part into the new question of what is the newer medicine the older medicine was basically idealized in terms of ideal techniques ideal approaches but they never entered the framework of what what do we do with the framework of being a tropical medicine the location of the medicine the kinds of issues that come up when you do tropical medicine so the the british doctors became world famous and actually the Nobel prize winners because of their activities in in in china and also japan and in india with these exchanges were going on and so it was ironic that the lesser known doctors the poor doctors coming from manchester and elsewhere were sent out to do these these menial work and it opened the door to new techniques new knowledge and the rise of tropical medicine so in many cases these doctors were the pioneers of tropical medicine at the same time i mean fascinating story but it goes the other way as well and you find the as you say the rise of the engineer in china you also find the rise of the doctor that's the kind of more western trained but a kind of more professionalized idea of what a doctor could be even people who who who use traditional chinese medicine started at least through the 20th century late 19th and into the 20th century started establishing practices that look much more like western medical practices so there's a kind of very interesting way that shanghai is a is a locus for developing not just information transition and transmission but it's a place where westerners are learning things that they've never seen before and a challenge their own sciences and their own techniques challenge the treaty courts became an opening for these kinds of techniques these kinds of problems and they themselves suffered these diseases because they didn't have the resistances to them so many of the doctors who began to master the new tropical medicine they were actually curing diseases that they themselves often had many of their colleagues died that's right i mean it people would go to the that's right wives and families were very susceptible to this is the beginning i think of an interaction that we see beginning in the early 19th in the early 20th century when the very great epidemics broke out during the first world war and in man in manchuria there was a huge scandal of incompetence in the medical field among the manchus and chinese and the westerners who could come in to help out so rather than hiring the westerners in many cases they did this in shanghai but in the manchurian campaigns they brought in many of their own doctors or chinese doctors that have been trained that came from malaysia came from panang and went on to be trained in scotland particularly and trained in london and sort of they came back and the brits in other westerners wouldn't hire them for the policy for the jobs in medicine and epidemic control like here they went to work for the ching dynasty and they brought through that they brought modern medicine and the role of making sure that you control the the epidemics and the way to control the epidemics was to separate people out into their proper categories who had far along in this disease who was lower in this disease who had risked resistances so slowly but surely tropical medicine was leading this new powerhouse of medicine coming through that the cutting edge was not France not england or even the americas although there was a good deal of that in there they were introducing china to the new techniques of organization and the chinese love organization so this fit in very nicely and you found a place for the Jesuits in astronomy here you found the place in medicine so you've spoken about well the Jesuits in astronomy and these 19th century westerners in engineering medicine i wonder if you speak a little bit about geography map making cartography geographical knowledge because in a way the 90 across through the 19th century after the first opium war you find the excess foreigners have to different parts of china increasing and there's an awful lot of exploration both about simply where rivers went and what's right what was going on in certain provinces you find people going there botanists going collecting plant materials particularly tea for the tea industry but you find all kinds of geographical knowledge being yes the Jesuits actually were hired by the the chinese manchus to give the boundaries of their territories because they had a rough idea of who's was what but now that the russians are coming in and other groups are coming into the north east north east north western corridor they need to know the exact board boundaries so they brought the Jesuits in to do that the Jesuits gave them the techniques and how to deal with that and ultimately in terms of geography they were pioneers for this kind of thing so the Jesuits had a great deal of influence that influence carried over to the Protestants the Jesuits in the catholic church basically have a failure narrative going after 1780 because they were disbanded and their order order was destroyed this was left after for a generation until the opium war that the interaction moved forward in terms of medicine in terms of the sciences the engineer and the knowledge of science per se was being brought in together with these often british very much of many americans and other europeans bringing in through the faith of prepostinism these new ideas in science and it took avenues that many of the british doctrines were not aware of where they were going they didn't know they were going to found tropical medicine they knew they had opportunities to do things that they couldn't do in england that they couldn't do in other areas and so it was in many ways the oxford cambridge thin defense of modern medicine in europe that had little to do with the rise of the new medicines the new role of epidemics and breaking open understanding of how to control diseases and how to control epidemics and that became a key issue for the chinese to move in and say we've got the problems we've got the scale you give us the big answers and so the process has been in many ways along with the the japanese and others jumped into this and said yes we understand the organizational techniques and the tropical medicine is geographic is geography top tropical medicine is where we learn about elephant hyacinthiasis learn about these other so-called marginal diseases that had been publishing chinese peasants and local groups for centuries this enlarged capacity of the chinese on an organizational basis to control these new diseases and to move forward for not only knowledge in china but transfer that knowledge to the other colonies and the rest of the world so tropical medicine became the place to be and it was the british that invented it although the chinese had talked about it in terms of heat diseases yes of course heat heat diseases and cold cold diseases and their organization geographically into different kinds of problems that you had to come to grips with so this was the cutting edge of that time so this is this is um uh this is a time when things are really changing when when in a way even though at at that time shanghai and china broadly was seen to be something on the edge of interests in london or in new york or in other places but in retrospect we're talking about somewhere that was really one of the driving forces not only for the development of aspects of western science but also and more importantly the development of chinese science itself so i think um thank you so much for having this discussion i'm sure that the lecture this evening will be uh fascinating and you'll expand on a lot of these ideas um so um from me from the australian center on china and the world from the a union general thanks so much ben thank you um we look forward to your lecture thank you very much thank you very much thank you for your questions