Director's Signature Series
The Warrior Emperor and China's Terracotta Army

As recently as half a century ago China-now universally accepted as the unchallenged leader of the future world-was dismissed as a country of little importance, little relevance, merely a vast enigma on the periphery of human civilization. One man alone is largely responsible for this profound change in the world's thinking: an eccentric English chemist, Joseph Needham, who, by way of an illicit mid-life love affair with a Chinese woman, became one of the most knowledgeable students of China in all history, and a lifetime champion of the Middle Kingdom. His passion led him in many strange directions, but his most lasting legacy was to be a vast book on Chinese science, still in print, and which remains the longest book about China ever written in the English language. The barely believable story of the life and achievements of Noel Terrence Joseph Montgomery Needham-The Man Who Loved China-will provide the centrepiece of Simon Winchester's talk.

Simon Winchester is a journalist, broadcaster, and bestselling author of 20 books, including The Professor and the Madman, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and The Map that Changed the World. His current book is the New York Times bestseller The Man Who Loved China, the remarkable story of Joseph Needham. He contributes to a number of American and British magazines and journals, including Harper’s, The Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Spectator, Granta, the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly. His next book, Atlantic: A Biography of the Ocean, will be published in October 2010.