Human Accomplishment

Hangzhou became the capital by happenstance. In 1127, it was still a minor provincial city, midway between the Yangtze and the trading ports of the southeast China coast, chosen as a refuge by an emperor fleeing nomad barbarians. He chose a beautiful place. To the west was a large artificial lake, backed by the graceful curve of low-lying mountains. To the east, upon a spreading plain, “ . . . there sparkle, like fishes’ scales, the bright-colored tiles of a thousand roofs,” one visitor wrote. “One would say it was landscape composed by a painter.”

 

Sparkle was an apt word. Hangzhou, like other Chinese cities, was unimaginably clean by Western standards of that time. The crenellated walls of the old city, also built some 500 years earlier, 30 feet high and 10 feet thick, were freshly whitewashed every month. The streets were cleaned frequently. Each year, the canals that crisscrossed the city were dredged and cleaned.

 

 

In addition to its public facilities, Hangzhou numbered hundreds of tea-houses, restaurants, theatres, and hotels. In Hangzhou of 12C, one could get cheap-but-good noodles, meat pies, or oysters from small shops, as one does in today’s East Asia. Those with more money to spend could choose a tea-house in a garden landscaped with dwarf pines and hung with brightly colored lanterns, or they could dine in one of the large restaurants hung with works of celebrated painters and calligraphers and set with fine porcelain.

 

…

 

 

If art was a high pleasure, literature was a necessity. Chinese cultural life intertwined poetry, philosophy, essays, and narratives into the political life of the nation. A cultivated person was not only expected to be well versed in the classics, he (or she) was also expected to be a skilled writer, especially of poetry. A Chinese tradition of belles-lettres grew up during the Tang and Song Dynasties that transcended even the high importance that had been attached to scholarship in earlier dynasties.

At two o’clock on an August afternoon in 1768, the bark Endeavor put to sea from Plymouth under the command of second lieutenant James Cook, then just thirty-nine years old. Cook’s orders were to sail southwest down the Atlantic, double Cape Horn, and then make for Tahiti, a one-way voyage of some 13,000 miles. The motive behind this expensive, lengthy, and dangerous trip was not trade. No diplomatic services were to be rendered, nor, for that matter, did Cook have messages to convey to anyone at his destination. The purpose of Endeavor’s voyage was to observe an astronomical phenomenon known as the transit of Venus.

 

A transit of Venus occurs when Venus as observed from Earth crosses the face of the Sun. The transits occur in pairs, separated by eight years, with each pair of transits separated by more than a century. There were no transits of Venus in 20C, for example. A century prior to Cook’s departure, English astronomer Edmond Halley had realized that the transit of Venus offers a unique opportunity to measure precisely the distance from the earth to the sun. But to get the data, people had to be waiting in place at widely dispersed points on the globe when the auspicious day arrived, hence the trip to Tahiti.

 

Few episodes better capture the spirit of intellectual life in 18C Europe. A passion to know was everywhere—to catalog and classify; to order; to probe into the how and the why of things; to take the world apart and see what made it tick.

 

…

 

By the late 1720s, England’s combination of economic prosperity, social stability, and civil liberties had no equivalent anywhere on the continent. The young Voltaire, forced by circumstances to live in England (he had been exiled for inappropriately challenging a nobleman to a duel), was entranced. After returning to France, he wrote Letters on the English, praising their virtues.The book was a sensation in French intellectual circles. Before Letters on the English, according to report, there were but two Newtonians in all of Paris; now, Parisian thinkers learned English, translated English works, and borrowed from English fashion.