and 1600 begin to slip, until she was completely outdistanced by West-
ern Europe. The Master was renowned as a sinophile. But this question
of his was entirely objective. My work was to seek answers within the
socioeconomic arena.

Burdened with his own research still in progress and the administra-
tive matters of Caius, Needham encouraged me to read by myself
everything and anything on file in his office, including "leads and tips"
from his friends and colleagues that were in any way connected with
his "big riddle." Only on each Saturday afternoon would he and I meet
to talk things over, usually with a walk along the banks of the Cam
River which rarely lasted for less than an hour and a half.

The Master was a full head taller than I; yet he adjusted the pace of
his long legs to suit mine. With endless curiosity and enthusiasm that
was occasionally mixed with pedantry, he would stop here and there to
admire the plants and flowers en route, caressing the petals and pro-
nouncing their names in Latin. At other times he would explain to me
how the Roman Road cut through the town and where Cromwell trot-
ted his horse to Huntingdon, 20 miles away. Gradually I sensed that he
built up his system mainly through an inductive rather than deductive
method. Eventually the thousands of strands of loose ends had to be
tied together. On one of those occasions he told me that as he saw it, in
the Western world, Reformation, Renaissance, and the development of
capitalism come as a "package." One thing leads to another.

In his file cabinet were numerous kinds of leads, some neatly typed,
others handwritten. There was Wittfogel's theory of hydraulic society.
There was archaeologist Cheng Te-kun's proposal that Needham
should line up ten major inventions in the world, construct a profile of
the socioeconomic environment for each case, and then make analyses
and comparisons. But the piece that caught my attention most was the
comment by Homer Dubs, the translator of the Han-shu. He consid-
ered that Dr. Needham had asked the wrong question: You are asking
why modern science did not originate in China, aren't you? But a
negative question would not bring forth a positive answer. He never
elaborated further. The piece of advice ended there.

But such episodes and bits of enlightenment eventually led me to
burrow deeply into the question of how capitalism made its start in
Western Europe, not to follow the steps of Marx or Weber, nor even of
Dobb or Braudel, but all by ourselves, starting from the grain market
on the Ouse River and the first turnpike built in East Anglia. Thereafter

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