§104. Alchemy
Needham credits the discovery of gunpowder to “the systematic if obscure investigations of Daoist alchemists.” The earliest printed formula for the explosive appears in 1044, though the business was well known before that, with final experiments leading to the correct formula in the early ninth century.
Alchemy was by then an established practice with a tradition reaching back some five hundred years. This Chinese alchemy eventually made its way into the Mediterranean basin, where it mingled with the hermetic chemistry of the Alexandrians, and eventually appeared in Europe at the same time and through the same channels as the recovery of Aristotle. China's elite were thinking about the idea of physical immortality as attainable by technique from the eighth century bce. By the fourth century it was considered attainable through drugs, especially metals. The idea of transforming cinnabar into gold appears in the second century, and in the first century, the prospect of immortality through ingesting natural or artificial gold.41Alchemy consolidated three streams of earlier theory and practice. One is the pharmaceutical-botanical interest in macrobiotic plants, those used to prepare drugs or elixirs to prolong or rejuvenate life. Second, the metallurgical-chemical work of imitating, or possibly manufacturing, gold. Needham thinks the claim of literal transmutation is a fantasy of the literati, artisans knowing the tests for gold more intimately than any scholar. A final stream in the alchemical mix is the pharmaceutical-mineralogical use of inorganic substances in medical therapy. All of these were established practices by the Warring States period, and were synthesized into a system of alchemy by Go Hung in the fourth century ce.42
The first texts associated with this alchemy tend to be the lucid, practical fruit of laboratory experience.
An example is the Essential Formulas from the Alchemical Classics (Dan jingyao jue), by Sun Simiao, a prominent physician and alchemical author of the seventh century. His treatise is a compendium of formulas for preparing elixirs of immortality, medicines, and making or augmenting pearl and jade, and not neglecting detailed, technically feasible specifications for the construction and operation of laboratory equipment. His emphasis is on concrete means to achieve the results described, with no resort to theoretical explanation, there being nothing in this entire treatise about yin and yang or the Five Phases. Alchemy is for him continuous with medicine, as it was for Paracelsus, and his alchemical text is imbued with medical learning.43Nathan Sivin thinks Sun's book is “as close to a modern laboratory handbook as anything we are likely to find in ancient literature.” Technical terms are introduced and explained, equipment described, ingredients listed by weight, and advance preparation indicated, with concise, perspicuous instructions on compounding products. Most of the alchemical operations and ingredients he describes derive from pharmacology, emphasizing minerals over herbs, and most of his chemical manipulations, methods of application, and ingredients were already in use in medicine. Sun avers that he has “personally tried the several alchemical formulas compiled here; there was not the slightest discrepancy in the results” He also says, “For over twenty years, I have loved the Daoist arts. I have successfully tried the many methods, experienced (jing she) them all. Indeed, there was nothing I was unwilling to try.”44
Needham observes that on the occasions when European alchemy “was not proto-chemical it was allegorical-mystical, while when Chinese alchemy was not proto-chemical it was physiological [and] iatro-chemical... a real and experimental proto-science.” Some Chinese saw in their alchemy something like what Francis Bacon saw in European alchemy—a key to the power of nature. Needham suggests that metallurgical operations like smelting and steelmaking, where Chinese were early masters, persuaded some that they could imitate natural processes and even improve them. They could “stand in the place of nature” and “bring about natural changes at a rate immensely faster than nature's own time.” That was what excited Bacon about alchemy too. According to a Song dynasty alchemical work, sages appropriate “the mechanisms of the shaping forces of nature (zao hua zhe) and [make] them work for human benefit.” “The sage can rival the skill of the shaping forces.” That sounds like a potent empiricism, a use of experience that is (or would be) an instrument of knowledge demonstrated by effective power. It might have developed into some kind of empiricism were it not throttled by an orthodoxy that understood the levers of power to operate differently.45