The fifth volume of Dr Needham’s immense undertaking, like the fourth, is subdivided into parts for ease of assimilation and presentation, each part bound and published separately. The volume as a whole covers the subjects of alchemy, early chemistry, and chemical technology (which includes military invention, especially gunpowder and rockets; paper and printing; textiles; mining and metallurgy; the salt industry; and ceramics).

As Dr Needham’s immense undertaking gathers momentum it has been found necessary to subdivide volumes into parts, each bound and published separately. The first two parts of Volume IV deal respectively with the physical sciences and with the diverse applications of physics in the many branches of mechanical engineering. The third deals with civil and hydraulic engineering and with nautical technology.

Between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, there was created under the Yi Dynasty in Korea a remarkable series of astronomical instruments, star-charts and clocks. The present volume is the result of close collaboration between four distinguished historians of Asian science to demonstrate the context, purpose, nature and specific workings of these early scientific instruments. Specially commissioned drawings and other illustrations demonstrate their complexities of design and operation. A brief introduction is given to the Chinese background of Korean astronomy and astronomical instrument-making and to the renaissance of Korean astronomy in the early fifteenth century. In a detailed examination of the instruments made under the supervision of King Sejong in the 1430s, there is documentation of the re-equipping of the Royal Observatory, with identification of the individual instruments involved. A survey of the succeeding two centuries gives the background to Song Iyong's instrument, identified as a demonstrational armillary sphere in the Koryo University Museum.

The latest volume in Joseph Needham's magisterial revelation of China's premodern scientific and technological traditions introduces medicine. Five essays are included by Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, edited and expanded upon by the editor, Nathan Sivin. The essays offer broad and readable accounts of medicine in culture, including hygiene and preventive medicine, forensic medicine and immunology. Professor Sivin's extensive introduction discusses these essays, placing them in their historical and medical context, and surveys recent medical discoveries from China, Japan, Europe and the United States.

The Gunpowder Epic is one of three planned publications on military technology within Dr Needham’s immense undertaking. The discovery of gunpowder in China by the 9th century AD was followed by its rapid applications. It is now clear that the whole development from bombs and grenades to the invention of the metal-barrel hand gun took place in the Chinese culture area before Europeans had any knowledge of the mixture itself. Uses in civil engineering and mechanical engineering were equally important, before the knowledge of gunpowder spread to Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Dr Needham’s new work continues to demonstrate the major importance of Chinese science and technology to world history and maintains the tradition of one of the great scholarly works of the twentieth century.