In the second year of the Northern Song’s Qingli era (1042), a young man from Fujian turned down a cushy government post handed down by family ties. Instead, he rolled up his sleeves, aced the imperial exams, and earned his rank as a scholar-official.
That man was Su Song, hailed by British science historian Joseph Needham as “one of the greatest naturalists and scientists not just of ancient China, but of the entire medieval world.”
By 1057, after a decade of toil, Su Song unveiled the Jiayou Annotated Shennong’s Materia Medica. To craft this monumental work, he blended textual sleuthing with hands-on testing and systematic synthesis, pioneering a visual revolution in pharmacology with a one-object, one-illustration approach.
In 1076, when natural disasters struck Suzhou and Hangzhou, the emperor tapped Su Song as Hangzhou’s governor. He rolled out a public health playbook—isolating neighborhoods, distributing medicinal brews, and registering the sick—while personally spearheading the Phoenix Mountain water diversion project to clean up the city’s water supply.
Later generations praised him for “governing with a relentless pursuit of nature’s deepest truths.” That mindset let him brush up against a modern idea—bridging research, industry, and practice—right there in the 11th century.
In 1092, Su Song climbed to the rank of prime minister. That same year, he unveiled the world’s oldest astronomical clock, the Water-Driven Armillary Sphere and Celestial Globe Tower, ticking with a daily error of under 20 seconds. Europe wouldn’t catch up until 1685, when Italian astronomer Cassini harnessed clockwork to track celestial orbits.
Fast-forward to 2017: as engineer Wang Xingxing fine-tuned the joints of a four-legged robot, he likely didn’t realize that the harmonic reducer he relied on shared a timeless thread with the gear systems in Su Song’s ancient tower.
This isn’t just a leap from mechanical gears to smart controls—it’s a testament to the eternal fluidity of knowledge across disciplines. Su Song’s courage to shatter academic silos remains the enduring spark of human progress.