Jim Bowler

 

Jim Bowler (JMB below) So, Liu Tungsheng here we are together again after 29 years and back in Beijing in October 2004. It is a great privilege to be here and have the opportunity to hear some of your experiences and share some of the years together. First could we hear of your early days, your family and what it was like growing up in China more than 80 years ago.

Liu Tungsheng (LTS below) Yes, I would like to begin with personal experiences while in my home town. I was born in the year 1917. The home town of my grandfather was in the north of China, Tianjin, but I was born in Shenyang in the northeastern part of China. My father, when he was very young, was a worker on the railway then he became a station master of Shenyang. The station’s name is Huanggutun where the Japanese bombed the railway and killed the warlord, Zhang Zuolin, who at that time was the governor of northeast China. That was the start of the Japanese military invasion from 1928.

My father was a self-educated man, so he paid much attention to the education of his children. I learned from my father the qualities of diligence, hard work, honesty and generosity. All these virtues or characters were also taught at primary school. My mother, a traditional woman, came from the countryside from a family of farmers - very kind people.

I began primary school when I was six in Shenyang (the older name was Moukden, in Shenyang). I think the greatest impression of my primary school education and of that age, during the 1920s and 1930s is a kind of national humiliation. While I was at primary school we had ‘national humiliation days’ because of the unequal treaty between China, Japan, Britain and other countries like France, even Russia and Italy - of course not Australia.

In the larger cities like Shenyang we had some concession areas which were occupied and actually managed by foreign countries. They had so-called ‘extra-territoriality’ during that time, especially in Shanghai. In Shenyang there was a special area that was the headquarters of the Japanese commercial activity in northeastern China. The Japanese established a railway they named the South Manchuria Railway, which was actually the route for export and import. So when I was very young, patriotism was not only part of our education, it was a kind of life experience with Japanese imperialism and the presence of all the Japanese soldiers. Of course I have some very good Japanese friends, but the Japanese military invasion was really very brutal and destroyed many Chinese establishments.

So, for the primary school stage of my life there were two major impressions. There was the traditional education from school and also from family about diligence, hard work, honesty and generosity. On one side there were the qualities of a man’s life and on the other side was the patriotism through the offensive idea at that time of being under Japanese control.

The Japanese occupied life after July 7, 1937 as they occupied northern China, Beijing and Tianjin. They had control of Chinese territory, not only through the military occupation but also through a kind of intellectual and cultural control via propaganda. Their management and their cultural control was so very strong. We had to learn Japanese, obey the Japanese rules and understand the priorities of Japanese behaviour.

In 1930, after 13 years in Shenyang, I left my home town. That year was when the Japanese military people first occupied the northeastern part of China, so my family fled from Shenyang to live in Tianjin and Beijing. We moved to the interior part of China during the 2nd World War.

Twenty years later I went back to Shenyang, which was really liberating, because when I was last there it was occupied by the Japanese. They had established Manchukuo, a puppet imperial state, controlled by the Japanese military. With more than 10 years of occupation the Japanese controlled all branches of government, even in the country. In 1950 I returned to Shenyang with many other geologists planning to inspect and explore the mineral resources in the northeastern part of the ‘new’ China.

Then I discovered that in the 20 years from 1930 to 1950 no engineers had been educated. China had the universities, they had the high schools; they trained physicians, medical doctors but no civil engineers, no mechanical engineers, and of course no geologists. So all the geology was being conducted by the Japanese geologists. They had trained only some of their subordinates to look for the outcrops of some ores or mineral deposits. The information was collected so the Japanese geologists could decide whether the deposits were useful or not. So it seems there was some kind of intellectual control of China through the Japanese occupation. That’s why most of the Chinese people of my age group have a strong patriotism, especially regarding the Japanese.

JMB: In Australia we had no experience quite like yours because we were never actually occupied - but it came very close. If it weren’t for the Americans, I would now be under the control of the Japanese. With the battle in the Coral Sea it came very close to Australia.

LTS: So that was my experience when I was very young. Just across the street from my primary school there was a Japanese primary school. Every afternoon on our way home we had to pass the play ground and gymnasium building of the Japanese primary school. Nearly every day we heard the sound of adults practising a military attack. They were like reserve soldiers, retired from the normal army, and the primary school provided a place where they could practise their military manoeuvres. They were actually merchants or teachers or managers of shops but they qualified for the reserve in military service. I was very young, only eight or nine years old when I passed the Japanese primary school and heard the very terrible sounds of people practising to kill.

Then in 1928 the bombing of the railway occurred which killed the head of the Chinese government of the northeastern part, who was the father of the so-called ‘young marshall’ Zhang Xueliang who kept Jiang Jieshi [Chiang Kai-shek] during 1936. It was the official governor of the northeastern part who was killed by the Japanese in 1928. In 1946 there was an international court in Tokyo; there were two military courts, one in Tokyo for the Japanese and one in Europe. The international court in Tokyo discussed what date the Japanese began the war, because they were considered war criminals. The lawyers of the international court determined that the start date was when the Japanese bombed the railway and killed the war lord Zhang Zuolin who was not only the governor of the northeastern part but officially speaking was the governor of whole of north China. So one country killed the head of the other country, which was considered a war crime. Thus they count the beginning of the war with the Japanese as 1928.

JMB: So it was the bombing of Shenyang.

LTS: Yes that is a very famous incident. So his son Zhang Xueliang took on control of the military of the northeastern part and retreated into northern China. When the Long March passed through northern China to the northwest he was in Shaanxi Province and Jiang Jieshi [Chiang Kai-shek] was controlling the southern part of China, and the communist army passed through the eastern and northern part into Yan’an. The son of the older marshall talked with Chiang Kai-shek during a visit to his headquarters, then they had negotiations between the communists and the governor. From that they began the resistance to the Japanese in 1937, after the Japanese had occupied Beijing, Tianjin and also Shanghai.

I think this is quite enough about me in my younger days. Then we left Shenyang, my hometown, for Tianjin, and for my middle school. This school has celebrated its one hundredth year, and it was this year that we call it Nunkai, that is the name of a place, Nankai Middle School. It’s a very famous school because of its students. The school is very proud of its alumni because two prime ministers were graduates; one being Premier Zhou Enlai, the other Premier Wen Jiabao.

JMB:So you are close friends.

LTS: Yes we are friends. But I graduated in 1937, he graduated in 1960, so quite a different age. He graduated in geology at the Peking Geological University in 1965. This is not very systematic but if you feel it is interesting...

JMB: It is a very important dimension of your journey.

LTS: Many of us, of my generation, experienced a similar life, especially those of my age. Some like me in the northeast, others in the southeast or near Shanghai had almost the same kind of experience especially those who experienced the 2nd World War. One interesting difference, maybe for me, is that I learned quite a lot about nature when I was very young because we lived in the countryside where was no entertainment such as movies or theatres. The only thing we enjoy is nature, so at the small river we could swim and catch insects or other animals.

I attended the middle school from 1930 to 1937, and during my graduation year from the middle school the Japanese military force occupied Beijing (at the time they called it Beiping), Tianjin, started to occupy Shanghai and gradually moved further to the interior. Many of us moved to the southwest to continue our university education.

JMB: Did you finish middle school before you moved to the southwest?

LTS: Yes, in 1937 I graduated from that school, but there was no chance to enter the university due to the start of the war. There was also another use of young students, some of them graduates - some were moved to the northwest to the communist-occupied area. The war actually started in 1937 and ended together with the 2nd World War in 1945. After that, in 1946, I started my career as a geologist.

JMB: So there was a gap from 1937 to 1945, during those war years. Life must have been pretty tough.

LTS:Yes, four years of university life from 1938 to 1942, then from 1942 to 1944 I was sick with some kind of stomach pain. I started to work and went to the hospital for two years to cure my stomach pain. After that I had a very interesting experience, for that’s when I found a position at a hostel which cared for Americans from the US airforce. The US airforce was in China to attack the Japanese occupation. I started at the hostel on the day that the American bombers took off from Chengdu to bomb Tokyo. Later they also bombed all of the Japanese occupied areas, the military targets, until the end of the war. After the hostel I went to the Geological Survey of China.

JMB: So to the Geological Survey in which year...1947?

LTS: 1946. After the war, right after the war. I enrolled in the Geological Survey in Chongqing - you have been there - in the southwest in Sichuan Province, which was the wartime capital along the Yangtze River, and the Geological Survey was there at a place in the countryside. Then they moved it back to the old headquarters which was in Nanjing, then the capital of the government. After the liberation in 1949 the Geological Survey expanded as the Ministry of Geology. Some of the people from the Geological Survey established the Institute of Geology in 1953. This institute continued the geological research work of the former Geological Survey. Some of the research, exploration and geological survey mapping work all moved forward and expanded greatly in the Ministry of Geology. During the 1950s there is no research work at the Ministry of Geology. At that time the institute reported to the academy and also reported to the Ministry of Geology. This was the continuation of the former Geological Survey; there were people like Professor Hou Defeng and Professor Ye Lianjun. We had six senior geologists who came from the Geological Survey including myself. Altogether there were no more than 100 geologists at that time during the establishment of the ‘new’ China. That is until we experienced many revolutions, including the cultural revolution, up to recent time. This is a very general chronology.

JMB: So you joined the Geological Survey, and when the moment is right could you tell us about some of the famous people you worked with, such as Pei Wenzhong and your work with Yang Zhongjian [CC Young].

LTS: Before I say something about my tutor, my professor, and my work as a paleontologist I will try to group my experience, especially some of my early childhood impressions. These can be grouped into six stories.

STORY 1

The first story was the one my grandmother told me during the 1920s. This story is very interesting. I have never before told anyone or recorded it. It is the story of the ‘southerners’, of people who I think are actually the ‘foreigners’.

She described the story of these foreigners who in very hot weather were wearing wool coats and high boots speaking some kind of language or dialogue that local people don’t understand. They came to the hill and went around the hill everyday from morning until the evening trying to find something from that hill. At last after three days of looking one of them found it. He knocked at a rock and found a golden frog and took it away. So there was the appearance of the foreigner, which I now think was a geologist. I don’t know if it was Ferdinand von Richthofen or Baily Willes or someone else.

The actions my grandmother described were about finding fossils from in rock, of course not a golden frog but some fossils of other animals, insects or such like. My interest was sparked that we couldn’t find the golden frog and that she’d said we have a very precious things in our country that were taken away by the southerners, by the foreigners.

This is an example, which is very representative, not only among the older country women but among the social class of that day that extends to building railways, making steamers and the opening of the mines - the very famous coal mines opened by the English were not very far from my home town. It is the kind of attitude that persists to this day among some Chinese regarding exploration and use of our resources by foreigners.

It is this kind of culture which has limited the growth of Chinese economics and the progress of Chinese culture to the outside world. A similar kind of ‘miniature living’ or ‘miniature thinking’ occurred during the opium war. During the opium war the people of the Qing Dynasty didn’t want to open the door so they resisted everything from the outside world.

JMB: From Britain, particularly.

LTS: This was during the 1840s. Of course some Chinese would have liked some of the western culture, but many of the officials and others resisted the foreigners, just like my grandmother. She actually had the notion which was very sad, that all the precious frogs were taken away by the foreigners. Of course they saw that the foreigners were very capable and thought that the Chinese couldn’t do it. They had a kind of appreciation of western technology, and the wisdom in technology and exploration, while at the same time an awareness and a regret that all of the precious things had been taken away. This was the sentiment during my young days and many people of my age had a similar experience. I find this story particularly interesting because she was describing a geologist and that maybe it influenced me to become a geologist as well.

STORY 2

The second story is about a very famous proponent of Chinese geology, Professor Ding Wenjiang [Ting Wen-chiang]. He was educated in Britain since high school. In Britain for 10 years he’d graduated from Glasgow. He finished his studies in both zoology and geology. He was a very good geologist, maybe a student of a very famous English geologist who studied the parallel mountains (‘dry valleys’) in Yunnan Province. There are many stories about Dr Ding [Ting]. He was the first director of the Chinese Geological Survey, he established the first Chinese Geological College, trained some 20 Chinese geologists and is considered one of the founders of Chinese geology.

Professor Ding Wenjiang - a very capable person - returned to China in the early 1910s. When he was director of the Chinese Geological Survey he published, in 1919, the first Chinese geological magazine called the Bulletin of the Geological Survey. On the first page in the first issue of volume one of that journal he printed a quote from Richthofen. These are not Richthofen’s exact words and the quotation has been modified from the German by many translators but essentially Richthofen wrote that ‘Chinese intellectuals like to sit at their desk in their very neat and clean rooms that are full of sunshine and write poems and make paintings’. They enjoy this kind of intellectual life; they don’t like to go out in the field. So many years later other disciplines of science had developed but not geology.

What Richthofen said has been modified through passing from one person to another and there is also a version by a very famous Chinese scholar, Hu Shi [Hu Shih]. He stated that Richthofen was saying the Chinese look down on people who are travelling by foot instead of riding horses, and see them as belonging to the lower classes.

Professor Ding Wenjiang printed Richthofen’s quotation at the front of the first geological bulletin to encourage young Chinese geologists to go into the field. This was a very good story, especially for people of my age. I always tell this story to young geologists, especially now because some of them don’t want to do field work. During the 1930s and 40s geologists liked to go to places like the Himalayas; they were very ambitious the geologists. I think this demonstrates the difference between western culture and Chinese oriental culture. It seems a very good story. Professors and senior students always told us this story. What Ding Wenjiang and Richthofen had said about the Chinese intellectuals back then is still relevant to some young Chinese geologists who don’t like field work in the present time. However with this warning most young Chinese geologists go on to work hard in the field; their achievements being their best reward.

Ding was proud of those he trained at Peking University during the 1920s who became the first generation of Chinese geologists. There were students like Yang Zhongjian [CC Young] who graduated in 1923 and Pei Wenzhong who graduated in 1927.

STORY 3

Then there is the story of Pei Wenzhong and the discovery of Peking Man. Pei graduated from the university in 1927. At that time he couldn’t find any job in geology. Then came support from another founder of Chinese geology, Professor Weng Wenhao [WH Wong], who graduated from Leuwen University in Belgium. He was the first Chinese person with a doctorate degree from a western country. Professor Weng supported Pei Wenzhong to work as a kind of secretary for the excavation in Zhoukoudian.

Just before that, in the early 1920s, JG Anderson from Sweden had purchased some ‘dragon’s bones’ used in Chinese traditional medicine from the Chinese drug stores in Beijing. The ‘dragon’s bones were actually fossil bones and teeth. Anderson sent them back to Sweden where paleontologists found that some of the teeth may be from an arthropod, a primate, some type of monkey. However Anderson was very sharp and very good at exploring. At that time was the first discovery of Java Man, which was big news. From instinct Anderson figured that maybe in China he could find a fossil man. So he explored the surroundings of Beijing and found in Zhoukoudian a place that local people called the Chicken Bone Mountains, because fossils of birds were present in deposits. There had been lots of birds, like pigeons and such like. The fossil bones resembled those of chickens because they had a cavity and were very small.

Anderson excavated in that region and then came the Austrian paleontologist Otto Stansky and also a Swedish palaeontologist Birge Bohlin. Stansky and Bohlin were in China excavating at Zhoukoudian during 1924 and 1925. Then Weng hired Pei in 1927 to take care of the management of the excavation. At that time Pei knew nothing about the work in paleontology so he was very diligent at taking care of the excavation. He first learned from the archeologists new methods for excavation where they created a grid system and excavated from level to level. This was the first grid system Pei applied, then he made some sort of pulley from the lower part of the mountain to facilitate the working result. Then he looked carefully at the excavation. At the end of 1929 he discovered that fossil - the first skull of the Peking Man.

Previously, others involved in the excavation such as Davideon Black, Teilhard de Chardin and Bohlin had all thought they would find some human fossils there. However, it wasn’t until near the end of 1929 - I think it was late December - they were ready to stop the excavation because it was very cold and Pei insisted they try another day. On that very last day they found something different, maybe a kind of skull. Pei examined it himself and at last they thought it was a skull of fossil man. They wrapped it and carefully transported it to the Beijing laboratory in the department of anatomy at the Peking Union Medical School, which was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation at that time. So this is the story of the discovery by Pei.

Pei’s discovery was a very crucial and important turning point for Chinese geology and paleontology. Of course before that we had important works by Grabau and Teilhard de Chardin and some others but none were conducted by Chinese paleontologists or the discoveries by the Chinese themselves. So this finding of the fossil skull by Pei is a kind of declaration of independence for Chinese geology. For many years I wondered if that’s why there is a kind of phenomenon about Pei, because if people were talking about Pei or talking about the discovery of Peking Man none neglected to say that Pei was the discoverer. I called this ‘the Pei phenomenon’ for the Chinese realised we made a discovery of world-wide importance and discovered our self reliance through that work. So this discovery is very important even though Chinese geologists had done much other geological work.

STORY 4

When I was at university between 1938 and 1942 I had a professor from Germany, Peter Misch, who was a student of Hans Stille. The Chinese government invited Hans Stille to teach in a Chinese university but he said ‘I am too old and maybe it is not appropriate for me to travel’. Instead he sent one of his assistants, one of his very best students, Peter Misch. He was a professor in structural geology and at that time he also taught and was a proponent of regional metamorphism that was studied at the western end of the Himalayas at a very famous mountain called Nunga Parbat. Peter Misch taught us about structural geology and about the theory, the hypothesis theory of Hans Stille. These were very distinguished people.

At a similar time, during late 1930s and 40s, the Chinese translation of Sevin Hedin’s book on the exploration of the Taklimakan Desert was translated and published. It was a very popular book for young students; of course I read that book. It contains a very famous story about Hedin’s rescue of his guide by finding some fresh water and taking it to him in his boots. For me Sevin Hedin and Hans Stille were people of science, of geology; they were big figures for young students of geology. Sevin Hedin explored nature, while Hans Stille explained the nature and the structure of the earth. So, geology not only enables an exploration but also an explanation of the earth.

That for me is the importance of the study of geology which captured my interest and led me to study paleontology later. So this is the story of my professor, Peter Misch, who at that time taught geology in the Southwest Associated University in Kunming, which was a collective university including Tsinghua, Peking and Nankai Universities - three universities together.

STORY 5

Then comes the fifth story, the story of Teilhard de Chardin, which comes from Yang Zhongjian [CC Young] who was a very good friend of Teilhard de Chardin and also a student. Yang Zhongjian [CC Young] learned a lot from Teilhard de Chardin who was about 10 years older than himself. Teilhard de Chardin is a very special man for the Chinese.

Most Chinese geologists and others, especially in those days, knew him as a vertebrate paleontologist or a geologist. He was a very wise man as Huxley had said in his lecture. He said he worked in paleontology, structural geology, quaternary geology, petrology and even botany and some zoology; many kinds of disciplines of science. Teilhard de Chardin was very capable, very knowledgeable and quite an expert in those many branches. However in France, the French knew Teilhard de Chardin as a philosopher. Many people still think of Teilhard de Chardin as a philosopher and don’t know about his paleontological work. Actually, he is one of the founders of Chinese vertebrate paleontology. He trained Yang Zhongjian [CC Young] and Pei and many others. I entered geology later, after the war, and didn’t have the chance to meet him personally.

Teilhard de Chardin would have liked to come back to China but at that time the Geological Survey of China could not afford the salary for him. He asked only $US 500 but at that time the Geological Survey couldn’t pay for that - its a pity - because formerly he’d been paid by the French missionaries, the Jesuits.

JMB: And the Americans...there was an agreement.

LTS:Yes, and also the Americans and later the Green Foundation paid him. It’s a pity I didn’t get to meet him. He left Beijing in 1946.

JMB: Yes he left just before Yang Zhongjian [CC Young] returned to Beijing and Yang Zhongjian wrote a very personal letter saying how sad he was that they had missed each other. He couldn’t understand why Teilhard de Chardin had left before he came back from the south.

LTS:Yes, but at that time Teilhard de Chardin was very anxious to get back to France following the long years of isolation from the outside world during the war.

JMB: Yes, isn’t it strange. I didn’t understand...he stayed in Beijing during the war. All the geologists, all the Chinese, had gone to the south.

LTS: At that time it was very difficult for people to move. Also he was engaged by a very distinguished group in Beijing. Franz Weidenrich, a very famous palaeoanthropologist, was among them and also Amadens Grabau. I think too there were still several distinguished scientists in Beijing working on the Peking Man skull. And I think it was in 1936, not long before the 2nd World War, there was a big discovery by Jia Lanpo and soon after they discovered three almost complete skulls of Peking Man. So there was a very interesting group of scientists in Beijing at that time. Maybe that is why he did not leave.

Teilhard de Chardin was in Japan to attend a meeting when the war began. He then returned to Beijing but he couldn’t leave during the occupation by the Japanese. At that time he couldn’t do anything, for nearly half a year he couldn’t leave Beijing, couldn’t go to Zhoukoudian or other places. According to Professor Jia the Zhoukoudian was occupied by the Japanese and three of the workers there were killed by the Japanese military.

During the Japanese occupation of Beijing, Teilhard de Chardin’s ideas about the noosphere and the ‘phenomenon of man’ were completed. It was very interesting; Yang Zhongjian [CC Young] gave me a monograph, just a pamphlet actually, where Teilhard de Chardin described his idea of the noosphere. I still remember that. In that paper he described the lithosphere, then came the stone age, then the bronze age, followed by the industrial age and then came the noosphere ‘the age of thinking’. These were very interesting ideas of Teilhard de Chardin’s but were neglected by Chinese palaoeontologists as well as geologists and other people. The Chinese paleontologists and other Chinese colleagues working together with Teilhard de Chardin referred to him as a ‘foreign monk’ because he was a priest, and knew nothing of his philosophical work - it is really a pity. However, most of his official philosophical work was published in France, in the French language. Also the situation of Teilhard de Chardin himself was very peculiar because of the Pope and also the higher level of the Catholics who had very strict rules, and being a member of the Jesuits who had good scientific training.

The growth and even the beginning of Chinese science has to pay their gratitude to the Jesuits. Several hundred years ago the first Jesuit priests who came to China learned the Chinese language, wore Chinese clothes and took a Chinese name. Like Teilhard de Chardin who had his own Chinese name, not a translation, not a phonetical translation, but his own Chinese name. The Jesuits liked to modify their behaviour to try to adapt to Chinese culture and make it their living habitat. Also they educated the Chinese people, in science and at the same time in their religion, but their most important contribution is their education in science. The Jesuits were the first to establish astronomy, the first to establish the geodetic survey; all these were by the Jesuits, but of course you would know that.

JMB: No I didn’t know that. But one of the earliest ones was of course Marco Polo. Marco Polo became very famous, but then there was an argument in Rome. The Jesuits were getting too... there was an argument, where the Jesuits said the Chinese habits, the Chinese respect for the dead was perfectly acceptable religiously, their reverence for the dead. But another group said that must be changed. The Jesuits lost, they lost the argument. So history was set back. Terrible. But then with the history of Rome, Teilhard de Chardin ran into the same problem with Rome. He didn’t care about that too much.

LTS: No, he didn’t care about that but that’s why he has that philosophy. So the importance of Teilhard de Chardin is his philosophy.

JMB: Yes, his philosophy.

LTS: Even today, the Chinese still celebrate Teilhard de Chardin’s contribution. Last year there was a ceremony for his discovery of the primitive man, a tooth and also the stone implements in the loess. It was a celebration of 80 years since his first discovery in China. We say 1923 was the first so then 2003 is 80 years on. At the same time ‘The phenomenon of man’ was translated and many found out about the importance of the noosphere. So this is very interesting, from paleontogy people are becoming aware of his philosophy. Teilhard de Chardin, his science and philosophy, influenced me to study paleontology.

JMB: Liu Tungsheng, you’ve been discussing the role of Teilhard de Chardin and you now have another story.

STORY 6

LTS: I think I have to say that it was only because when I was in Australia you showed me the book ‘Letters from a Traveller’. Actually that is a very interesting book not only because ... even the translation is so beautifully written, his French must be very very beautiful essays.... Even if you read the English translation they are very good essays, he wrote very good. I tried to pursuade some people to translate it into Chinese but it is very difficult. However I learned quite a lot from that book about Teilhard de Chardin’s work.

I tried to find out whether Teilhard de Chardin had been living in Beijing continuously. Only occasionally he went back to Paris or other places. He was in China for 23 years, from 1923 to 1946, mostly in Beijing, except for when he was on field work.

Were Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophy or ideas influenced by the Oriental philosophers or not? Someone like Teilhard de Chardin would want to know about their philosophy. In his work he has very good summations of the philosophies of the Indian, of the Japanese, of the Chinese and from that I think he was influenced by the philosophy of the Chinese. Anyway they are parallel in their explanations of the future of mankind. The most famous Chinese educator and philosopher, Confucius, had the idea the world will become a common country or common world and that mankind has to have a kind of virtue, a morale, with friendship and love for others. I found these ideas also in Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘The phenomenon of man’ whose omega point in an older world will be the uniting of all people into a big family where the very end goal of people in their evolution and development must be love.

It seems a very interesting parallel. However I don’t know much about Teilhard de Chardin because he wrote most of his essays in French which I was unable to read. Also I don’t have the knowledge for a real understanding of his philosophy. So I just persuaded other people who can to study the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin.

However, there is great importance in his understanding of the ‘earth systems’ for he created another layer of the earth, the noosphere. I’m really interested in that because in recent years with environmental and the global change issues and ecological studies of the living world including the earth, people have become more aware especially during the last 10 maybe 20 years and it seems the earth is becoming smaller where people have a view of the globe in its entirety.

So we have to consider all work not only of the loess plateau or the Tibetan plateau, not only of the northern plain or the sea coast or any one place. We have to consider the geology, we geologists, we have to consider the geology of the world, of the globe, especially if we are working on environmental issues.

So thinking of global environmental issues or problems reveals man as a geological agent, and that man’s influence on the environment seems to be increasingly more important than before. That’s why I am interested in the noosphere, even though it is very abstract and difficult to imagine it as a sphere. But if you consider there are so many people especially those concerned with environmental issues, it seems they are living in the same kind of world and they are thinking about almost the same issues or the same problems or the same future. Not like in the Middle Ages or the older ages, where for example the Romans and the Chinese were so different but now the Italians and the Chinese face the same environmental issues. This is my understanding of Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, where people with different ideas become gradually unified around the same ideas about the world, about the earth. I think it is very interesting and I use this kind of philosophy to try to stimulate work in environmental studies in China - but not too much because I am old and could not do it myself!

In the year 2000 there was a short paper written by Crutzen et al in the bulletin or newsletter of the IGBP (International Geosphere and Biosphere Program). Paul Crutzen is Dutch and working in Germany at the field of atmospheric physics. He had studied ozone depletion at the South Pole but as an atmospheric chemist he raised a problem for discussion: now human beings are in a geological epoch he called the Anthropocene following after the Holocene, which began when James Watt invented the steam engine in the year 1846.

There has been a lot of discussion about the beginning of the Anthropocene but the idea of the Anthropocene is very admired, even though many Quaternary geologists consider the appearance of humans as the beginning of the Quaternary. Paul Crutzen’s idea to start from the beginning of the industrial age is proven from the ice cores in which carbon dioxide and methane increase due to human activity.

When I was working on the environmental influence of indigenous disease in the loess plateau I also found that humans had mobilised many of the chemical elements such as mercury. In its natural state mercury is not very active and causes no pollution but because of industrialisation and human use of mercury in chemical industry then mercury pollution occurs.

From a geological point of view, man as a type of geological agent has mobilised the preceding geological record such as sand dunes which were previously stabilised by soils. Through exploration and soil disturbance by humans the dunes became an active desert. This type of work is not only interesting scientifically but it is very important that politicians, policy makers and other land managers be aware of such geological mechanisms, cycles and phenomena.

Even though these change are actually natural phenomena with human’s activity an agent of geological phenomena it is important to consider, especially for the Chinese because China is so populated. We are always talking that if China had 20% or even 10% less people then the problems of cereals supply and water shortages would be solved much easier than they are now. So we can only wait for another 30 to 50 years for the birth rate to stabilise. Yet after 50 years or more the population will again increase and the only way to solve the problem of population growth and shortage of resources is for people to be aware of man’s effect on the environment, otherwise it will influence the life of the future. That’s why I’m in favour of Paul Crutzen’s idea of the Anthropocene.

So this is my contact with science as a Chinese from the Orient looking at the results of science from the west - actually all these people are from the west. I think from rejection to cooperation to accepting all these results are good for the Orient and not a bad thing. I always like people to learn much more, not just enough, but to learn more about a lot of other things, of which western knowledge is one aspect.

JMB: That goes both ways and that is part of the other side of the problem. The west has difficulty realizing that it has so much to learn from the east - many philosophies and cultural riches which the west has lost. We have this issue in Australia, a huge education problem, because there’s a sort of mentality that thinks we are alright and we don’t need to make strong links with our neighbours. Indonesia, most Australians don’t understand anything about Indonesia - our neighbour - and there’s been this cultural reluctance and its been partly driven by a feeling of superior technology. A notion of superiority based on ‘the west has the first of everything’; but amongst young people now I think there’s much more they want to explore.

In the early days in Australia - you talk about the Chinese attitude in the opium wars towards the Japanese - Australia was just as bad in the early days. It was part of that old European tradition...we’ve had a very bad history in that context. So one of the amazing things evident through your journey, through the way that we are sitting here today and for the wider scientific group all those barriers are gone. But for the politicians and for many less educated people many barriers are still there.

LTS: Yes, I agree.

JMB: Maybe later we can touch on that subject. Because science...it’s interesting. Teilhard de Chardin used to say that research is a spiritual activity. I’ve thought about that, it’s almost a religious activity, research. We are, you are creating things, your mind is creating and it’s a very interesting concept. Huxley says the same thing, research is a spiritual activity; the research community, the scientific community we are very privileged. So can we talk about your loess experience and come up with some of these broader questions?

LYS Yes, I’ve finished my six stories now. My first contact with the loess issue was when I was in Nanjing. It began in 1946 when I was a young palaeontologist. Some of the pedologists at the survey sent me a segment of bone they found from the loess in Nanjing, in the vicinity of Nanjing City. Eventually it was very interesting because I met the pedologist Professor Song Daquan who studied the palaeosols (the buried soils) in the loess near Nanjing at the source of the Yangtze River. From the geological literature in China it is called it the Xiashu loam or translated in English as Xiashu loess. That was the name designated in the 1920s and 30s by the American soil scientist James Thorp who had studied the paleosols in the United States and also in China.

So I became acquainted with the fossils from the loess and then in the museum I found the fossil described by Teilhard de Chardin. He had found it beneath the Malan Loess; beneath the loess of the last glaciation and above the Hipparion red clay is a group of geological formations which he designated as a reddish clay and not as loess. I wondered why Yang Zhongjian [CC Young] and Teilhard de Chardin who worked together had not recognised the nature of the loess, the older loess? Maybe they didn’t notice or pay much attention to the buried soil, the paleosol, or they were influenced by the loess deposits in Europe which are mostly younger from the last glaciation. Maybe that’s why they considered it a new geological formation, the reddish clay. The very impressive study of Teilhard de Chardin divided the reddish clay into three subformations the a, b, c. Actually reddish clay ‘a’ stratigraphically equals the later named Wucheng Loess and reddish clay ‘b’ and the ‘c’ stratigraphically can be correlated with the Lishi Loess. They conducted a very excellent study of the stratigraphy of the loess.

Among the fossils were various kinds of mammals, especially the rodents of the steppe region called Myospalax, a kind of mole rat which developed and evolved from the lower part to the upper part of the sequence into several different species and can be divided into three sub-formations. This was very interesting. When I was studying the fossils of Myospalax I discovered Teilhard de Chardin and Yang had studied the reddish clay but at that time I didn’t know it was loess.

However, in 1954 I began to study the Quaternary in the Sanmen Gorge region which is the biggest dam on the Yellow River, and also a big failure as a dam for when built none knew any engineering geology about the loess. So I was committed to study the loess over the Sanmen Gorge region and one evening after a rainy day with Professor Zhou Mingzhen and a few others we went for a walk in the vicinity of our tent. I discovered in the nearby loess gully about two or three levels of lights, just like room lights through the windows of high buildings built into the hill sides. I thought it couldn’t be a three or four storey building in that region because at that time it was very ‘uncivilised’ countryside. Were there people living there? It was very strange. I was in the southwest of China during the 2nd World War and were familiar with the night sense of the ‘mountain cities’. I thought there must be some stranger things existing in that gully - a town perhaps?

The next morning we went to have a look for the source of the lights. Then we discovered they were cave dwellings and the light was from the lanterns used by the residents of the caves. We then discovered a number of caves located at the same level, just like a store in an apartment building. Why were these caves built in levels? Each level had its ceiling just beneath a layer of calcareous nodules or concretions. So we had some idea, but were not sure. We asked the pedologist, the soil scientist Professor Zhu [Xianmo]. He said that was the buried soil, the palaeosol, which is why we couldn’t find any reddish clay only loess with intercalated buried soils in the loess plateau. The so-called reddish clay was recognized as a series of loess interbedded with buried soils.

I recalled my previous study of loess in Nanjing in 1946 and the pedologist Professor Song who had collected fossils from the Xiashu loess. I thought that fossils might also be found in the buried soils of the Xiashu loess as buried soils in loess were not an isolated phenomenon and appeared in both central and northern China. So then I began to study the loess profile. I also acknowledged that the reddish clay layers with calcareous nodules were genetically loess with soils.

In 1954 some very famous soil scientists from the USSR visited China. One of them was Professor Kovda - you probably know the name - who at that time was the consultant general or adviser to the president of the Chinese Academy. He’s a soil scientist, an experienced soil scientist. Another one was Professor Grasimov, a famous geographer and soil scientist. They were both in China at the same time. When they were in Beijing many leading Chinese soil scientists joined and took them on a trip in the vicinity of Beijing and then to the loess plateau. I accompanied them and Professor Yang Zhongjian [CC Young] also accompanied them to the loess plateau. We were on a train with some compartments occupied by two persons to one compartment in the carriage. In the train Kovda and Grasimov wanted to talk with Professor Yang Zhongjian and me about the issue of the loess in China.

At that time I didn’t know that Professor Grasimov considered the Chinese loess a kind of pluvial deposit [*pluvial: a Russian term for flood outwash deposits along the foothills in arid or sub-arid regions]. So I just reported to him my observations from Shanxi Province where there is one layer of loess and another layer of soil, with several layers altogether. I had discovered eight layers of interbedded loess and soils. We now know that each pair of loess and paleosol represents a 100,000 year interval between each of the soil and loess layers. That’s the upper part of the whole, the complete soil section, loess section, and Professor Yang insists that is the ‘reddish clay’ and it is also the early aeolian deposits, of course. Professor Yang is a very good scientist who was insisting on his observation and beliefs.

Many Chinese studying loess wanted to follow the Soviet hypothesis about the genesis of the loess. I also held the idea that it was an early deposit otherwise you couldn’t explain the alternating development of the loess and the soil. But Professor Yang denied what I said about that...he had no idea about the soils. And Grasimov was really very bold and even though he was younger than Professor Yang he said to me ‘you are right, but I need some specimens to prove it’. He said it is a buried soil so don’t be afraid of those authorities because they’re translated by the interpreter. Professor Yang sat over there and I was here and he was on the opposite side, and the interpreter said ‘no matter whether it is a great authority you have to insist on your own observation’. That’s good, then he said ‘you mail me the specimen’.

I mailed Grasimov the specimen I collected from the Shanxi section and then he wrote a paper about the genesis of the loess and the loess plateau in China. He used my section and the evidence of the soils but his final conclusion was of a pluvial deposit, an alluvial fan over the mountains in the northern part of China. But anyway his idea, and our conversation stimulated me very much and I obtained the confidence to insist that this was a kind of alternative view of the development of the soils in the loess.

Then in 1961 the sixth INQUA [International Quaternary Association] Congress was held in Warsaw, Poland. Professor Grasimov is a very generous man, so around two years before the congress he came to China to urge Chinese scientists to join this international meeting. At that time we were quite isolated with very few international contacts, except with the former Soviet Union and other socialist countries. He encouraged us to attend the sixth INQUA and he wanted to introduce us to the Polish Quaternary scientists. Professor Grasimov also guaranteed there would not be any trouble for us because at that time China had not held a regular position as a member of the United Nations.

So I prepared my thesis for the meeting. It was the first paper I wrote about the geomorphology of the loess plateau, the so-called Yuan, Liang and Mao. People said it would not be very interesting to the international scientists. At that time I had a copy of the journal of science published by the American Academy of Sciences. It contained a paper by Emiliani about an oxygen isotope study of the Caribbean Sea. I noticed that there was something similar between his curve and the Chinese the loess-soil sequence. I prepared a draft of the loess, then the soil and so on reflecting climatic fluctuation. But ‘unfortunately’ I had so many cycles of glaciation (more than the accepted four glaciations) that Professor Li Siguang [Lee Sze-kwang, JS Lee] along with many others were not in favour of this work. He had not previously known of such climatic variation and I was not confident about it either. Also I thought it may not be appropriate to propose alternating changes of the climate.

So I changed my idea and handed the new paper into Professor Li Siguang. He was one of the older generation of scientists. He read it and then had a long talk with me and asked: ‘where do you work, where is the section, how is the section structured, what is the succession and the sequences of the stratigraphy, what is the sequence of each layer, what is the relative contact surface, and were there any structural disturbances or any fossils’. It was a very detailed talk, a conversation, between us. And then Professor Li asked me ‘where do you think the profile is better, in the upper part of the Lishi Loess?’. I was working in the Lishi county of the Shanxi Province, so he suggested I use the name Lishi Loess. He listened carefully to my description of the loess profile and asked questions, then he advised me to make a typical stratigraphic scale of the loess in the loess plateau from the upper part of the Lishi Loess because it was the best exposure in the Shanxi Province. And also the Wucheng Loess in Wucheng, Shanxi Province (which is a town not very far from Lishi) which had fossils studied by Teilhard de Chardin and Yang. The fossils were different layers of Myospalax. So that was the content of paper I delivered in Warsaw at the sixth INQUA conference.

Professor Hou Defeng, the director of the institute thought it may also be beneficial to include the work of Professor Zhang Zonghu from the Ministry of Geology. So Professor Zhang Zonghu and I both prepared the paper which I presented in Warsaw. It was delivered in Lublin in the southeast of Warsaw. Julian Fink was very interested in the paper, and also BTU Smith from the United States who had developed a fluvial origin for the Missisippi loess. I had a section with me and also some samples from each layer that I had obtained through a technique of ‘peeling’ from the loess. A Russian Quaternary scientist, Madam Kes, was at the meeting and she also gave a talk on the Chinese loess.

So Fink and Smith were very interested as well as Dylik from Poland. Dylik had the idea that loess deposits were from periglacial deposits, a cryogenic origin for the loess. Fink, a very kind person, had experience of the powdof soil in the post-glacial period in Europe and thought that may provide an answer to the Chinese loess. So it gave us confidence to further study the loess in China.

Carl Rol from Bonn in Germany was also at the meeting. He was a very distinguished geographer who was head of the Geographical Society at the University of Bonn. He had read a paper I published in English that was translated into German for the journal Die Geologie. He was a long distance away; we being from a socialist country and he from an imperialist country. It was not very easy to contact each other so he just called my paper the same as the title in the journal: the loess from the Shanxi and Shaanxi. So I presented a paper about all the loess from the Shanxi and Shaanxi! People communicated that way in 1961. So very kind of people over there.

That INQUA meeting was very interesting in so many ways. We had a field trip from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Carpathians in the south. On the way I met George Kukla, who is now an old friend, at the very beginning of the study of the loess. Of course I already had many young people with me in China studying the Chinese loess, but it was a great occasion to participate in an international Quaternary meeting and have the chance to make an extensive study of the Chinese loess. To consider the mineralogy, heavy minerals, grain size, chemical composition, pollen and other fossils - we then have a collective study of the loess in China. So we published the books The loess in the middle reaches of the Yellow River, The loess of China and also The texture and the composition of the loess.

JMB: That was during the cultural revolution.

LTS: Two of them were published before the cultural revolution and one at the beginning of the cultural revolution. We were really fortunate to finish that work before the cultural revolution. We have a summary of it from 1954 to 1960 before the INQUA congress in 1961, and the three books. There are also another two books about the Quaternary in China. So that’s an overview of the time before the cultural revolution.

Then there was work in other places for me. I was interested in the Qinghai and the Tibetan plateau. In 1964 I went to the Tibetan plateau with Professor Shi Yafeng, with plans to work on other problems in Quaternary geology like many other young people.

Around that time there was a chance to join the international congress held in Beijing and called the Beijing symposium. It was a scientific symposium sponsored by the Chinese government. The participants were mostly Japanese scientists, several Nobel prize laureates and distinguished scientists from Africa and Asia, but from memory there were no scientists from the western countries, like the United States or Britain. The Beijing symposium was actually a meeting of scientists from Asian countries and some of the African countries. It was a very special scientific gathering held at the Friendship Hotel in 1964, and of course they wanted a paper dealing with the Quaternary in China.

So Professor Shi Yafeng and I presented a joint paper about a study of the Tibetan plateau especially in the region of the mountain Xishapangma which is the 14th highest peak and over 8000 metres above sea level. Until the Chinese climbed the mountain and carried out the scientific work the mountain had not been climbed. On that expedition my colleagues and I discovered the leaves, the broad leaves of the tree of the Quercus, which was a feature of the dicovery of the uplifting of the Qinghai plateau. People then became interested in the relationship between the uplift of the Tibetan plateau and the loess plateau. So I returned to study the loess, to see whether there was any relationship between these two plateaus in their materials and transportation from the glacial deposits to the loess plateau.

But then came the cultural revolution. Initially it wasn’t so bad for because I had little trouble with the young people working with me. However, at a later stage they wanted to be sure about the political history of each pupil. So one day some of these young people, the red guards or suchlike, declared that I was a spy, not exactly a spy but some kind of special agent working like someone in the FBI. I was detained and placed in a cowshed with others. That was a kind of protective measure by the government, because many people committed suicide due to isolation. When you put a person in jail completely isolated from the outside world you put him in a condition where he doesn’t exist; he begins to believe he is a spy or special agent and become very confused so its much easier to commit suicide. With other contact, such as going back home he can talk with his wife or some other good friends and everything seems to be solved. So they put all these people into one large room, maybe 20 people, or 10 of them asleep in the same room and they can talk with each other also. This was a measure to try to avoid people committing suicide because of isolation.

Many of my friends like the late Professor Li Pu, he was a graduate of Cambridge, committed suicide. Only because people say ‘you are a rebel’ or ‘you have rebellious behaviour’. He was once a party member but later separated from the communist party and people said he was a kind of rebel from the party. That was a heavy responsibility for a communist party member, but he couldn’t explain to them or to himself. At that time his wife was not in Guiyang so he committed suicide. Another good friend Professor Si [Youdong] was a graduate from Moscow University, the Moscow Exploration and Mining University, a very famous school that trained geological engineers. When he was younger, during his university days maybe, his family was a landlord so he became a landlord. When he joined the university they sent him to USSR and he graduated from there. He couldn’t explain why he had this kind of responsibility, maybe that...so he committed suicide also, only because he was isolated like Professor Li. At the early stage of the cultural revolution the Institute of Geochemistry had just moved from Beijing to Guiyang and their families were still staying in Beijing, so these two people were living there by themselves and were kept isolated. These was two cases of suicide and there were many suicide cases all over the country. So in the academy and some other places they grouped people together as I experienced.

JMB: But how in 1975 did you come to invite the Australian group, because it was still during the cultural revolution though near the end of it.

LTS: The government wanted to stop the cultural revolution. After two or three years they wanted to stop the confusing condition of China, so they asked the workers to go back to their factories to produce, the students to go back to their schools to attend their classes, and the scientists to go back to their laboratories to do their scientific work. But it was so confusing. They couldn’t stop the situation so in the year 1973 or 1974, I’m not quite sure of the year, there was a movement to try to restore the regular life of the society. Otherwise there were no students at the schools nor workers at the factories. I think that was around the time Mao Zedong asked the ping pong players to China; he tried to contact the US, and President Nixon sent delegates to contact the Chinese. So this was a kind of turning point.

Even though after the ‘ping pong’ diplomacy there was not a great change, the government became responsible for contacting the ‘outside’ world and at the same time there was a kind of voice for re-establishing the regular rules or structure of the society.

Then in 1973 I think it was, the UN Congress of Environment was held in Stockholm and China sent a delegation to attend. The very next year I joined the Chinese delegation of environment to Britain. I’m not sure of the years...maybe the UN congress was in 1972 and 1973 I went to Britain. After that, in 1974 I was also sent to Nairobi in Kenya to attend another UN meeting on the protection of the environment. Naturally because of all these commitments I had neglected the study of the loess.

In 1975 I joined the first scientific delegation to the US, the first Chinese group to visit the United States. Scientists had discovered from our report to the academy we couldn’t say that because it’s not the end of the cultural revolution, but the elder scientists like Professor Zhou Peiyuan and Professor Zeng Chengkui were returned students from the United States of the 1930’s. They discovered that our scientific studies were 20 or 30 years behind the United States. That’s why I thought we have to go back to our studies; if we only participate in the cultural revolution and go to meetings, to marches on the street, to the gatherings and yell all those slogans then we will continue to get further behind them. Many people from education and research circles they wanted to restore the regular conditions of study and research.

So in 1979 I was moved from Guiyang to Beijing and came back to the institute. Before that in 1975 we sent a delegation to visit Australia led by Professor Huang Bingwei, the geographer. He had been to Australia before you came to China. So the exchange of delegations.

JMB: Yes we came to China after Professor Huang Bingwei had been to Australia. I’d forgotten that.

LTS: So 1975 was the turning point for renewing studies, otherwise I may have worked on some environmental issue. Because the Australian delegation was coming to China we had to do some basic work otherwise what would we show others. At that time maybe you discovered many places where there was nothing to tell you or to show you. We had a few loess studies in Guiyang and Beijing but not very much, only that work from before the cultural revolution. So the academy became aware of the importance of continuing the studies. So in 1975 I came back to loess and we established palaeomagnetic studies as well as other studies.

Our Australian friends were so interested in the Chinese loess studies and other scientific studies. Was the first visit in the year 1975? We then established another visit of the Chinese Academy to Australia which included Madam Wang Zunji and myself. After that visit Donald and the Chinese, including Huang Bingwei talked about a collaboration, a program of collaboration over a number of years. That was the start of training for young people like An Zhisheng, Sun Xiangjun, Huang Qi, Yuan Baoyin and many others. They studied in Australia for one year and some of them for even two years. This was a type of collaboration that had never been practised before and I think has not been practised in more recent years. We only have some exchange of scholars, like with the United States and with other countries, but not this collaboration to train young people and to do research work together as well as helping Chinese advance their studies in the laboratory, in the field and in publications.

So there was a very concentrated study of loess during those years, during the late 1980s and the early 1990s. This intensive strengthening of the study of the Quaternary in China actually laid the foundation for the advance of the Quaternary scientists in later years; like An Zhisheng who went on to develop a separate laboratory of loess, Wen Qizhong who developed the study of geochemistry in Guiyang and Guangzhou, and Sun Xiangjun who developed the study of palynology. This kind of collaboration really brought a magnificent result. So thanks go to our Australian colleagues. I think this kind of collaboration still exists between the scientists of our two countries. It is a collaboration really worth remembering and worth exploring further the experience between our two countries, or between the Australian National University and the Chinese Academy.

Currently in China we don’t have this kind of larger scale collaboration in many fields. It’s a pity. I think we need that just like Huxley mentioned in his paper ‘Introduction to Teilard de Chardin’. Now people are so specialised they don’t care about other fields of science and other fields of knowledge. Such specialised knowledge makes people very narrow, with a narrow view of the world and the society. And at this time, science, not only Quaternary science but also other sciences, need a multidisciplinary approach, they need joint studies with various disciplines together so they can solve some of the problems now facing us. Now scientists use computers, GIS, satellite imagery and numerical models; many of these things need to be developed and combined together. Of course you can do it by yourself in one country, and there is a chance for China, for countries like China who are not so advanced who need the help and the joint efforts of other countries, or other countries who are advanced in this kind of way. I think many countries have their own speciality and strengths. So all these specialties and strengths of different countries need to get together to advance the study. This is the advantage of joint collaboration. In China we really benefited from the long years of collaboration between China and Australia. For the Quaternary I don’t know of any other collaboration like it.

The only other joint association in my experience was of a smaller scale. During the late 1980s when I was an organiser of the first international symposium on the Tibetan Plateau I had the opportunity to meet Professor Ken Hsu from ETH, Switzerland. He was very kind and invited me to Switzerland for six months. I thought what shall I do? Six months is a long time. So I thought of taking some loess samples with me to study over there. I was really fortunate as at that time we had just been drilling in Luochuan and it was very successful because we had a recovery of more than 90% and all the cores were very well preserved and in good condition. I took about half a metre which was one sample, or two and a half metres a sample. I carried these samples with me to Switzerland. There are many of these kind of stories. Before I went to Zurich I took the samples with me to the United States. I met Opdyke there and said I’d brought with me a group sample of the loess. I’d met him years before in 1975 when I went to the Lamont-Dohery Observatory of the Columbia University. At that time we visited his laboratory and talked about palaeomagnetics. So I knew him, but he was going to move. I asked him whether he was interested in the study of the loess. He showed no interest so I took the sample on with me to Switzerland and asked Ken Hsu.

Ken Hsu was so kind and invited Freidrich Heller to help me study the loess sample. At first we didn’t obtain good results because the core drilling was carried out by a geological team working very fast. They penetrated the top 100 metres in one day because the loess is very soft and in only two days they’d finished 150 metres, so people couldn’t make detailed notes. The cubic samples were cut by local farmers. A few cubic samples may have been disturbed and data from these type of samples puzzled us. The reversals did seem to exist. The Jaramillo event was relatively clear, but the Brunhes/Matuyama boundary looked indistinct. At last Heller and I realized that maybe some of these samples had been misplaced.

So I returned to China and resampled all these problematic layers. I reassembled all these layers and sent them by mail to Heller. We then made another measurement and everything was alright and there were very exciting results. Also before I left I measured the magnetic susceptibility of the samples with the Kappa-bridge. We have to thank the advanced computer; I measured all the data and Heller put them into the computer and produced the diagrams, the curves, already drawn out. We discovered that the curves seemed to be telling us something. But we didn’t think to correlate it with anything. When I was on the flight back to Beijing I suddenly remembered a paper by Nick Shackleton on deep sea cores. Because I had some impressions of Emiliani’s work in the late 1950s, it was years since I’d paid attention to all the advancements in this area. Back in China I found out about the work of Shackleton and Opdyke, then I compared the two results. They matched each other in some details. At that time (1980s) Shackleton’s work only extended from recent time to about 400,000 thousand years and not further back. Heller had also found a resemblance to the magnetic susceptibility curve. Then Heller asked me to write something about it, but I didn’t do so. All the manuscripts were finished by Heller, Freidrich Heller.

This was another turning point; the second time that loess studies in China advanced to a new stage. Gradually from then on we carried out more palaeomagnetic studies and had several research students working on profiles of the loess, like Han Jiamao on a new loess profile in Jixian, Shanxi, Ding Zhongli at the Bojee, Shaanxi and Liu Xiuming at Xifeng, Gunsu and another one like Luochuan. Then we had several profiles with the same type of results. Such results led us to hold a loess symposium in the 1985 and you were there also. So many scientists came to Luochuan and we had discussions. I think this was another step forward for the study of loess.

JMB: Yes, after the susceptibility and the palaomagnetics studies the scene was set for more systematic analysis. Then after the loess studies you went on, you became president of INQUA and then later came your major prize, your Tyler prize and then your more recent national prize. You can now look back on all of that with a new perspective.

LTS: For knowledge about loess we needed to study sections in more detail and do more sections. Loess studies in China are now working towards two ends. One is for more data on the recent, or Holocene loess which is crucial to understanding the dust storms occurring in northern China in recent years. Maybe the recent dust storms are a repetition of the ancient loess depositions. It is very interesting...we can blame the dust storms on the impact of people. Soils the steppes have deteriorated, followed by desertification with dust blowing from Mongolia or Xinjiang in the west and central Asia into the northern part of China, eastern Japan and Korea and even to the western coast of the United States. Yet 10,000 years ago there were not many people nor much intensive agriculture to have caused these kinds of dust deposit. I like to ask my students to study this problem: man’s impact on the loess plateau or on the northern part of the region and its relevance to the deposition of the loess through the study of the Holocene loess or even, as Paul Crutzen suggested, the Anthropocene period of loess.

There was another discovery, not by me, but by Guo Zhengtang. In 1996 the 30th Geological Congress was held in Beijing. I had the opportunity to give a paper at the general assembly on environmental change during the Cenozoic era especially in China. We discovered from the geological evidence that in the Eocene and Oligocene we could differentiate the deposition of red beds, the formation of early Tertiary gypsum and some pollen of the dry areas as features of an arid period while other features such as peat deposits, fossil plants were of a wet climate. We can determine that during the Eocene and Oligocene age it was very warm and very dry. The arid region extended further south and can even be traced into the southernmost part into the Hainan Islands because there are gypsum deposits over there. It’s northern limit runs latitudinally through China. But during the Miocene, at the end of the Eocene and the beginning of the Miocene, this arid zone moved into the north. The distributional pattern shows it latitudinally in western China and turning to the northeast in that part of China just like the recent topography and recent meterological pattern.

This led Guo Zhengtang to look for evidence of aridity in the stratigraphy of the northern part of China. He discovered the so-called old loess and palaeosol sequences in the west of the Liupan mountains - the Liupan mountains form a central ridge in the loess plateau. The sequences had no stratigraphical name, although it was formerly named by Yang Zhongjian as the Gansu Series and considered a Palaeogene deposit. The loess and paleosol series discovered by Guo was in the Miocene age with abundant fossil mammals. Before that people said it was a kind of red bed, but Guo claimed it to be loess. He’s now still working on that. Was it a true loess? If so there would have been an arid period during the Miocene age and he explained that the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau had already uplifted before that time. We have to trace loess in China back from 3 million to 6 or 7 million years to the beginning of the Hipparion red clay or even older loess and paleosol deposits in the Miocene. We also need to find if there are any loess deposits in the northern part of China.

The distribution and age of the loess is a very important issue to be cleared up but it is especially crucial for gas and oil exploration in the north and eastern parts whether the arid region or the loess deposits can be traced back to Miocene or Eocene time. People say that they have already discovered a gas reservoir in the Qaidam Basin in that region which might be the Neogene or some of Quaternary or Pleistocene age. If however they are wind borne deposits it would seem to be very difficult to find any oil in that region. So for the loess, on the one hand we have to go from the recent to the older ones. I think this is actually the main study, but of course there are many works that have to be developed in recent years by the young colleagues.

JMB: Maybe we can just pause for a minute. Recognition has come as a result of these many years of imaginative and inspiring work. Recognition in many different ways, the INQUA presidency, the Tyler prize and now the recent science national prize. You have achieved that after a life’s work and now at long last China has emerged from a dark period in the past and you are right at the forefront of that emergence. You’ve led a lot of that transition and China is now leading the world in many ways.

LTS That raises a very good issue which needs to be discussed. I have just recalled the first stage I was asked to be a director at the laboratory of Quaternary studies during the late 1950s. At that time, maybe during the ‘great leap forward’ period, I had an idea. I didn’t know how they’d respond to my idea but I was quite sure about it. I had been thinking over and over about my career as a scientist. Formerly as a paleontologist I had aimed to make a name for myself as one of those great vertebrate palaeontologists, to be an expert of palaeoicthyology and to publish my work or collect some of the best specimens and develop a systematic study of fossil fishes. But after the establishment of the ‘new’ China, the establishment of the Ministry of Geology and the establishment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and as I was a member of the department of the Quaternary study laboratory I had studied another type of science other than palaeontology, so I had an idea. Could I aim for being as a big scientist as formidable as Teilhard de Chardin or other distinguished scientists in the field of Quaternary? After several years of serious consideration and study I became very clear I would not pay attention and effort to preparing myself to be an eminent Quaternary scientist as others in the history, not only in China like Professor Yang Zhongjian or Pei Wenzhoong but as great scientists in other countries as well. I considered I did not have the ability or the environment, both myself and our country. Because at that time there was the establishment of the new People’s Republic, a newly established government of our country and they had many things to do: reconstruction of the government, restoration of industry, the improvement of agriculture, these were the utmost items they had to consider. Maybe for me, yes, I was ready at that time, but it was not a priority for the government. The recently established government did not have the advancement of science even applied science or the arts such as literature, painting, sculpture, music at the forefront. Also if I would like to be an eminent palaeontologist and study foreign languages I would have to know comparative anatomy and have to do many things that political environment would not allow me to do. So I decided I would not go that way. I had to go another way, for the need of the society or the need of the Academy of Sciences or the need of my institute to help young people, to dedicate my experience and time to the education of young people, to build up a group of people who can work in these fields.

So I tried my best to organise young people in the laboratory and find opportunities for their rapid advancement. This was a big turnaround in my study aim; so from the late 1950s I had decided not to go in the direction of a ‘pure’ palaeontologist instead worked half as an organiser or with executive work and half with research work. Mainly though I had the aim to help others. I think I was right because not only have I been elected as the deputy or vice president of INQUA, I was elected as the president of the Chinese Quaternary Association and was appointed as head of the Chinese group in the Australian-China collaboration. I didn’t have the time or the opportunity to advance my studies during that collaboration but I liked helping others obtain the chance to improve their ability like An Zhisheng and Sun Xiangjun, so then I could collect a group of people and try to work together. So the Tyler prize and the other prize is to me actually a kind of prize for the collective work of the group. If I didn’t have that group I couldn’t have achieved all these accomplishments.

I am quite satisfied with my decision during the 1950s not to singularly pursue my own research work but to help others gain opportunities and work together. I don’t regret it because I still had many opportunities to study certain topics extensively and intensively, such as palaeomagnetic studies. But at last I’m very satisfied, because through encouraging others studies we can combine all these works together and have a larger result than what one person could achieve.

Why the INQUA appointed me as representative of China and why the Tyler prize is due to the research on Chinese loess (not just my own work but the studies of many people together) which gives people the idea that the loess profile can be compared and correlated with the deep sea record and the ice core records. Even the National Supreme Award of Science and Technology of China, the highest science and technology prize, was bestowed on me because I have a group of people working together. The achievement is not perfect and not strongly organised but we have the beginnings of an innovative program of cooperative work on the loess.

Of course you know loess is a very special research topic because it is very easy to reach and also there are many issues that have to be studied. There are many advantages in organising people to come together, otherwise it would [be more] difficult. I think I am fortunate because I am Chinese and have had the opportunity to study the loess profiles. Before that I had no knowledge of loess because I was a palaeontologist, until by chance I came into contact with the loess on that evening I discovered several levels of lights in the Sanmen Gorge area. I became interested in the study of the loess because I solved the problem of palaeosols within this loess which were erroneously called reddish clay of fluvial origin. And then I had other opportunities, very interesting ones like Ken Hsu inviting me to Switzerland, otherwise I would not have had the chance to discover the magnetic susceptibility variability rhythms of climate.

JMB: Well that is a remarkable journey. There are many, many lessons. It is a journey in which you have exercised what came to you as sort of a natural sense, what turns out to be the sort of leadership that was required at the right point at the right time. You were there at the right time, you had the imagination, you had the vision to see that something could be done and you were able to bring people together to do it. In other words, you had people moving in a direction. You gave them a direction to move. And I suppose that’s part of the next question as we move towards the end of this discussion. Now looking back, or looking forward, what messages do we take away from that sort of experience where many people in the world today are going in different directions and many people as you said earlier are so specialised, indeed we are divided. We need to find a way to come together to go forward. How can your experience and the way the science community works provide us with some ideas about working towards a more convergent future.

LTS: Specialising is a very interesting and important issue that has to be addressed in China. Because in the scientific community we really are a very specialised group of people. My father or my teacher or my professors they are the first generation of the Chinese intellectuals. Before them there’s the imperial dynasty and they produced a type of examination system to promote the way of management. People were asked to read the classics of Confucius and then write essays. They then became scholars and were sent to be officers in some area; this was the path for the scholars, for the intellectuals. But by the generation of my Professor Yang Zhongjian, since the ‘Republic Revolution’ in 1911, they studied science, in Yang’s case geology. They became the first generation of professional scientists and earned their living by doing scientific work. This is the first generation in China in 5,000 years of cultural history where there are members of society being scholars, intellectuals in that way. It is in many ways a privileged group, for they have the chance for contact with the outside world, they can communicate with the western civilization with ease.

In China, this group of intellectuals or scientists earned their living doing scientific works so there was from my experience a reliance on the government, because we were hired by the government, were in a kind of professional employment by the government, so were not going to rebel from the government. So something was good and something was not very good for the intellectuals during that time. I’m not sure, maybe I’m wrong. But I think these professional intellectuals may have had the kind of thinking where they don’t want to have contact with the society around them, they just want to have a very quiet place, a stable situation or environment to do their scientific work. They would not consider what was happening in their society. Many of them they were, like in the west where they say living in the spiral of the imagination or in the ivory tower. Even though they were the first generations of the professional scientists some of them were living this way during the early stages of oriental culture meeting western culture.

So to start from this group of scientists, if they are going to be concerned they have to join the society or influence the governors or people who are policy makers and be aware of their responsibility to the society. That’s a very important issue we have to aim for or work toward. I’m aware that in recent years some of our young people are quite aware of their own study and of how to increase their abilities to get better results and to advance the study of the science. But other than science they are not so aware of or don’t care much about other things happening in society especially over the last 10 years. Of course we have made great progress in these last 10 years but people have become more and more concerned with themselves or their own family or their own small group but not the outside world. That’s why for a geologist many think about mineral resources and want to specialise in this area so other issues more concerned with land and resources are neglected. They only care about iron, aluminum, petroleum and a few others, so there is this tendency to specialisation.

So last year at the ceremony to give the Li Siguang prize - you know JS Li a very distinguished geologist in China - one of the governers said in his address that ‘the Geological Society has to have a turn, a turning of their viewpoint and a turning of their work. That is, you have to take geological science as a kind of system of the earth not only of strict geology, so turn from geology to geological systems, earth systems. The geological community is not only so in the narrow sense of geology, but inclusive of the environmental issues for the geologist’.

I’m really very pleased about these ‘turning points’ and at the 32nd Geological Congress people were talking about the Planet Earth program. In that program attention is being paid to environmental study and recent studies. And I think the Ministry of Land and Resources together with other countries and even with UNESCO people like Edward Derbyshire are pushing this work. I am so pleased, because if UNESCO and IUGS has put the study of environmental issues as crucial in the coming years then many people will pay attention, not only to pollution but also to other aspects of the environment, and take human impact or human activity to be a kind of geological agent. That seems to be what they were saying in Italy; that there seems to be a renaissance of the Geological Society. So I’m expecting a renaissance of geology.

JMB: Ok...the renaissance may come through environment and global change.

LTS: That is how I understood it, but I don’t know for sure if that’s how it was meant.

JMB: I do think global change has the ability to be one of those issues that breaks down the barriers.

LTS: Yes, yes.

JMB: Breaks down the barriers, and we should build on that and use it in the right way to get people to the table, get them concerned.

LTS: Yes, yes.

JMB: To not just worry about myself but worry about the bigger environmental picture.

LTS: I think that is why the Tyler prize and the national prize considered our work. Because we have embraced the idea of bringing the issue together as a kind of collective work, a convergence. Just as Teilhard de Chardin mentioned in his work, no matter whether you are in the western world or wherever, environmental issues are the same; air pollution has no boundary.

So I think maybe for this time, maybe for China - of course we are just a group setting in this building - I’m not sure whether our influences are very big. I’ve just participated in a meeting in Tianjin. Their main concerns were the city or metropolitan geology, a geological hazards study, the geology of agriculture and land planning, and the geology of surficial deposits. So they are turning all these works from the classical mineral deposits into environmental issues.

JMB: Is that a major government initiative?

LTS: Yes, by the Ministry of Land and Resources, the former Ministry of Geology.

JMB: So the Ministry of Geology has become the Ministry of Land and Resources. That is a good note to finish on along with your statement that air pollution, indeed climate, knows no boundaries.

LTS: Oh yes, I think.

JMB: Liu Tungsheng it has been a great privilege to sit with you and hear your journey, and now other people will be able to hear what you have to say. Thank you.

LTS: Thank you. If you have any topics you would like to discuss I would be glad to do that. Thank you very much, you have given me a chance to think about many things I neglected before. Yes.