To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding in 2015, SACU sponsored the first Needham Essay Competition for Oundle School Sixth Form pupils. Now in its second year, this year’s competition was also open to pupils at St George’s School, Harpenden, and two £100 prizes were awarded, one to each school. The essay topic was ‘The Significance of Mao's Little Red Book both in China and across the World’.
From Oundle, Anneka Shah’s (L) essay was selected to be awarded a prize, and she was invited to the A Taste of Beijing conference held on 14 September in London, hosted at the British Library by the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), Peking University and the Beijing Publishing Group.
During the day, the delegates attended lectures relating to the importance of literature and communication in strengthening relations, and lectures on ‘Chinese literature going global’. Chinese scholar Tan Liefei discussed architecture in Beijing, and John Moffett, from the Needham Institute in Cambridge, gave a keynote speech on the life of Needham. To accompany the conference the British Library curated an exhibition of books relating to China.
Joseph Needham, after whom the Physics Department and Chinese Society at Oundle is named, played a large role in improving Anglo-Chinese connections. Originally a student at Oundle (Grafton 1918), Needham studied biochemistry at Cambridge and later became Master of Gonville and Caius College. Needham is best known for his magnum opus, Science and Civilisation in China, for which he wrote the first 15 volumes about Chinese technological achievement.