The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (11 page)

The Athenians hastened their demise, though, by making several missteps, and succumbing to what one historian calls “a creeping vanity.”
They practiced democracy at home (for some) but not abroad. Toward the end of his reign, Pericles reversed his open-door policy and shunned foreigners. He also underestimated the resolve of Athens’s foe, Sparta, and finally, in a classic case of overreach, Athens (under a new leader) blundered into the Sicilian Expedition, Athens’s Vietnam.

The rot came from inside, too. Houses grew larger and more ostentatious. Streets grew wider, the city less intimate. People developed gourmet taste. (If the proliferation of foodies foreshadows the downfall of a civilization, then America’s goose is well and truly cooked.) The gap between rich and poor, citizen and noncitizen, grew wider, while the sophists, hawking their verbal acrobatics, grew more influential. Academics became less about pursuing truth and more about parsing it. The once-vibrant urban life degenerated into a circus atmosphere, “with professional freaks, contortionists, and dwarfs usurping the place once occupied by self-respecting citizens,” explains Lewis Mumford.

Every place of genius contains the seeds of its own destruction. The Greeks, I think, were aware of this. While they didn’t know precisely when their day in the sun would end, surely they knew that just as “human happiness never remains long in the same place,” as Herodotus said, neither does human genius.

Sure enough, after the fall of Athens, genius drifted several thousand miles east, where a very different, but no less brilliant, golden age blossomed.

TWO

GENIUS IS NOTHING NEW: HANGZHOU

IS IT POSSIBLE FOR A cup of tea to rise to the level of genius?

I’m not sure, but this particular tea that I am sipping at a café in Hangzhou, China, comes awfully close. It is served in a glass teapot, with chrysanthemum buds floating in the hot water like lilies in a Vermont pond.

I pour carefully, handling the pot with the sort of hypervigilant care typically reserved for surgical instruments or very small children. Slowly, I take a sip. It tastes like beauty. Genius can adhere to any object, no matter how mundane. Genius—this particular kind of genius—is not a noun or verb but an adjective, a free-floating property waiting for the right host, be it a person, a place, or an especially good cup of tea.

I once met a reformed coffee addict who told me how he was up to six, seven cups a day when something in him snapped and he decided to go cold turkey. No more coffee. Only tea. “Coffee made me think more quickly, but tea made me think more deeply,” he said with the conviction of the converted. Now, sitting here holding this perfect cup of tea in this perfect little café in Hangzhou, I realize he may be right and wonder,
does that explain the difference between Chinese and Western genius? We in the West go for the quick jolt of caffeine and its rapid-fire flashes of insight, while in the East they imbibe their caffeine more slowly and therefore take the long view. This is, I’d soon learn, one of the many ways in which East and West approach creativity differently.

The café is called Taigu, which means “old place.” Not old as in decrepit, inferior to the new, but old as in rooted. Solid. My table feels as if it inhabits its own private universe. With its Tiffany lamps and plush cushions, it reminds me of one of those ornate railway cars from the nineteenth century.

All of this intensifies the pleasure I derive from each sip of my tea. It is, as I said, pure genius, and that is why I have come to Hangzhou. For genius. The West may have invented the word, elevated it to quasi-religious status, but we do not have a monopoly on the concept. There are as many flavors of genius as there are of happiness, or gelato, and I am eager to sample the Chinese variety.

In particular, I’ve homed in on the Song Dynasty, which spanned from 969 to 1276 AD, a time of great flourishing. The dynastic capital, Hangzhou, was the richest, most populous city in the world. It was also the most innovative. When Europeans were busy picking lice out of their hair and wondering when the Middle Ages would
ever
end, the Chinese were busy inventing, discovering, writing, painting, and, in general, improving the human condition.

This golden age had distinctly Asian characteristics: a group genius marked not by sudden breakthroughs but by gradual developments. An innovative epoch that, in typical Chinese fashion, rested firmly on a bedrock of tradition. A less caffeinated flourishing than found in the West but one no less remarkable. Whatever Hangzhou lacked in terms of Athens’s philosophical gravitas, it more than made up for in art and poetry and, especially, technology. Old Hangzhou changed the way we navigate the world, both literally and figuratively.

If you’re like me, you probably know that the Chinese invented gunpowder and fireworks. You’re probably not aware, though, of the breadth and depth of Chinese accomplishments. The Chinese invented
everything from the compass and block printing to mechanical clocks and toilet paper (a genius invention, if ever there was one). Medical advances were made during the golden age as well, and as political scientist Charles Murray points out, “If you were going to be ill in [the twelfth century] and were given the choice of living in Europe or China, there is no question about the right decision.”

By almost every measure—wealth, sanitation, education, literacy—China surpassed the West. The Chinese produced the world’s finest textiles and porcelain and introduced the world’s first paper money. They pioneered advances in nautical technology, too. While Europeans were still deploying tiny galleys powered by muscle, the Chinese were sailing huge, sectioned ships, with as many as four decks, a dozen sails, and up to five hundred men. They also published some of the world’s first nautical and astronomical charts, and pioneered the field of archaeology. Meanwhile, using advances in coal and hydraulic machines, they churned out an impressive amount of goods, from plows to Buddhist statues.

The Song Dynasty was also a time of great philosophical and spiritual genius. The blending of Buddhist and Confucianist thought yielded a remarkably tolerant atmosphere. In fact, the technology that fueled China’s golden age—woodblock printing—was first perfected in Buddhist monasteries, where some of the world’s first books were published. The era also produced a bumper crop of great thinkers, unburdened by the sort of brooding that typically accompanies European philosophy. “Nothing is more foreign to the Chinese genius than metaphysical anguish and anxiety,” says historian Jacques Gernet, who has written extensively on the Song Dynasty.

Finally, the period saw an explosion in artistic output, yielding enough poetry and paintings to fill many museums. People were accomplished not only in the fine arts but also in the art of conversation, leading Gernet to conclude that these were “one of the most highly cultured types of human beings that Chinese civilization has ever produced.” That
any
civilization has ever produced. The Song Dynasty was China’s Renaissance, Hangzhou its Florence.

That much we know. Beyond lies only fog and questions. What
exactly was in the air back then—and, an even bigger riddle, where did it go? What is the answer to Needham’s Grand Question?

Joseph Needham was a British scientist and sinologist who, in the early twentieth century, unearthed and chronicled the incredible, and previously unknown, flowering of ancient Chinese science and technology. His Grand Question was, why did China, at the time light-years ahead of the West, suddenly lose its lead and fall behind for centuries to come?

Sipping my genius tea, I ponder this Chinese puzzle, but realize I’m not going to make much progress today. I’m still groggy from the long flight. I had arrived late at night, and for me nothing is more disorienting than landing in a strange city in the dead of night. I joined other bleary-eyed travelers at the taxi stand at Hangzhou’s shiny new airport and, on the drive into the city, was jolted awake by the ultramodern highway and apartment towers and office complexes, all glass and steel and raw Ayn Rand ambition. I could hear the voices of friends, the ones who have spent years studying China.
You won’t find the past in China,
they warned.
Chairman Mao wiped it out. You’re wasting your time.
I worried they might be right.

My driver exited the highway and we were soon funneled onto a narrow, winding street; we were rounding a bend when the taxi’s headlights briefly illuminated a clutch of late-night revelers emerging from a tavern, laughing and smiling. Something about their mannerisms, about the puddles of rainwater shimmering in the moonlight, loosened the grip of the present, and for an instant, a flash, I was transported to Hangzhou circa 1230 AD. This was not merely an intellectual experience. It was more than that. I could, for a split second,
feel
that era. The past is like that. It is absent and then suddenly not absent. When this happens, when the past arrives uninvited, we greet it not with shock but recognition. Yes, of course, we think. The present doesn’t displace the past; it conceals it, like a blanket of fresh snow. The snow melts and we see what was always there.

My hotel, abutting a Ferrari dealership in one direction and an Aston Martin dealership in another, has done a good job of concealing the past, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge its existence. The lobby of the Crystal
Orange Hotel is sparsely furnished with leather swivel chairs, chrome fixtures, and Andy Warhol prints. The staff wear matching black uniforms and ironic, contemporary expressions. My room features such modern amenities as automatic blinds and preset lighting configurations labeled
NEW YORK
and
PARIS
(I would never figure out the difference). The only nod to China’s cultural heritage is, oddly, a small goldfish, which I spot doing laps on top of my minibar. Perhaps it’s the temporal dissonance of jet lag, but sometimes I swear the goldfish is speaking to me. “Don’t look at me, bub,” it says. “I have no idea what I’m doing here either.”

The next morning, I return to the Taigu Café, order a pot of genius tea, and assess where I’ve been, and where I need to go. Athens and Hangzhou. These two places of genius, separated by fifteen hundred years and some five thousand miles, share no cultural or linguistic roots, yet the deeper I dig, the more similarities I see. Both cities were blessed with enlightened leaders. Athens with Pericles, and China with a succession of enlightened leaders known as emperor-poets. That is, I concede, not a combination you see every day. To be clear, these leaders were no dilettantes. They didn’t write poetry the way Harry Truman played the piano or Bill Clinton the sax. They were actually talented. Emperoring was what they did on the side.

Hangzhou, like Athens, was a trading city. In its teeming markets, you could buy anything: rhinoceros horns from India, ivory from Africa, as well as pearls, crystal, sandalwood, camphor, cloves, and cardamom. Hangzhou, like Athens, stood at a crossroads of goods and ideas, a destination for visitors from across China and beyond.

One attraction was the city’s “pleasure grounds.” (No, it’s not what you’re thinking, though there was plenty of that, too, in old Hangzhou.) These were places where you could learn to play the Chinese transverse flute, or take an acting class, or simply marvel at the perennial circus unfolding before your eyes: tightrope walkers, jugglers, sword swallowers, comedians, wrestlers, performing ants. Hangzhou was a city of “constant pandemonium,” writes Gernet, and I’m instantly reminded of the bustling agora in Athens. I’m sensing a pattern here. Places of genius require a degree of uncertainty, and perhaps even chaos.

Athens and Hangzhou differed in important ways, though. Unlike Athens, Hangzhou embraced new technology. As I said, the pivotal technology was woodblock printing. It was the Internet of the day. Like the Internet, it removed barriers to entry. What had previously been a monopoly controlled by a select few, the scribes and their wealthy customers, was suddenly available to nearly everyone.

Like all successful technologies, block printing came along at the right time and satisfied a need, even if it was one people didn’t know they had. In this case, that need was for information. A widening circle of people—members of the burgeoning merchant class—sought to improve themselves by reading the classics, Confucius and Lao-tzu. They gobbled up these works the way we devour histories of the founding fathers. Soon, thousands of titles, on all sorts of topics, were published each year. One library alone, at the Imperial Palace, housed some eighty thousand scrolls.

Not all technological advances caught on, though. Four hundred years before Gutenberg, Chinese craftsmen developed a mechanical printing press. It sank without a trace.

This fact gives lie to one of the greatest myths of innovation: that you can’t stop progress. In fact, we stop progress all the time. If we didn’t, we would be overwhelmed by a flood of novel technologies—some useful, most not. If we couldn’t stop progress, then surely you would know the name Cornelis Drebbel.

Drebbel was a seventeenth-century Dutch inventor, a handsome man with a quiet voice and gentle disposition. He invented telescopes and microscopes, and self-playing instruments. He developed new methods for refrigeration and incubation. His perpetual-motion machines enthralled at least two European monarchs. He was, in many ways, the Thomas Edison of his day.