Chinese water dowsers

[JackieN]

I've just been reading Bomb Book & Compass by Simon Winchester which chronicles Joseph Needham's times in China which resulted in his growing tome on Science and Civilisation in China (24 volumes).

There's a comment which is really intriguing that Needham was stuck in Lanzhou in the early 1940s and interviewed a man who built windmills and was working on a way to 'detect water underground with a technique more sophisticated than dowsing'.

I just wondered if anyone had come across this or knew what it referred to. Needham's life work was all about showing that China invented a lot of things many hundreds of years before they were 'discovered' in the West so thought I'd try to find out more about this mysterious technique.

Jackie


Edited by I.P. 18.10.10 - corrected typos.