Bomb, Book and Compass

by Simon Winchester

  Stein was (and still is) widely vilified in China for his trickery and plunder – as were a succession of greedy treasure hunters who came after him.28 Dunhuang was eventually closed, so terrified were later Chinese governments that more foreign pillagers would take away the treasures. But when Joseph Needham arrived in September 1943 he went as a diplomat, and so was able to enjoy nearly unrestricted access to the grottoes, with no hindrance by fussy officials or soldiers. His access became even more complete once the mandarins in the local magistracy realized how sick his old truck was, and that he would have to spend many weeks on-site.

  He made full use of this access, and of his time. Day after day he sketched and photographed the caves in great detail, to the point where he believed he might have enough material to publish a monograph – Dunhuang in those days being generally unknown and highly exotic. He was charmed by the sound of wind chimes at a temple, which he heard while sitting silently in the desert on a brilliant moonlit night. He cursed when robbers stole the razor blades he had bought in New York the year before, when he was with Lu Gwei-djen, to whom he now wrote a letter almost every day. He found and ‘poked about’ in a Han Chinese fort and in any number of previously unvisited stupas. He celebrated the ‘double tenth’ – the anniversary of the Chinese revolution, observed on 10 October every year, as it still is to this day – by eating a collation of chocolate cake while standing up outside the cave entrances with a pair of friendly lamas dressed in russet robes and wearing ‘beads and strange hats’. He was chased by a pair of wolves and from then on had to keep fires going at night to scare others away.

  He found shortly thereafter the jawbone of what he believed to be a monastery abbot, a discovery that triggered more disturbing dreams and robbed him of some night-time peace; he swapped a carton of sulpha drugs for a box of locally grown quinces; he went donkey-racing on the dunes. He copied maps from various books about the Silk Road by the great American scholar Owen Lattimore. He attended an immense parade for a local city god and ate a very non-Chinese meat pie there. He bought and smoked Russian cigars and had a Gobi craftsman cut him a new set of stone seals. And once, when he spent a night at an inn, he was lying in bed when, thanks to an overheated kang below, there was a sudden explosion that burned all of his roommate’s clothes. Everyone else in the party had to give the victim spare clothing, whether it fitted or not. Needham himself was not much given to wearing proper clothes out here in the desert: as the autumn temperature started to drop he wrapped himself simply in sheepskins or in locally woven rugs.

  Before they became marooned for the winter – when the Turkestan deserts become fearfully frigid – Needham decided to send for help. He despatched his faithful assistant, H. T., into the desert with a pair of donkeys. He told H. T. not to fret about not making it: the animals’ own survival instincts, Needham tried to reassure him, would guarantee the survival of any man riding them.

  H. T.s ultimate mission – once he made sure his boss would be rescued – was to get home to Chongqing. He was supposed to ride the animals across the desert to a road where he might catch a bus, find his way by road to Lanzhou, then somehow find an airplane bound for the capital, and once there go to Needham’s office and restart the work that the boss was having to ignore – supplying universities with their various needs and ordering these goods from India.

  But his trip home became just as frustrating as the expedition itself. H. T.’s bus slid into a ditch; a car he rented blew a gasket and had spark plug trouble; and when he finally reached the Lanzhou airfield he was ejected from every plane he tried to board, because all the aircraft had been commandeered to carry immense quantities of Hami melons to Chiang Kai-shek and his melon-loving wife.

  He waited at the aerodrome for the better part of a month before deciding to return to Lanzhou. When he got there, he found that Needham’s party had also made it that far. A crew of mechanics from a desert oil field had done some limited repairs on the engine, the truck had managed to limp to Lanzhou, and a more competent local technician there would make it ready for its 1,000-mile journey home.

  There remained one small problem. Although Needham and H. T. were both in Lanzhou, Needham was south of the Yellow River and H. T. was north of it, and the bridge was down.

  ‘So we both spent a great deal of time crossing the river each day,’ wrote H. T. some years later. ‘I particularly enjoyed… the sheepskin raft, which gave me the sensation of sitting right on top of the churning current. As the weather got colder, chunks of ice began to appear on the water and by early December the whole river was solidly frozen. It was an awesome sight to see the mighty river turned into a solid sheet of ice, all within the space of two weeks.’

  By early December, with Needham having done all he could in the Chinese northwest, he joined a long list of people trying to get on the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) flight. He had connections aplenty, thanks to his journeying; and after a mere two weeks of waiting, one of them finally worked the necessary wonders. Room was found on a beat-up old American warplane, and crammed in with baggage, melons, and a few other hastily boarded emergency travellers, Needham took off. At 5 p.m. on 14 December the plane touched down at Chongqing’s sand-spit of an airfield, where there was an embassy official on hand to greet him. He had expected to be away for a month; he had been gone for four.

  Meanwhile, H. T. had still to get home in the wounded old Chevrolet truck. It took him a further month of misery – at one stage he ran out of lubricant and resorted to filling the engine with rapeseed oil. But in late January 1944, five and a half months after leaving, he and Needham were reunited, and the two men were able to breathe a sigh of relief, turn the truck over to the embassy garage, and never set eyes on it again.

  There was one other pleasing coda to the journey – a romance that blossomed right under everybody’s nose, and yet passed unnoticed by all, thanks to the journey’s abundance of difficulties. Liao Hongying, the pretty young woman whom Needham had dropped off in Lanzhou, met there a visiting British diplomat, Derek Bryan. The pair had gone back to Chongqing in H. T.s truck. During the journey Bryan remarked on the discipline and efficiency of Mao Zedong’s Communist soldiers – and Liao realized that he was clearly not a stuffed-shirt supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, as in her view most foreign diplomats were, but rather was ‘one of us, one of the people’.

  They fell in love, were engaged within the month, were married soon after – and became subsequently an abiding fixture, first in Beijing and then later in England among the small corps délite who, during the 1950s and 1960s, campaigned in earnest and with unwavering support for the ideals of the People’s Republic of China.

  Bryan and Liao were not communists but, like Needham, committed socialists. Either way, though, they incurred the dis favour of the British Foreign Office, which eased Bryan from the diplomatic service in 1951 after he told an American diplomat that he rather approved of Mao Zedong’s social reforms.29 They were ardent Quakers, and with Needham they later helped found the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, membership of which was one of the only ways for Britons to be permitted to enter China during its most exclusionary years. They taught Chinese, did research, then spent their retirement in Norwich. When they died – Liao in 1998, the 92-year-old Derek Bryan in 2003 – they left a considerable sum in a trust to help support Chinese students who wished to come to Britain.

  However arduous Needham’s trip to the northwest had been, its route, as far as any risk from the war was concerned, was reasonably safe. There were essentially no Japanese soldiers to the west of Chongqing, and the Japanese air raids had more or less ended by 1941.

  The same could not be said of the Chinese east. By 1943 Japan was in firm control of much of eastern China, from Manchuria down to a point on the coast well to the south of Shanghai; and Tokyo also held tightly on to territory that ran from the old treaty port of Xiamen southwest to the borders of Indochina – Vietnam in particular. All of southern Guangdong province – incl
uding, since the surrender on Christmas Day 1941, the British crown colony of Hong Kong – was ruled strictly by the mandate of the Japanese emperor. Where the two armies met – the more or less united Nationalist and Communist armies on the Chinese side, the Japanese imperial army on the other – was the ever-mobile front. Cities in this swath of contested countryside changed hands with baffling frequency and experienced fighting, bombing, and all the manifold horrors of total war.

  Nearly incredibly, however, the Japanese forces let one rock-bound stretch of the eastern Chinese coast, 300 miles that very roughly ran along the seashore of Fujian province, remain free of their control. There are many theories as to why, but most probably the planners had decided it was more important to go for the major manufacturing centres and transportation links and leave the more isolated and unpopulated countryside to its own devices. So, although much of Fujian had been occupied briefly in the late 1930s, by 1944 it was back in Chinese hands. And halfway along the coast was the province’s principal city, the former treaty port of Fuzhou; it, too, was now stubbornly under Chinese control, and continued to run as it had before the Japanese arrived.

  Needham was fascinated. For one thing, it astonished him to discover a British consulate operating in Fuzhou, in territory that was almost surrounded by the enemy – the possibilities for espionage, or for other kinds of mischief, were surely legion. Immediately, he became curious about how the academic communities were faring in this part of China, hemmed in tightly either by the Japanese invaders to their north, west, and south, or by the sea to the east. And so, with his interest piqued by the extraordinary situation in Fuzhou, he set out once again.

  He began his great ‘South-Eastern Journey’, as it was later to be called, in April. A few weeks earlier, his wife, Dophi, had arrived from Cambridge, to take up the post of his chemical adviser. But he chose not to take her along. His companion was once again to be H. T. Huang, and their vehicle would be a converted Chevrolet ambulance, very similar to the ill-starred wreck they had taken before, though slightly smaller and less powerful. It was similar but, crucially, it was not the same.

  Map of Needham’s Southeastern Expedition, ChongqingFuzhou.

  In any case, because of the geography of the Japanese occupation Needham and H. T. had to drive the truck due south30 and then get aboard a steam train. They rented a flat wagon to carry the truck and hooked it onto the back of the train, and for the next five days the railway-obsessed Needham was in an adolescent rapture – ‘saw first train, with British-looking 2-8-0 with two day-cars and two bogie wagons’.

  His enthusiasm for trains was much like his ardent devotion to young women, and in his diary he expressed the keenest interest in both almost every day. ‘Saw many pretty Miao girls in bright kilts’; ‘face of woman cooking… perfect curve under black hair’; ‘lovely boat-woman, strong and handsome’; ‘found very nice Jap-trained girl at observatory’; ‘shared compartment with nice girl of purest Red Indian appearance’. His excitement sometimes carried him away: the ‘Red Indian’ girl turned out to be Chinese, from the same school Lu Gwei-djen had attended in Nanjing; and the giant 2-8-0 railway train he discovered was not British at all but made in Czechoslovakia.

  Needham and H. T. soon settled into the routine of train travel, and Needham would get off at every stop to talk to the engineer or to make notes about the various steam locomotives he spotted shunting in the yards. American and British soldiers were everywhere, helping the Chinese hold the front line against the Japanese – and in travelling to their various billets these foreigners took up most of the first-class seats and sleeping compartments.

  But one advantage offset the crowding: Americans often travelled with interpreters, and if these interpreters were young women and pretty, the genial old dog from Cambridge had an opportunity to befriend them. On the first day he found Miss Zhao Baoling, a fine soprano whose seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of Chinese folk songs entertained Needham for hours. H. T. felt obliged to write the lyrics down for posterity, for the archives. ‘It is all research,’ Needham would say. ‘Sure it is,’ said H. T.

  There was plenty of military activity to keep the soldiers busy: few days passed without Needham’s noting an air raid or some other scare suggesting that the Japanese were up to something.

  Train should have left at 1.50, but then came air raid alarm, two balls raised [on the signal-box flagpole], train shunted back into the country and everyone dispersed into the wooded hills. The two balls came down, but nothing happened so people drifted back to the train. Then sound of planes: everyone ran into the woods. Seven US fighters, probably P40s, circled four times and went away. Everyone drifted back to the train again. Sound of planes; everyone ran to the woods; two unidentifiable planes flying rather low, circled once and withdrew. At last all-clear gongs went and the train left at 4 p.m.

  Unknown to Needham and his superiors at the embassy in Chongqing, the Japanese were indeed planning something.

  Tokyo had at long last wearied of the inconvenient existence of the Allied-held salient in their eastern Chinese holdings, and had ordered its local commanders either to annihilate or to throttle it. And so, at almost the same moment that Needham and H. T. began their train journey towards Fuzhou, the Japanese Air Force and Army were moved to seal off the area completely, to close the gaps that allowed the Chinese to bring men and matériel – and visiting scholars like Needham – into the region.

  So just as they were venturing further and further into this seemingly carefree part of eastern China, the Japanese were slamming closed all the entrances and exits. If Needham didn’t move swiftly, or have enormous luck, he would find himself trapped – and as a very high-value prisoner of war.

  But he knew nothing of this, and as April ended and May began (‘bush tunic and shorts this morning – first time this year’; ‘morning nice and hot… violent storm with rain, lightning and thunder in the afternoon’) he continued merrily on his way. Just as he had on the northwestern journey, he devoted as much time as possible to visiting universities, factories, and schools; giving lectures; collecting shopping lists for the flights over the Hump; flying the flag; and generally keeping up morale.

  But all this was much more difficult as the days wore on. The Japanese skirmishing attacks were becoming more numerous, and, though no one knew why, their increased frequency was making many Chinese fretful or physically ill. A college librarian Needham met in the town of Pingshi, whom he described as ‘nuts, but rather nice’, was newly suffering, as was his wife, from a chronic form of malaria. ‘Compared photos of them in Canton before the war when she looked very spry, and they had a car as well as a house, while now they both look yellow and haggard. But he has carpentry as a hobby, and is making dolls’ houses.’

  Needham seemed to find amusing people everywhere he went. In one small town he reported meeting a parasitologist squirrelled away in a back street, doing very little science but happy with the arrival of a dozen microscopes that had just been smuggled in from Hong Kong. At a small observatory he discovered a Princeton-educated phoneticist who had recently been captured by bandits and held for four months in a cave. In Ganxian – which is where Rewi Alley was once stationed, which Needham declared was the cleanest and most prosperous-looking city he had seen in China thus far, and which had colonnaded buildings like the centre of New Delhi – he found a young Chinese man who spoke good Greek. The two had tea, and, with Needham applying his formidable linguistic abilities, ‘an enjoyable chat’.

  Needham might have been justified in describing the malarial librarian as ‘nuts’, but his own oddities frequently surfaced, as H. T. discovered time and again. In Ganxian, for example, Needham’s unusual breakfasts caused comment and some consternation. He always liked his morning toast burned black. The charcoal, he said, brought inestimable benefits to his stomach. The cook at the China Travel Service inn, where they were staying, had his own ideas on what constituted properly made toast and he served it to Needham brown. Three times a
n increasingly impatient Needham sent the toast back to the kitchen, and the matter was not resolved until H. T. applied the invaluable combination of diplomacy and chemistry that described his job. ‘We have here a famous and very eccentric Professor from England,’ he explained. ‘Please tell the chef not to worry about getting the toasts burnt. That is the way he really likes them – and the carbon is good for his digestion.’

  In mid-May the car needed repairs – they had retrieved it from the train and were now driving over the Fujianese hills, which Needham said reminded him of the Jura – and so they took the opportunity to have it looked at while they waited for local flooding to subside. For three days they had nothing to do and no visits to make, so Needham, ever a man for improving each shining hour, decided to translate some Chinese folk songs into English while keeping the original metre (the exercise proved woefully unsuccessful) and to teach some passing Chinese lovelies how to sing the three songs he knew best: ‘Gaudeamus igitur’, the communist ‘Internationale’, and the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, a tune then beloved of all good Nazis.

  He also wondered briefly – while being interrogated by a Chinese chemist he met – about a supposedly distinguished British scientist whom the Chinese gentleman was certain was named Queenie Woggin. After some head-scratching Needham realized he was being asked about Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, an expert on fungi who went on to be head of the women’s branch of the British Army. She most certainly had a queenly manner, which he supposed might have accounted for the error. Walking swiftly away from his interrogator, he fell into a hole in the road, up to his neck, a feat that he later said greatly amused everyone, particularly the women. He took himself off to a neighbour’s veranda to restore his bruised dignity, lit his evening cigar, and spent an hour gazing in rapture over the blue hills of Fujian, the masses of rhododendrons trembling in the cooling breeze, the scent of gardenia in the air.