Bomb, Book and Compass

by Simon Winchester

  Needham’s retirement from the mastership came in 1976, and with it came the beginnings of a slow and steady downward spiral. For the first time Needham was beginning to realize – and, moreover, to admit – that he might not manage to cover the entirety of Chinese science within the limits of his lifetime. Perhaps, he wondered out loud, he might have bitten off more than he could chew. It was clear that he needed help – and not simply the kind of assistance that Wang Ling and Gwei-djen had been able to offer. He needed someone who could perhaps write an entire volume, could look after an entire topic of Chinese scientific history on his or her own.

  Though he gritted his teeth about having to delegate, he eventually did: Francesca Bray was the first to be handed one entire subject (agriculture, eventually becoming Volume VI, Part 2). But T. H. Tsien’s Volume V, Part 1, about paper and printing, actually came out first, in 1985, and with a note from Needham publicly admitting that in freeing himself from the burden of sole authorship, he had now reached a turning point. The project was still his – he was its architect and the builder of the first courses of brickwork. But the upperworks, parapets, dome – these would be the work of others. Life was too short for it to be otherwise.

  Moreover, he had now reached a venerable stage of life. He was seventy-six when he left the Caius mastership; eighty-five, frail, and bowed when Tsien’s volume on printing came out; then two years short of his ninetieth birthday, and ailing, when Francesca Bray’s volume on agriculture emerged. The wisdom of years was prompting him to envisage just how the series would progress when he was no longer competent to write it, and also how it could progress when he was no longer around even to direct it.

  According to a tradition at Gonville and Caius, those who are most intimately associated with the college will in their lifetime make use of two ancient gates built in the college walls. They would enter as undergraduates through what had been known for 700 years as the Gate of Humility; and at death, if their life had brought distinction, fame, or both, they would leave through another, more ornate and topped by a sundial. Called the Gate of Honour, it was seldom opened, and then only for momentous occasions. Joseph Needham’s appointment with this second gate would now be not too long in coming, he suspected.

  Needham was sufficiently distinguished in 1963 to have his portrait painted in oils for the Caius College Hall three years before he was elected Master. The combination of slide rule and scholar’s robe suggests his dual fascination with East and West.

  And yet he was content: those whom he had gathered around him in these closing years would be sure to finish everything, come what may. Cambridge University Press was in full agreement: Science and Civilisation in China was too bright a jewel in the publisher’s crown – in Cambridge’s crown, in the nation’s crown – for anyone ever to entertain any thought of abandoning it.

  Needham and Gwei-djen moved adroitly to ensure the lasting physical security of the vast collection of books and manuscripts they had accumulated. Needham had long before persuaded the college that two rooms were necessary to house the project, and after a battle royal in the mid-1950s (for rooms in Oxford and Cambridge colleges are the scarcest of commodities, and one has to be of the greatest distinction to be permitted more than one), he was given the right to use both his old room, K-1, and K-2 next door. He installed Gwei-djen in the latter, their books in both. The crush of bookcases became unmanageable: it was still necessary for research assistants to be very small, the better to squeeze along the tiny corridors between these shelves.

  Soon after Needham stepped down as Master – being permitted as a courtesy to retain the rooms for a while – the pair amalgamated their book collections. They then formed a trust that had two aims: to keep the project going and to find a permanent home for it. The trust then underwent mitosis, remaining in existence but joined by two sister organizations: one based in Hong Kong to raise funds for the project’s home; the other in New York to seek money for the book’s continued publication.

  Needham and Gwei-djen began a rigorous programme of shuttling to Asia, making speeches, attending dinners, jumping the hurdles and ducking through the various hoops that were the necessary rituals in persuading rich men and foundations to part with their money. Almost every time the couple went to China, they had to endure the gastronomic purgatories of banquets, often laced with awards. But Needham remained courteous and in puckish good form throughout: at one moment after he was awarded yet another plaque or medal or brooch or scroll of calligraphy, he turned to the camera crew recording the event: ‘All this,’ he asked, ‘all this for little me?’

  The couple’s greatest success was with a former bicycle repairer in Cambridge, David Robinson, who had made a small fortune in the 1950s renting televisions to Britons too broke to buy them, and had then invested the resulting cash in horse racing and turned it into a very large fortune indeed. In the late 1970s he was endowing a new college at Cambridge near the University Library (and across the road from one of Britain’s few Real Tennis courts), and, after, a meeting at dinner and a series of long conversations, he offered to give Joseph Needham’s East Asian History of Science Trust a plot within the college site. He offered land – something that in the city of Cambridge was rare and precious.

  On this piece of land, Robinson imagined, there would rise a building to house all of Needham’s books on China, serve as headquarters for publishing the remaining twenty-odd volumes of Science and Civilisation in China, and allow research to be conducted on various aspects of Chinese history. And in time all this came to pass: Robinson College opened its doors in 1980, and the Needham Research Institute in 1987, just as David Robinson was coming to the end of his long and remarkable life.

  The Queen opened the college; her husband laid the foundation stone of the institute; and the university vice-chancellor and the Chinese ambassador were both on hand to declare the Needham Research Institute open for business.

  But it was a project that had taken its toll. The financial crises attendant on its opening were profound, complicated as so often is the case by politics and competing egos. At one especially low point an anonymous donor gave sufficient money to keep the project tottering along – this turned out to be Lu Gwei-djen herself, who handed over part of her estate in Nanjing. Both she and Needham gave the titles to their houses on Owlstone Road – his at No. 1, hers at 28 – for the benefit of the trust. And from his personal funds (which were not inconsiderable: he was as judicious in financial matters as in his scholarly work) he paid Francesca Bray during her research for agriculture, much as he had paid Wang Ling for his help with the early volumes.

  But, more poignantly, the work was taking its toll on the health of the three now very elderly and increasingly frail protagonists of the story. Everybody noticed. Some observers were aghast. In the winter of 1986 Needham showed up in Hong Kong, walking slowly and painfully with the help of a stick, to ask for yet further funds from people with unimaginable fortunes. As he stood up after giving a talk, and hobbled off, one of his oldest friends in the room, Mary Lam, cried out: ‘Those people in Cambridge are so cruel, sending such an old man to go around asking for money. Give Dr Needham what he wants!’ (This they did, to the tune of $250,000.)

  Dorothy Needham was the first to die, three days before Christmas in 1987 The affection she and Joseph had displayed for each other never dimmed. The loving tone that marked their early correspondence – seen in hundreds of postcards and letters from Switzerland, Albania, Babbacombe, the Isle of Mull, O’Donnell’s Sea Grill in Washington, DC, and everywhere imaginable in China – remained intact for all of their lives.

  Dorothy – Li Dafei, ‘graceful plum blossom’ – had begun to suffer the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease soon after Needham retired. Thereafter she could travel very little, and was unable to take part in any discussions about the science to which she had once devoted her life. While still able to comprehend, in 1979, she had been elected an honorary fellow of Caius – one of the first women to be admit
ted, three years after her husband’s mastership had ended. Very occasionally the couple would dine in the college. When confused, she had to be led to her table by a steward, while Needham, now being wheeled through the college in a chair pushed by colleagues, would be hauled up to the hall in the dumbwaiter from the kitchen, along with the vegetables.

  Dorothy Needham’s last academic testament and magnum opus, written in 1972, was a book, Machina Carnis, on how muscles work: antiquarian booksellers still stock it, charging as much as $250, and it remains a classic. It had been a puzzle to her that despite her distinction and what her husband had once called her ‘complete freedom from worldliness’, she remained officially unrecognized by her university, and existed only on research grants, which were the basis for a hand-to-mouth existence and for which she applied and reapplied year after year through the decades of her active life.

  She died peacefully at home on 22 December 1987, at age ninety-two, having lived just long enough to be told that her husband’s institute had opened its doors – though it is doubtful that she ever truly understood. A flotilla of nurses were her final companions. The sadness of those close to her at her death was mixed with very evident relief that the ten long years when she was non compos mentis were finally at an end.

  Gwei-djen was not well, either. Though she – unlike Needham – had stopped smoking, she had had serious bronchial complaints for years, probably brought on by the chain-smoking of her youth. As far back as 1982, when she and Joseph had travelled to the mountains of Sichuan to investigate a cave painting that illustrated the first Chinese gun, she had just had part of one lung removed, and she had to be carried up to the caves on a litter. Sometime soon after that, she was found staggering around the college in the dark – Joseph and Dorothy were at the cinema – and was rushed to a hospital with a perforated appendix. In 1984 she collapsed in a hotel in Shanghai and had to be removed to Hong Kong, where she was treated. She recovered well enough to accompany Needham to Taiwan, where they had what both agreed was a wonderful time. But her collapse seemed ominous, and from then on she had a frail look about her, seeming very different from the tough little spitfire she had been in her youth.

  There was an unanticipated coda to this story. In the early autumn of 1989 Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen married.

  The woman from Nanjing, who had been named for the sweet-smelling osmanthus tree and as a thing of great value, had first met Joseph Needham in 1937 and had fallen under his spell in 1938. He had been thirty-seven years old, she thirty-three. They had become lovers, and ever since had been inseparable boon companions. Now, after fully fifty-one years of waiting in the wings, during which her essential presence in Joseph’s life was wholly accepted by Dorothy, Gwei-djen was at last to marry the man with whom she had shared this undying passion.

  In 1989, more than half a century after they first met, Needham and Lu Gwei-djen were married in Cambridge. She died two years later, whereupon Needham invited three other women to marry him. All politely declined.

  For more than half a century he had given her his unwavering affection. She, by way of return, had given him a great deal more: she had committed herself to him entirely, but she had also given him one further and incalculably valuable gift: China. ‘Joseph has built a bridge between our civilizations,’ she had remarked in the 1960s. ‘I am the arch which sustains the bridge.’

  The couple married in the Caius College chapel on the morning of 15 September 1989, a Friday. The wedding photographs show the two ancient lovers as they emerge through a sandstone archway, both stooped and with pure white hair, Joseph – the frailer of the pair – supporting himself with a tricycle walker and his chestnut stick, Gwei-djen leaning on a silver-tipped malacca cane. She is wearing a blue cheongsam with a bold paeony print, he a crumpled double-breasted blue suit that had seen better days, and a blue bow tie. A lapel button shows his Chinese Order of the Brilliant Star. Both wear sprays of lilies, and are smiling broadly. ‘It may seem rather astonishing,’ said Joseph at the celebration lunch in Hall, ‘for two octogenarians to be standing here together, but my motto is: Better late than never.’

  It was to be a very brief marriage, lasting just a little more than 800 days. Late in the autumn of 1991 she slipped and fell in a dark Cambridge restaurant, breaking her hip. A few days later, lying immobile on her back in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, she found it increasingly difficult to breathe, her cough worsened, and antibiotics offered to treat the very obvious infection in her already badly damaged remaining lung became ineffective. Early in November the doctors decided to send her home, where she died, peacefully, on 28 November. The official cause was bronchial pneumonia. She was eighty-seven.

  She had been inspired throughout her life in the West by one simple truth, something her father – Lu Shih-kuo, the ‘Merchant-Apothecary in the City of Nanking’ to whom Needham had dedicated the first volume – had said before she left China in 1937: ‘However strange the doings of the old Chinese might be in the eyes of modern people in the West, they always knew what they were doing, and some day the world would recognize this.’

  There was some untidiness following her death. A number of hitherto unknown relatives wrote urgently to Needham, having heard that she had left a small fortune in carefully managed stocks and shares, and demanding ample portions of it. She died intestate, and, though Needham tried to make certain that his late wife’s wish – that the bulk of her estate go to the charitable trust – was fully honoured, he had his lawyers fire off a barrage of letters to the various aunts and uncles and in-laws who had written so importunately from China, Canada, and New York state, rejecting most of their requests. Some claims, however, were still unsettled nearly two decades later, in 2007, and were being painstakingly handled by Gwei-djen’s executors. The outstanding cases have been of a complexity and a duration to rival Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. It is grimly supposed by many that the lawyers, working at a glacial rate, will consume an all too large portion of the remaining proceeds.

  Yet there was a curious reason Gwei-djen did not make a will. In the late 1970s and early 1980s work on the book was proceeding in a way that some critics found puzzling. Needham, now well on in age, seemed somehow to lose his early grasp on the need for a coherent plan for completing the project – managing to write no fewer than four separate (but magnificently irrelevant) volumes on alchemy, for example, and to shoehorn them uncomfortably into the series. This caused some ructions: not a few people in Cambridge began to fret that if Needham became subject to increasingly eccentric editorial whims like this, the series might never be finished.

  The worry became so intense that it prompted one unalloyed supporter of the book and its founder to fly to New York to reassure the principal American financial champion of the project – the futurist and computer guru John Diebold – that all was in fact well, and that Science and Civilisation in China would be completed (and he was quite direct in saying so) by 1990 It was the most foolhardy of predictions – and when it became clear to Diebold that the target date would actually be missed by decades, he became understandably furious.

  This led to much argument and many recriminations between Cambridge and New York, with the conviction growing in the minds of the ageing and stubborn Needham and Gwei-djen that some kind of plot was now being hatched in New York, and led by John Diebold, to shut down the project completely. In consequence, and by the time she married Joseph, Gwei-djen determined that she should not in fact make a new will – as she should have done – until she had engineered a financial structure that, whatever the villains in New York might do, would guarantee the future of the books, or, as she and Joseph then insisted on calling them, ‘our children’. But she died before completing her plan.

  Needham was devastated by her death – much more so than he had been by the passing of his wife four years before. Moreover, he was now very much alone, for the first time since he had married Dorothy seven decades before. The sudden and unanticipated lack of female companionship evidently u
nhinged him, and he swiftly and impetuously (but serially rather than simultaneously) wrote proposals of marriage to three women – all of them East Asian, one the Miss Shih of Toronto with whom he had enjoyed a brief but intense relationship twenty years before. All three women turned him down.

  His loneliness was exacerbated by the fact that all his academic contemporaries were now gone, and the people at his institute were young men and women who – though they waited on him hand and foot, treating him like an emperor and behaving with all the deference of courtiers in the Forbidden City – had little in common with him, and were much more absorbed in their own fields of study.

  Physically, too, he was weakening. He was bowed over with scoliosis and had developed Parkinson’s disease and a variety of other ailments. But his mind remained sharp – waspishly so, said those who got on his wrong side – and he continued working through the early 1990s at the Sisyphean task he had set himself nearly half a century earlier.

  To make his life a little easier, he had sometime before been moved into a house that stood in the grounds of Robinson College just next to the institute, no more than a two-minute wheelchair ride to the sun-drenched office where he liked to work. The house, built in the minimalist style of the 1930s, had been designed for one of the university’s most celebrated couples: the economist Michael Postan and his historian wife, Eileen Power. Needham would have been amused to learn of one unexpected connection: in 1930 Eileen Power, travelling in China, became engaged to Reginald Johnston, who was the immensely handsome tutor54 of the last emperor of China, Pu Yi. The engagement was called off in 1932.