Bomb, Book and Compass

by Simon Winchester

  In 1992 Needham was made a Companion of Honour, and brought to Buckingham Palace to receive this most exclusive of British awards from the Queen. One of his care-givers – since Gwei-djen’s death he had a full-time helper, Stanley Bish – dressed him in a black silk Chinese robe for the ceremony. Needham was supposed to have said – but outside Her Majesty’s hearing – ‘About time!’ There were many who thought that he should have received an honour rather earlier in his life, beyond the purely academic recognition he had amassed. But he was content with his lot, and cherished the uniqueness that this particular honour conferred: ‘Joseph Needham, CH, FRS, FBA,’ said a notice published by the Royal Society: ‘one can count the number of living holders of these three titles on one finger of one hand.’

  He worked until the very end, faithfully taking a ginseng pill each morning – just one; Gwei-djen had long before told him that his previously customary two were excessive – in the belief that it would lengthen his life. He loved his office: he loved being surrounded, almost encased, entombed, enwrapped, and swaddled by the accumulated thousands of books and stacks of papers and scrolls, and by walls that were hung with pictures and charts and maps and lined with the filing cabinets, supremely well organized, that helped him in his work. And there were innumerable objects, too, attesting in aggregate to the extraordinary range of his travels and fascinations.

  There were clay models of masks from the Beijing opera. Chinese chess pieces brought back by Dorothy’s aunt Ethel. A small abacus. A bag from a sake brewery in Kyoto. A piece of the Berlin Wall. A model of a nineteenth-century beam engine. A baby’s urinal ‘collected by Rewi Alley in Xinjiang’. Seeds from a Chinese tea plant from Meijiawu. A Han dynasty bronze whistling arrowhead. An ivory box for keeping fighting crickets. A crossbow trigger, probably a Ming copy. A set of Chinese scales and a single slipper. A cigar holder engraved with Chinese characters written by Needham himself. Scores of seal ink containers, including one described as ‘very nice’, from the Qianlong era, made when Lord Macartney was visiting China in the late eighteenth century. A plaque stating that 28 October 1984 was officially Joseph Needham Day in the state of Illinois. Two pairs of slippers for bound feet. A rice pounder. A Sichuan spinning top. A toy railway train and one piece of track. Two of Dorothy’s earrings. Railway timetables and tickets galore. Photographs of churches from around the world. Pictures of himself morris dancing, while playing the accordion and smoking. A Chinese wooden puzzle. A sample of gypsum. A model of a spoon once used as a lodestone.

  These props helped, as did the ginseng, for Needham was still managing to work – though dozing for much of the working day, it must be said – during the following three years, writing, filing, napping, writing. He would be wheeled over to the institute at noon, and return at five. When he came back he would eat ice cream and watch Chinese television, and sometimes he would sing – once singing ‘The Red Flag’ so loudly he was asked to pipe down. He did not miss a day in the office, keeping to his routine of five hours at his desk labouring on the book, then going home to domestic letter writing, ice cream, and bed.

  On Thursday, 23 March, it was clear to all that the end was coming. His colleagues at the institute noticed that he was failing, and the next morning it was suggested that, for the first time in memory, he take the day off. It was a Friday, after all: he could make it a long weekend. He could charge his batteries for the week ahead. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay at home.’

  He got up for a while and sat at his breakfast table, classical music playing in the background. At noon his nurses put him back to bed. The dean of Caius came by, unannounced, and said a brief prayer with him, saying he would return the next morning to give Joseph Holy Communion. The old man slept through the early evening, wrapped in a sheepskin rug.

  Then his care-giver asked if he was frightened. ‘Oh no,’ he replied weakly. Christopher Cullen, his successor as director of the institute, asked him if he was in pain. ‘No, no pain,’ he returned quietly. Stanley Bish later wrote that a friend and neighbour, the distinguished historian of literature and science, Elinor Shaffer, came by, though she had wondered if she should, since she had a bad cold. She brought a daffodil, a sign that the brisk March weather was nonetheless the start of another spring, the ninety-fifth through which Joseph Needham had lived.

  She sat close to him, said Bish, telling him of her recent lecture tour, and believing that he understood the gist of what she was saying. At 8.45 two nurses arrived, and someone told Joseph how lucky he was to have two beautiful young girls looking after him. He grinned wickedly, impishly, happily. A few moments later Elinor Shaffer got up to leave, having been invited to have a cup of tea in the living room next door to Joseph’s bedroom before venturing out into the cold.

  She stood up and, according to his care-giver, grasped Joseph’s hand, squeezed it, and said happily: ‘Good-bye, Joseph – I’ll be in to see you soon.’ And with that Noël Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS, FBA, sighed once, very slightly – there was no pain, no gasping, no more than a weary acceptance of the inevitable – and died.

  It was 8.55 p.m. He had lived for ninety-four years and a little over three months. It had been a very full life indeed. It was a life during which, and all in consequence of his love for a Chinese woman, he had worked single-handedly to change the way the people of the West looked on the people of the East. In doing so he had succeeded, as few others are ever privileged to do, in making a significant and positive change to mankind’s mutual understanding.

  And now that was done, and his appointment at the Gate of Honour had finally come due.

  Written in elegant calligraphy beside the fireplace in Needham’s old college room is the famous four-character Chinese aphorism:

  The Man departs – there remains his Shadow.

  Such is the reverence for history in Cambridge it is likely that this singular memorial to Joseph Needham will remain in place for decades, and maybe for centuries.

  Epilogue: Without Haste. Without Fear

  Four thousand years ago, when we couldn’t even read, the Chinese knew all the absolutely useful things we boast about today.

  — Voltaire: The Philosophical Dictionary, 1764

  Much has changed in China since Joseph Needham’s battered old transport plane first touched down there in the spring of 1943. The city where he was based, Chongqing – or Chungking, as it was written then, when it was the capital of Free China – is now like few places on earth, growing so fast and so furiously that it is hard to keep up with the speed of the changes. Chongqing is now by far the most populous city in China, and by some counts can be regarded as the biggest city in the world. Thirty-eight million people live crammed within its metropolitan limits. The frantic rhythms of their lives capture the concentrated essence of everything, good and ill, about the awe-inspiring, terrifying entity that is today’s new China.

  The Yangzi still sweeps through the city, as ever, a turbulent winding sheet of thick brown sludge busy with countless hundreds of ships, sampans, junks, barges, and any number of other kinds of lumbering or scurrying watercraft. But the Yangzi is perhaps the only thing that someone returning after many years would recognize today. Now eight new bridges swoop over the river, and eight sparkling new monorail lines on stilts run along beside it. Clusters of skyscrapers have sprung up in each of the half dozen commercial centres, all of them glittering by day, and at night becoming a pulsing, flashing, Technicolor light show, a gaudy urban entertainment, with neon stripes of vivid yellow and royal blue racing up and down the sides of the taller buildings, the highway crash barriers winking pink, purple, and green, the tops of buildings flashing stars and with sinuous curves of coloured light crowning replicas of some of the world’s best-known buildings: the Empire State, the Chrysler, the Grande Arche of La Défense.

  Perhaps the Needhams and Gwei-djen would still just recognize the Liberation Monument, a pillar and a clock (that used to chime ‘The East is Red’ but now merely booms in the s
tyle of Big Ben), which was there when they were, dedicated in the 1930s initially to the memory of Sun Yat-sen; today it memorializes the defeat of the Japanese invaders in 1945 They might just remember the structure – but not its surroundings. There are hundreds of restaurants, selling popcorn and ice cream and various unidentifiable meats; there are mobile-phone shops, gleaming department stores, and lines of young men and women holding placards advertising skills – translating, painting, cleaning earwax, walking dogs, bricklaying, personal training – that they will perform for extra cash. There are teeming masses of people, happy-looking, prosperous, loud, boisterous, well dressed, well coiffed, and well fed, and all Chinese, flooding the square as though every day were a holiday and every moment fashioned for them alone, just to be enjoyed. Young policewomen weave their way through the crowds on roller skates, keeping a wary eye: and in the alleys there are riot police with dogs, just in case. All seems happy. All are watched.

  Current figures attesting to Chongqing’s size, growth, and standing are little short of stupendous. They are of a scale and sweep that Needham, working diligently among the ruins and devastation of sixty years ago, could never have imagined. Sixty years in the life of a city that, like Chongqing, is 1,500 years old might seem like nothing – London has changed dramatically in its past six decades, as have Paris, Cairo, Moscow, and Rome; yet in their essence these western cities are still today much the same as they always were, recognizable physically, familiar in the way they feel, sound, and smell. But this is manifestly not so for Chongqing: the same interval has brought about changes few other urban centres in the world have ever experienced, creating a future world, part Blade Runner, part Shinjuku, part Dickensian London, that is profoundly unrecognizable, a place to take away one’s breath.

  The entire municipal entity that is known as Chongqing incorporates both the crowded inner city and an officially city-governed semirural hinterland, the two together occupying about the same area as Maine, a little bit less than Austria, slightly more than Tasmania. The population of thirty-eight million puts it in a league not so much with other cities as with entire respectably sized countries – it is more populous than Iraq, for instance, bigger than Malaysia, bigger than Peru.

  The arithmetic is relentless. Every day 800 babies are born in Chongqing and 500 people die – many from emphysema, since the air quality is so bad, or by their own hand, so firmly have the new urban phenomena of angst and anomie taken hold. Thirteen hundred of the rural poor stream into the city each day to try to grab for themselves some of the riches that are so clearly being generated within. Thus some 1,600 new people every day are added to the population – the equivalent of all the people of Luxembourg welding themselves onto the city every year.

  To accommodate these numbers new skyscrapers are being flung up with furious abandon. Developers rule. The old houses, the charming little slum lanes known as hutongs, Buddhist and Confucian temples, Soviet-style factories, schools built in the 1950s – all of them fall these days to the wreckers’ ball and the bulldozers, and out of their ruins rise gleaming shopping arcades, office towers, and forests of blocks of flats, a ceaseless building frenzy.

  There was a brief pause in the spring of 2007, when an engagingly defiant couple in Chongqing caused a fuss by refusing to move from their well-worn terraced house, the compensation offered being too miserly, they said. Their property then remained untouched for weeks, a solitary island of brick on its tower of foundation earth standing alone in the centre of a vast pit of mud, with the developers of the new project – an office building – waiting on the sidelines like vultures until the courts voted to tell the old owners to go. Inevitably, the courts did that – although the fate of what came to be known as the little ‘nail house’ – since it looked like an unhammered nail, sticking up inconveniently and preventing all forward movement around it – became a worldwide sensation. It was pictured on the front page of the New York Times no less, and people said sagely that it demonstrated the battle for the rights of the Chinese individual over the rights of commerce, greed, and progress.

  In the end, however symbolic the battle, the individuals lost and the developers won, and the march of Chinese progress resumed. Chongqing became a little bit more modern and its skyline a little bit more impressive; the nail house was forgotten; and the old couple, now seen as more querulous than engaging, took their money and moved to a new development somewhere out of town. An immense tower now stands where their home once squatted.

  Chongqing is also a place of the most crushing poverty, a melancholy state of affairs made even more so when viewed against the knowledge that the city’s economy grows by $14 million each day, and that there will be 150,000 square feet of new office floor space completed each evening. It is all the more painful when it is seen – a crippled beggar here, a sickly ragamuffin there, a hollow-faced and hungry street musician waiting for coins – against a backdrop of lines of gleaming BMWs waiting in traffic jams, scores of construction cranes whirling against the skyline, elegant Thai restaurants jammed at lunchtime with young models wearing the qipao, nightclubs that breezily demand an entrance fee of a hundred dollars and are packed and heaving with local people until the small hours.

  The dark side of Chongqing is very significant, too, if largely unseen. On the street corners, and noticeable everywhere if one chooses to look, are members of the ragged army of unemployed ban-ban men, freelance porters with thick bamboo shoulder poles at the ready, game for any job carrying anything, from a giant wardrobe to a sparrow in a birdcage. There are said to be a hundred thousand of these men, who will be lucky to earn a dollar a day – and the work ensures that they will die long before they are fifty. There are beggars, skip-scavengers, sickly-looking prostitutes, buskers, and an alarming number of children selling flowers – six-year-olds working late at night while their mothers complete their shifts as waitresses in the local hot-pot restaurants, or as bar maids in the dubious hostelries clustered down by the docks.

  And of course there is the ever-present pollution, so dreadful as to be barely credible. There are days when one wakes and cannot see a single building through the thick brownish yellow fog, and the sun even at its midday brightest is often just a vague coppery glare. Chongqing is one of the very few Chinese cities that have long been entirely devoid of bicycles – the steep mountainsides see to that – and so its streets are jam-packed with cars and annoying motorbikes that sound like insects, all of them belching gases into the foul air and making matters decidedly worse. The city produces 3,500 tons of rubbish every day, none of it recycled, all carted away to be buried in enormous holes dug on the outskirts, where rubbish, landfill, and plastic sheeting are sandwiched together in a repeating pattern like lasagna until the void is full, the area is covered and seeded, and a golf course is built on top.

  Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen went back to Chongqing in 1982, and they spent an afternoon doddering about, looking in vain for the little house where he had lived forty years before. Even in the 1980s the city was in the throes of monumental change, and the lane where his embassy cottage was seemed to be no longer there; nor was it or the cottage to be found on any maps. The elderly pair left the place after an hour or so, muttering to themselves about the progress that had engulfed the old city.

  They were more rueful than critical, though: Needham had always thought that China would turn out like this, sooner or later. It was simply a matter of time – and the Chongqing they saw in 1982 was for them a hint of the future he had predicted, rather than a keepsake of the past he mourned. Only its great river, rolling past so solemnly, with the steam tugs yelping and the long sea freighters moaning their way past the docks, presented them with a scene that was comfortingly unchanged.

  Still, much else about China, even today, resists alteration. The rivers and the landscape will always be there, of course, to provide a backdrop, a climate, and indelible tracts of geology and topography. Some man-made creations have remained much the same over the years as we
ll, no matter what prosperity may have done to China superficially.

  The written language, for example – the very thing that so fascinated Needham when he first met Lu Gwei-djen in 1937 – remains intact, essentially unaltered from its origins more than 3,000 years ago. The cuisine is much the same – wheat noodles in the north, rice in the south, and chopsticks used throughout the country as they have been for thirty decades. The music, unique in register, timbre, tone, and rhythm, may bend with the styles of the day, but a song from the Tang would be perfectly recognizable today, and even the most modern of Beijing operas is deeply influenced by the archaic and the traditional.

  The physical appearance of the Han Chinese people survives, too. Maybe the Chinese are not so racially homogeneous as the Japanese or the Koreans. But as a continental people they remain distinct from many others – Americans, Russians, Europeans – in obviously belonging to one race, which is largely disinclined to dilution or change, and whose people much prefer (as the Tibetans can all too readily attest) periods of long-term ethnic stability and a cautious but relentless expansion.

  Within this framework of changelessness there is also, entirely discernible, something else that resists change – something that can only be described as an attitude. It is a Chinese state of mind, and one that outsiders – and all who are non-Chinese are very much outsiders here – may occasionally find infuriating and insufferable, but that certainly exists, and at no great depth beneath the Chinese skin. It is an attitude, one might argue, that has been born of the very achievement that Joseph Needham attempted to catalogue and describe in his series of books. It is an attitude of ineluctable and self-knowing Chinese superiority, and it results from the antiquity and the longevity of the Chinese people’s endeavours.