The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist

by Simon Winchester

  It had been agreed, said Crowther over a lunch in London a few days later, that by living in and visiting learned institutions all across “free China,” Needham could find out exactly what was wanted by the Chinese—textbooks, laboratory equipment, reagents, visiting experts—find out where it was wanted, and have whatever could be sent, sent. “I was to do everything in my power to renew and extend the cultural bonds between the British and Chinese peoples,” Needham told a London newspaper. And that, he suspected, was only half of it. For he was to go out only partly as the Royal Society’s representative; more prominently, he was to go as a diplomat—the head of a new body to be called the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office, which Whitehall had decided was to be officially attached to the British embassy in Chongqing.

  During the summer the mechanics of his journey were worked out. His rank at the embassy would be satisfyingly senior—that of counsellor—so his Chinese counterparts would take him seriously and accord him respect as a high panjandrum, a full representative of the British crown. His salary, while not likely to make him rich, would be such that “when you return to this country after your visit your bank balance would be the same as if you had not gone out to China.” Anyone wishing to make contact with him by letter should write by way of the British Council at either Hanover Street, W1; the Dupont Circle Building in Washington, D.C.; or the Reserve Bank Building, Calcutta.

  He first told Dorothy, who was naturally happy, but concerned about the very apparent dangers of the trip. First, he would have to get to India by sea, either in a naval vessel on convoy duty, or more likely in a cargo ship—a risky business in itself, since the European and Mediterranean waters were crawling with Axis raiders. He had done some research that suggested it might also be possible to get to India by way of New York and either Lagos or Durban, doubtful though this sounds. But the British Council dismissed this somewhat eccentric idea, arguing that delays in all three cities could amount to months.

  He would be given only forty-eight hours’ notice of his journey, so he would need to have his bags packed at all times. He also had to obtain an exit permit allowing him to leave Britain. It would probably be uncomfortable onboard ship, and he would be obliged to share a cabin with as many as half a dozen others. They would probably be cooped up for as long as ten weeks: because of the zigzagging routes needed during the war, this was the routine time for a voyage between the Thames and the Hooghly in 1942.

  Calcutta was the preferred jumping-off point for free China—the place where Needham would get his papers and his marching orders. He would then fly into China over the infamous “Hump,” a rickety and spectacularly unsafe air bridge that was then being organized by American freelance pilots, who flew Dakotas and kindred planes over the eastern Himalayan ranges between British Indian air bases in Bengal and the encircled free Chinese cities in Yunnan.

  Once the arrangements were made he decided to go to America and tell Gwei-djen. Her initial appointment in Berkeley had been cut short, because it turned out she had a nearly fatal allergy to the Bay Area’s omnipresent acacia flowers. After a stint at a hospital laboratory in Birmingham, Alabama, she took a research position at Columbia University in New York—which is where Joseph Needham, who had been writing to her weekly during her absence, decided to meet her in the late autumn of 1942.

  The exigencies of war made his date with her decidedly nontrivial. To reach her he had to take Pan American Clipper’s circuitous flying-boat route—first from Poole in Dorset to Foynes in southwest Ireland; then to Lisbon in neutral Portugal; then, since the early autumn weather was poor and the Atlantic headwinds were too strong, across to the coastal town of Natal in Brazil; and only after this giant leap by way of a further long flight up to the Hudson River landing site off Manhattan.

  The Clipper’s manifest, which listed him by his long-unused first name, Noël, stated his affiliation as “British Foreign Office.” The American ambassador in London had used this ruse in a letter he had sent to the State Department a few days before, asking that the War Department grant Needham—“a friendly enlightened liberal”—priority on a plane to China, “via Brazil, Africa and the Middle East, or by way of Australia and India.” But despite Needham’s apparent willingness to get to China by way of almost anywhere on the planet, the department was unsympathetic: even if he could get permission, he would have to spend weeks cooling his heels at various American military airfields. It would be far less time-consuming for him to go by ship. So his journey to America on the Pan American flying boat may have been officially sanctioned—by the British war minister, Anthony Eden—but it turned out to have little official purpose. It was an officially sponsored journey that enabled him, first and foremost, to visit his mistress.

  The pair met at the Manhattan dockside, and immediately checked into a hotel. Her apartment on Haven Avenue was too small and, after all, it had been some months since they had seen each other properly. He had already written about the government’s decision in principle to send him to China: now, after his dozens of meetings in London, he could flesh out the details for her, and he could ask for advice on places to visit and people to see. It was an exceptionally happy few days for both of them. His love affair with China, and his deep affection for her, had at long last borne fruit. He was off to China, and the very distinctive and very different second half of his life was about to begin.

  During those few days in New York Needham also told Lu Gwei-djen of a kernel of an idea that had suddenly come to his mind.

  It was an idea that had originated some weeks earlier. Among the letters that he had exchanged with Crowther during the summer of 1942 there is a reference to an essay that Needham was then considering writing: it would be on the history of science and scientific thought in China. A few days later he received invitations—probably initiated by Crowther—from both Nature and the BBC, asking him to write impressions of his forthcoming trip. On the letter from the BBC he scribbled a brief note to himself. It said simply: “Sci. in general in China—why not develop?”

  “Science in general in China,” he seems to be writing—”Why did it never develop?” In New York, he discussed the idea with Gwei-djen, and wondered out loud if he might one day turn this thought into a book that would explain to the western world just how profound and enormous was China’s scientific contribution.

  He could hardly have wished for a better audience than his diminutive, intense, pretty, and very intelligent young Chinese paramour. For many years she had been hammering into his head a notion first planted in her mind by her father in Nanjing—that China had made an immensely greater contribution to world science and technology than anyone in the West had ever acknowledged. According to the generally received wisdom, only a handful of the more enduring inventions had actually originated in China—and yet this belief, she and her father had said repeatedly and insistently, was nothing more than an arrogant conceit of the West. The two of them were perfectly convinced that China had invented scores upon scores of other things of which the West was conveniently ignorant. Perhaps, she asked, Needham could just try to find out what these things were.

  By the time he got home to England, the press was in a frenzy. The communist Daily Worker had reported exclusively that one of its own—never a paid-up party member, to be sure, but a man quite content to be known as a fellow traveler—was off to China, to give the help for which socialists had long been campaigning. Perhaps, the Worker said, Dr. Needham would find time to meet and befriend Mr. Mao Zedong, whose revolutionary exploits the newspaper reported as often as it could, and whose ultimate political victory in China was a consummation, in the view of the paper’s editorial writers, devoutly to be wished.

  The mainstream press also reported on Needham’s forthcoming trip. The Evening Standard, in particular, which wrote more than once of how this “big and exuberant man,” who, “at 42, is one of the most brilliant biochemists in the world,” was off to show that “he was perhaps the only English scientist who c
an discuss Chinese philosophy in fluent Mandarin.”

  There were a few weeks of limbo, when Needham went back and forth between Cambridge and London, working out further details. He found it all rather irksome. “9 a.m. War Office,” reads his diary for a typical day in London. “11–1 British Council. Lunch Dorchester. 3–4 House of Commons. Cavendish Café w/Ken Turner, U.S. Embassy; 5:49 home.”

  He also spent time lunching or having tea with people associated in some way with China. He met, for instance, the Foreign Office librarian, Sir Stephen Gaselee, whose formidable intellect (his obituary remarks that he was renowned as “a Latinist, Coptologist, medievalist, palaeographer, liturgiologist, and hagiographer”) more than matched Needham’s own. The American ambassador, John Winant, had him over; David Crook, the Stalinist spy and lifelong British communist, wrote a letter of introduction to an American journalist in Chongqing, Jack Belden, who he thought could introduce Needham to the Communist leader Zhou Enlai, and through him maybe to Mao Zedong; Julian Huxley, the biologist, called to wish him luck; Arthur Waley asked to meet Needham, in London; and the Chinese ambassador, Dr. Wellington Koo, took him to lunch. Needham remarked that he could well have spent the rest of the year dining with all those in London who had any interest in the situation in China, so eager were they to spend time with him.

  But then, on November 19, there came a telegram from a junior official at the Foreign Office. The ship was ready, it said, and would begin boarding in a few hours. The sea journey east should take ten weeks at the outside: Christmas would be spent somewhere in the Red Sea; the New Year would be celebrated at Bombay. In the confidence that the vessel would tie up at the Hooghly docks in early February, seats had been secured on an American military plane which was due to fly over the Hump from Calcutta, and which was due to depart in the fourth week of the month. If all went according to schedule Joseph Needham should arrive in the Yunnan capital city of Kunming on Wednesday, February 24, sometime in the afternoon. He should get his bags and leave immediately.

  The next entry in his diary shows that he did as he was told—for on February 3, 1943, he was indeed in Calcutta, performing a curiously unexpected task before finally leaving for China. He was, the officials explained in justification, a British diplomat who was about to travel in a country embroiled in a war with Japan. It was imperative, they told him, that he carried a sidearm, just in case. He had therefore been officially instructed that he was obliged to get himself a gun.

  And so on that hot February day this tall, bespectacled, and in appearance classically absentminded professor left his billet overlooking the Calcutta maidan and walked to the Fort William army depot. From the armorer there he procured a pistol, a Webley No. 1 Mark VI—the classic British service revolver of World War I, deemed still suitable for a diplomat even though the soldiers were being issued a smaller and lighter replacement. He was given eighteen rounds of .455 ammunition, and warned that, should he ever have occasion to fire the weapon, it would deliver “quite a kick.” He signed it out, agreeing that it was being issued on loan, and that it must be “returned when no longer required in connection with your present work.”

  Now, duly armed, and in all other senses bucklered and spurred, he was fully prepared for his expedition. He waited for three pleasing weeks—for Calcutta, in late winter during the war, was a city filled with amusement and delight. Finally came the appointed day: February 24, a Wednesday. He rose at dawn, as ordered, and was driven in a British army jeep to Dum Dum airport outside the city. Here he boarded a C-47 of the Army Air Corps Ferrying Command, bound for Dinjan in Assam.

  The plane rose through a morning fog, headed northeast, and after two hours of juddering, noisy flying touched down on a soggy plateau in the valley of the Brahmaputra. A quick refueling, a change of crew, and the plane was airborne again, heading now over the great rock pile of the Himalayas, and across to the international frontier.

  Needham gazed out of the aircraft windows, far too excited to sleep. Range after range of gigantic mountains, glaciers uncoiling between them, rose up before and beneath him, their sharp peaks reaching closer and closer to the plane’s underbelly as the pilot tried frantically, by making enormous spirals, to reach a safe altitude. The altimeter read 17,000 feet by the time they reached the top of the ranges, and everyone aboard was cold and gasping for breath.

  He tried to write a poem to celebrate, but (perhaps rather happily for his readers) there was too little oxygen in the cabin, and his mind wandered. Instead he read some Lucretius, complaining in the margins about the translation. And then the frontier was crossed, and the plane began its slow descent over the deeply incised valleys of the Salween and Mekong rivers, for Yunnan.

  This was the moment he had so long anticipated. It was Wednesday afternoon, teatime, on February 24, 1943; and just now, less than a score of miles ahead of the plane, all China waited for him.

  TWO

  Bringing Fuel in Snowy Weather

  On Oranges

  There can be no manner of doubt that the original home and habitat of these [orange] trees was on the eastern and southern slopes of the Himalayan massif; a fact which is reflected in the presence of the maximum number of old-established varieties in the Chinese culture-area, also in the extreme antiquity of the Chinese literary references. It is also betrayed by the considerable number of single written characters denoting particular species—not only ju for orange and you for pomelo, but also gan for certain kinds of oranges, cheng for sweet oranges, luan for the sour orange and yuan for the citron—always a sign of ancientness in the nomenclature.

  —JOSEPH NEEDHAM ON THE CHINESE ORIGIN OF ORANGES, THE FRUIT FIRST MENTIONED IN THE BOOK THE SHU JING, PROBABLY DATING FROM 800 BC

  From Science and Civilisation in China, Volume IV, Part 1

  It was the China of which he had dreamed.

  He stepped off the plane at Kunming’s military airstrip into a crisp early spring afternoon, the air cold but the sun warm, to be met by the British vice-consul and Pratt, the King’s Messenger. He was driven off to the city across a fertile plateau along roads lined with poplars and irrigation ditches and through hamlets with small cottages built of yellow mud brick, their roofs blue-tiled and with gently upturned gables and ornamental finials.

  By the time he reached the ornate buildings of the consulate he was immediately and uncontrollably happy. He fancied that the consul general looked like H. G. Wells, and the architecture was instantly delightful. He was also pleased to note that a grove of bamboos had been judiciously planted outside his bedroom window; and he was particularly overjoyed when he realized that the consulate’s corps of venerable retainers—“said to be promoted coolies, solemn but nice”—actually seemed to understand his painstakingly learned spoken Chinese. The consul, Alwyn Ogden, was astonished at his ability, too, and highly impressed.

  Needham spent the late afternoon unpacking, listening to the crows cawing in the consulate garden, and watching the sun inch down over the far Tibetan hills, imagining himself—as he wrote the next morning in a long letter to his old friend Margaret Mead, the anthropologist—in the Cambridgeshire village of Duxford, in the garden of the local vicarage. Throughout his subsequent life in China he would make comparisons like this, comparing obscure places in Yunnan and Hubei and Xinjiang to beloved, cozy places in the country he had left behind, or else to spots—usually in either America or France—that he especially liked. It comforted him to do so: despite his goading wanderlust he was often overwhelmed by waves of introspection and homesickness. In any case he probably suspected that the conceit added some sense of fine romance to his writings—though some of his comparisons do seem improbable: in comparing the city of Kunming to the village of Duxford he was likening a city of almost 1 million to a rural community of no more than sixty.

  He recorded with fine detail his impressions of his first thirty-six hours in China, in letters to Margaret Mead and Lu Gwei-djen in America and to Dorothy—who was working in the biochemical laboratory
in Cambridge. He told them all how he went for a stroll that first evening—the hills on the skyline in all directions seeming to him like the west of Scotland—and how he was charmed by the friendliness of everyone he met. People in the street smiled at him. The gardeners “in their little mongol caps” were all “amiable.” The sentry at the gate of Yunnan University may have carried a rifle with a fixed bayonet, but was “pleased to pass the time of day.” And he was charmed to be able to watch a circle of about 100 soldiers sitting on a lawn, looking on while a pair of them practiced kickboxing to the tune of a thin bamboo pipe:

  As I write there are many patches of blue sky. Everything seems so strangely familiar (my having thought about China for so long), yet like a dream—e.g. the old Chinese gardener in ragged blue coat and trousers with a wispy white beard who potters around smoking one of these long pipes with a tiny bowl…and a mongol cap, periodically performing elaborate grafting techniques on the plum trees.

  He had evidently stopped to watch this old gardener, and not just because of the man’s exotic appearance. He realized that in following as closely as he could the manner in which the man was splicing, tying, and grafting the plum tree, he was actually witnessing something rather important. He was watching a performance—the carrying out of a technique, a craft, a science—that was very, very different from the performance of similar techniques he remembered at home.