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

by Simon Winchester

  Later he recalled his father working on the single apple tree that grew in the back garden of the family house in London—and if he closed his eyes he could see just what his father had done one long-ago summer day when he himself was just a child, while trying to top-graft this tree to help make it stronger and bear more fruit. The more he thought back, the more he realized that what his father had done was wholly unlike what this Chinese gardener was doing here in Kunming. Perhaps, of course, the difference was simply because the family tree had been apple, and this one was plum. But he doubted it. More probably it was because in China they did things differently.

  A further thought struck him. Perhaps the Chinese not only did their grafting differently but may have done this different kind of grafting very much earlier than anyone in Europe had done anything like it. Perhaps this old man’s technique was thousands of years old. Further still, quite possibly Needham could prove it was thousands of years old by researching old Chinese books on botany—which of course he could now read with ease. He could hunt down any references to fruit grafting in ancient times, and then compare these accounts with published histories of gardening in the English language.

  So he made a quick penciled note about the precise nature of this gardener’s technique, and a reminder to check the ancient texts. This notation is historically important—it represents the very first piece of information that Joseph Needham ever recorded with the specific intent of one day putting it into the book he was thinking of writing. If this gardening technique was different, then maybe he would have discovered a vital piece of information showing that Chinese horticulture had an antiquity far greater than anyone in the West supposed.

  He recalled once reading, in Cambridge, a treatise by the American missionary S. Wells Williams,12 which roundly declared: “Botany, in the scientific sense of the word, is wholly unknown to the Chinese.” Such a statement, Needham was to write later, “could only have been made by one of a generation totally ignorant of the history and pre-history of science.” Needham felt he needed to write his new book largely to overcome ignorance like this, and to purge the western world of prejudices against the Chinese that were based on such a wholesale lack of knowledge and understanding. Should a book ever be published, then observations like this, and the scores of others he now knew he would make—for this was only his first day in China, and he probably had chalked up one discovery already—would be sure to be included.13

  Moreover, what Needham had achieved and planned while observing this gardener—watching his peculiarly Chinese uniqueness, noting down the details of his craft, researching the ancient Chinese literature on the subject, and then comparing these writings with similar literature from the rest of the world—was an investigatory technique he could apply with equal validity across the board. Everything he was about to see—how a Chinese farmer plowed, how a Chinese bridge was built, how iron was smelted in China, what pills a Chinese doctor handed out, which kinds of kites were to be found in a Chinese playground, what a Chinese siege cannon looked like, how a dam, a brick, a haystack, or a harness was built in China—was useful to him. He could see and note down all these things while he was performing his official tasks for the British government. There would in any case be plenty of overlap between his official duties of helping out the beleaguered Chinese universities, and his personal research. He could spend each day looking, searching, noting; he could spend each night reading; he would examine the foreign literature when he got home—and then, perhaps, there might well be enough material for a book.

  And so even before he had reached his ultimate destination, Chongqing, the nation’s capital, where his billet—the British embassy—was sited, he was fired up with inquisitorial energy. His experience watching the gardener persuaded him to take advantage of his few days of rest in Kunming to scour the city and its hinterland for ideas—and he discovered them in abundance, together with much that astonished him, in areas of technology that were both prosaic and abstruse. The Chinese, he kept discovering again and again, had the longest imaginable history of invention, creation, and the generation of new ideas.

  He found and sketched, for instance, a bucket dredger, where coolies—his word—were winding up water from a deep ditch by hand. He ferreted out a local cytologist and discussed what he knew about British cell research. He went down local caves and found to his amazement scores of the finest measuring machines and scales squirreled away there, safe from bombings, with men in white coats patiently titrating and calibrating and weighing with Zeiss lenses and Griffin and Tatlock scales, hundreds of feet below ground. He was then even more astonished to find that Chinese scientists had a fathomless capacity for “make-do-and-mend”: he noted that even in the “sylvan surroundings” of Yunnan, some students at the crystal physics laboratory were building their own radio valves, and others were making quartz crystals for receivers. Perhaps most surprising of all, technicians in one physics building were making their own microscopes and telescopes from scratch, grinding the lenses to the correctly calculated shape from blocks of raw optical glass.

  On another day in Kunming he asked for and was given a history of Chinese mathematics from Dr. Hua, a man whose brilliance prompted Needham to describe him as the “Chinese Ramanujan”—until to his momentary embarrassment he discovered that Dr. Hua, like the legendary Indian scholar, had worked in Cambridge alongside G. H. Hardy, Trinity’s world-famous mathematics professor, and the two men knew each other well.

  He visited a laboratory doing work on antimalarial and antidysentery drugs, and spent one entire lunch being talked to about “plant growth hormones, cathode ray oscillographs, egg respiration and what have you.” Then that same evening he gave a talk on what he knew about the history of Chinese science, later noting with evident pleasure “the extraordinary good looks of the Chinese [that] came out remarkably as they were sitting round the fire. I like their long gowns, giving a monastic look to the scene, and they put their hands in their sleeves in a quiet way which is nice.”

  The very next day he decided to have a scholar’s robe made for himself. The local tailors seldom had to fashion clothing for a lao wai, a foreigner, and they were astonished at Needham’s height, which overtopped the average Chinese client by a foot at the very least. He decided on blue silk, with a black cotton lining and a lighter blue heavy silk for trim and enormous cuffs at the end of the baggy sleeves where he might hide his hands, as he had already seen Chinese merchants doing. The colors he chose denoted academia and thoughtfulness, the cutter told him.

  He was fascinated by the entire two-day process—not least by the arcane system of Chinese measurement which tailors still used (and which the older ones still use today), applying as it did such units as the duan, the cun, the chi, and the zhang. They then calculated the length of the silks required and the costs—first on a pocket abacus, and then as confirmation on a desktop machine, a venerable contraption of heavy teak spheroids and worn brass fixtures, which under the clerk’s fast-flying fingers whirred like clockwork.

  Needham was entranced. Here, again, was a shining example of a Chinese invention that, he imagined, probably predated any calculating engine made in the West. He sketched the machine in the tailor’s shop: it was made of twelve rods, each divided by a bar into a short upper part and a longer lower one, with two flattened teak balls on each upper part, five on each lower part, and everything enclosed in a teak frame. The Chinese name for the contraption was suan-pan, a calculating plate; wu zhu suan pan, a five-ball plate. The idea, the shopkeeper added, was probably as ancient as the hills.

  Soon after his arrival in China, Needham had a local tailor make a scholar’s robe for him, in blue silk with contrasting pale blue cuffs. By 1946 it was showing the effect of the rigors of his travels.

  Just how ancient was something Needham would determine later—and by patient detective work he would discover that the abacus was not only of far greater antiquity than any calculating engine ever made in the West (Blaise Pasca
l is generally given the credit for making the first, a machine devised in 1642, when he was twenty-one), but far older than had previously been assumed by scholars.

  Students of Chinese science working in the West had concluded from documents—most notably a picture in a book dated at AD 1436—that the abacus was a fifteenth-century invention. Not so, Needham declared after just a little more digging: a treatise written more than 1,000 years before, in either AD 190 or AD 570, had references to a calculating phenomenon which in English was translated as “ball arithmetic.” A further few days of detective work uncovered a full description, from a commentator named Chen Lun, of a device made “of a board carved with three horizontal divisions, the upper one and the lower one for suspending the travelling balls and the middle one for fixing the digit.”

  Within days of his arrival in Kunming, in other words, Needham was making discoveries about China that very few—whether Chinese or foreigners—had ever managed to make before. As a result, he was becoming ever more convinced. With no more than just a little inquiry he—a biochemist! an amateur!—was finding out things about China that the Chinese themselves didn’t know, and that even the most revered members of the small corps d’élite of Chinese scholars in the West didn’t know either. He was in consequence coming to the very firm conclusion that the book about which he and Gwei-djen had spoken so many times truly deserved to be more than just a vague notion. It needed to be written, if for no other reason than to establish once and for all a just and proper reputation for China.

  All this was a very long way ahead. But it was already beginning to seem as though nothing Needham would see, hear, or read over the coming years would go to waste. His late father’s often-repeated saying, quoted here yet again—“No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised”—had obviously remained with him.

  And there was one other thing: if he had begun falling in love with China while he was still in Cambridge, there was no doubt about his feelings now: this brief sojourn among the western hills of Yunnan had rendered Joseph Needham entirely and hopelessly smitten.

  Toward the end of March, Needham finally reached Chongqing, the Chinese capital, where his work would really begin. It was a measure of his importance to the government at home that he was escorted there by the same King’s Messenger, Pratt, who had met him at the airport a month before. Members of the Corps of Messengers are usually employed to hand-carry secret documents to British embassies around the globe; only very occasionally are they ordered to ensure the safe passage of critical personnel.

  But Needham was a critical man—he had been directed there by Winston Churchill. So it was Pratt who, on March 21, came with Needham on the excessively bumpy three-hour journey; Pratt who watched nervously as the plane put down on the sandspit in the Yangzi that was the city’s main wartime aerodrome; and Pratt who, after crossing the swaying pontoon bridge to shore clambered with Needham up the famous 480 granite steps, through the mobs of quarrelsome ban-ban men, the porters with bamboo shoulder poles eager for custom, to where the embassy motor cars were waiting. The messenger, like everyone else in the corps a former military officer, then saluted stiffly, his responsibility at an end; with the handshake from a waiting attaché, Counsellor Joseph Needham was now formally a member of the British diplomatic mission to China.

  He found the embassy a welcoming sanctuary, though it was a good deal less grandiose than most other British legations he had visited around the world. There were no marble pilasters and caryatids and no gilt chandeliers here; the embassy was a ramshackle agglomeration of long, narrow buildings on a bewildering variety of levels on a steeply terraced hillside on the right bank of the Yangzi. At the center was the reasonably imposing chancery building, with a proper porte cochere and a flagpole, and rooms at the back that led to caves carved into the mountainside, in case of an air attack. The half dozen other buildings where the lesser staff worked, and which were connected to the main embassy and to each other by a network of steep staircases running through the woods, had a cheap, temporary look, all lath and plaster and with bamboo sunshades. It was as though the Ministry of Works had built a temporary welfare payment office destined for some dreary English suburb but had set it down in China by mistake.

  Visitors were dismayed by the dilapidation: plaster had fallen off several of the walls, exposing the bamboo matting beneath, and some of the buildings leaned alarmingly, especially those perched at the top of fast-eroding slopes that crumbled down to the riverbank. Moreover, the humidity for which Chongqing was notorious had wreaked havoc on the equipment inside all the offices, coating leather shoes, attaché cases, typewriter covers, and the plaster walls with a greenish mold. Happily this mold burned off once the hot weather arrived—though there was no such luxury as air-conditioning; electricity for the fans was uncertain; and comfort was all too seldom the order of the day. The gardens of the embassy were home to some unfamiliar flowers, including some very fragrant ones that, Needham learned later that year, the local children turned into posies for men—selling them for one yuan at a time, to help mask the smell (like boiled meat, the Chinese complained of westerners) of their summertime perspiration.

  The ambassador, Sir Horace Seymour, was a career diplomat of the old school, having come to China from Tehran, where he had been the British minister. Needham described him as self-effacing—in fact, “so shy that by a sort of mumbling he tries to prevent you hearing what he says.” He had just struck what was perhaps the most important deal of his career: a few weeks before, on January 11, he had signed a document which formally ended all British claims on Chinese territory (except for those on Hong Kong), and which abolished all rights to the curious concept of extraterritoriality.14 He was in consequence a mightily popular figure locally, being seen in the capital as the man who had given back to China its long-sought birthright. He lived high on a hill overlooking the city, in a grand mansion which had been lent to the British by Chiang Kai-shek, the generalissimo. The setting was spectacular: both the Yangzi and the Jialing could be seen from the drawing-room windows; and from the dining room the magnificent mountains of Yunnan, blue and misty, could be seen in the far distance.

  Needham spent his second night in Chongqing there, in an atmosphere straight out of Tunbridge Wells, with chintz sofas and curtains in old-rose cretonne, gold-edged and royal-crested Doulton china, and silver-edged portraits of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. No Lady Seymour was present, though: she had elected to sit out the war in Wiltshire. But Needham did meet one of British diplomacy’s dashing characters, the flamboyantly enigmatic explorer-cum-special agent Sir Eric Teichman, who had been at Needham’s college, Caius, and had won a Blue15 in 1903 for steeple-chasing.

  Teichman had been invited along to describe for Needham the challenges of travel in remote corners of China. Few were better qualified. Like other Central Asian luminaries of the turn of the century, men like Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin, and Sir Francis Younghusband, Teichman was a traveler of enormous resourcefulness and courage. In 1935, despite having severe arthritis and still suffering the lingering effects of a youthful riding accident, he traveled by truck thousands of miles across the Tarim basin to the far western Chinese market town of Kashgar, then pressed on with a pony and on foot across the Pamirs and the Karakoram ranges to Gilgit, before finally reaching New Delhi. He said that this journey was his swan song as a traveler in Asia—for it was the last, the longest, and the most ambitious of his solo expeditions. He had been doing this sort of thing, disappearing on “special missions” and “fact-finding journeys” into this forbidding corner of the planet, since before the Great War.

  The advice he gave that night proved invaluable, as would become clear during Needham’s later epic voyages through China. And Needham was hugely impressed—as much by Teichman’s oddities as by his offer of assistance. Teichman, he wrote home, “is bent almost double, has a face reminding one of E. M. Forster, [and] comes out with a voice like a kind of harsh bell, extremely definite and clear and imita
ble.”

  The dinner over and the socializing eventually done with,16 Needham promptly found his office, assembled such staff as he had been allotted, and got down to work. At first nearly all his tasks involved his official duties for the Sino-British Science Cooperation Office, of which he was the director, and which was housed in a tiny prefabricated building at the top of the riverbank. He enjoyed the assistance of only a driver, a part-time secretary from India, and one older man of uncertain responsibilities. The organization would grow, and mightily; but at the beginning, Needham and these three did all the work.

  And the work, at least in the early days, was grueling. By Easter Needham was grumbling to his diary, if reasonably amiably, about both the scale of the task ahead of him and the practical exigencies of performing it in the still besieged wartime city. While others might be taking their ease during the dawn hours on the Monday holiday after Easter, for example, Needham had not gone to bed at all: he was still up, writing in his journal—in part to get his frustrations off his chest, in part to offer up an illustration of the duties he had to perform.

  On the Saturday before, he wrote, he had had an “exhausting” two-hour interview with China’s minister for war, and had then had to return to his office and write letters to a variety of bodies—one being the Potteries Trade Research Association in England—as well as to several local addresses. He then rushed out to dinner with “medical people”; came back and worked until past midnight; then slept fitfully until the moment when, very early the next morning, Easter Sunday (a day not celebrated by the Chinese):

  word is brought that the secretary of the vice-director of the National Resources Commission has called, so he has to wait while I dress. Hardly have I had breakfast before I am called to a two-hour meeting with the Ambassador concerning the anti-malaria situation, including claims by several varieties of commercial crooks of various nationalities. On return, with anxiety to get something done, find piles of unopened letters waiting….