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

by Simon Winchester

  The telephone service is very dim and the cars also. Thus, five minutes before an important meeting with some minister, I go along to the car park with the wooden paizi, or token, indicating the right to use a Chancery car, to find that Sir Eric Teichman or somebody has gone off with it, paizi or no paizi, whereupon I return to blow up Blofeld in his office, whereupon he flies round to the military or air attaché’s office begging for a car, but when we get to it we find that a tyre is flat, or the driver isn’t there, or that it hasn’t got any more petrol, or that it is using power alcohol from molasses so that it stalls on some awkward hill.

  Chongqing is a city defined by its hills. It rises like the prow of a ship, a great pyramid of jumbled rock and humanity, at the meeting point of two of China’s mightiest rivers, the Yangzi and the Jialing. Even though it is fully 1,500 miles from the sea, the Yangzi is still immense here—a great gray winding-sheet of a stream, littered with sailing junks, in places a quarter of a mile wide, in parts boiling with currents, in others slow and limpid, roaring imperturbably down from the Tibetan hills to where it pauses here in Chongqing, heavy with mud, on its passage through the great Red Basin of central Sichuan.

  The confluence of any two gigantic streams often provides a natural place to build a city; and so Chongqing is understandably ancient, having first been settled in the fourth century BC, and it has been one of the country’s greatest inland cities for at least 1,000 years. Foreigners were permitted to settle there from the beginning of the 1890s—it was the first of China’s interior cities to be obliged by treaty to provide concessions for traders and diplomats. Most of them liked the place—it was always lively; the people were peppery and amusing; the food was spicy; the women were said (except by supporters of a rival claim from the eastern city of Suzhou) to be the prettiest in the nation. The major problem was the weather: Chongqing is one of China’s three “great furnaces,” blisteringly hot from April until November, the air like bundles of heated cotton-wool, thick and barely breathable.

  In the early spring of 1943 the weather was not the major issue. The ruin and depredation caused by two years of nearly continuous Japanese bombing had pounded the city almost to death, and it was only now struggling painfully back to life, the people emerging from their underground shelters, blinking, into the smoky sunlight. Between 1939 and 1941 there had been no fewer than 268 bombing raids, much of the central city had been gutted by firestorms, and thousands had died—more than 4,000 in one terrible two-day raid at the very beginning of the Japanese campaign.

  The Chinese behaved with memorable stoicism during the bombing—which was arguably more sustained and terrifying than any other aerial bombardment inflicted on any other city in history. Robert Payne, a writer and teacher who befriended Needham in China—and who came briefly on one of Needham’s great expeditions—talked in 1943 to an elderly Chinese professor who managed to put the campaign into the kind of perspective that Needham would have welcomed. Payne was discussing the American bombing raids on Tokyo the year before, somewhat approvingly, and the Chinese sage was nodding his head in a way that Payne assumed signified complete agreement. It was only after the man began to speak that he realized “for the thousandth time since I came to China that a man who nods his head may actually be expressing the most profound disagreement:

  “I was in Chongqing during the bombardment,” he said. “I have no wish that the Japanese should share the same fate. Nothing is so terrible, nothing is so remorseless, nothing so revolting to the soul as a bombardment. The soul cannot suffer in peace after such indignities. Only now, two years afterward, can I think coolly of what happened, and I now praise God that China for centuries refused to harbour such things. The Chinese knew all about poison gases fifteen centuries ago; we invented an airplane, and quite rightly executed the inventor; we are the only nation that has thought continually of peace. I have no malice against the Japanese, who killed my parents and my brothers. I have pity, but it is not Christian pity, I’m afraid—it is the pity that burns.”

  Such conversations fascinated Needham, and as with the grafting of the plum tree and the making of the abacus, he avidly noted the details. But it turned out that he was not so interested in whether or not the Chinese felt pity for the Japanese, or in their views on the supposed indignity of bombing campaigns. It was the old man’s idea that a Chinese inventor had come up with an airplane, and that other Chinese scientists knew all about poison gas—and so these two nuggets of information, two Chinese “firsts,” if they were provable, went into the notes he was preparing, and also went into his ledger with a simple notation: “Research this further.”

  The mission, which was officially to occupy Needham’s next four years, was defined in all its aspects by the mechanics of the war that raged through China. By the time he arrived in Chongqing it was a conflict that had already steadied itself into an uneasy stalemate, and with the arithmetic pointing to one pitiless conclusion: Japan was going to lose.

  Everything had changed after the attacks of December 1941 on Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, and Singapore, when the Chinese government had at last declared itself officially at war with the invading armies from Tokyo. The Allies’ coolheaded military analysts swiftly concluded that as a consequence the eventual outcome was inevitable: insofar as China was concerned, Japan had embarked on a war that for one simple reason—China’s immense size—was absolutely unwinnable. China, 4,000 miles from Shanghai to Kashgar, 3,000 from Hainan Island to the Gobi Desert, was like a vast, shapeless sponge for any invading army: it could soak up, enfold, and suffocate endless supplies of men and matériel and still itself remain healthy, whole, and intact.

  Joseph Needham remarked on this years later. There had evidently come a point in the conflict, he said, when Tokyo also reached the same very simple realization: that even after it had fought over and then secured some town or village somewhere in China, its commanders would be obliged to leave behind sentries to guard bridges and culverts and tactically important sites: “and have you any idea how many bridges and culverts there are in China? Do you think Tokyo ever thought of this? Uncountable thousands. More men would be needed than Japan has in her entire army. The fact is, China is just too big, too complicated, for any other people in the world to come and dominate and control it. Japan was on a fool’s errand, and by 1941, it had come to recognise that.”

  The Nationalist government in Chongqing had therefore decided to spend less of its time and effort in the early 1940s fighting the Japanese, and instead let the sheer size of China wear the invaders down. Chiang Kai-shek had chosen the redoubt of Chongqing as his capital deliberately, with this very fact in mind. Even if China were to lose fifteen of its eighteen provinces, he once famously said, “if we hold on to Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan,” where Chongqing lies, “then we could defeat any enemy, recover the lost land, restore our country, and accomplish our revolution.”

  There was an additional reason for Chiang’s optimism. Because the Allies would be fighting Japan on the other fronts that had opened up since their attack on Pearl Harbor, Tokyo would be obliged to detach soldiers from its garrisons in China, weakening its presence in and its hold on China and so reducing the likelihood that China would lose any more territory. Therefore, a military policy of containment and survival became Chiang Kai-shek’s priority—that and defeating Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and their Communist battalions, whose own ideological power had been growing steadily during the first four years of the war.

  However, one major problem remained for the government in Chongqing—the supply of critically necessary food, weapons, and ammunition.

  A fair amount percolated through the 2,000-mile frontier between free and occupied China, with Japanese troops sometimes colluding in the smuggling. However, since the Japanese had attacked and occupied the northern part of French Indochina, the main railway between Hanoi and Kunming—which had been China’s lifeline, used for bringing in huge quantities of badly needed supplies from India—had been severed. The
only other supply routes passed along the immensely difficult caravan trails from Russia into the deserts of Xinjiang, and were seen as wholly impracticable. China—and its army—thus faced a real risk of being slowly starved to death.

  In an attempt to remedy this the Allies constructed the legendary Burma Road and the Ledo Road, hacked through well-nigh impenetrable jungles between India and China, in one of the most heroic engineering feats of any war, anywhere. They also arranged—most relevantly to this story—the air bridge over the Hump, the bridge by which Needham had traveled into China in February, and by which he would now want to bring in supplies for his own official mission. To do that, he would need permission. For his was a rather different task. The Allies were concerned most of all with keeping China’s body alive, fed, and in as fair a shape as could be expected. Needham’s duties were much more concerned with keeping the Chinese mind in good health, too—with making sure that the finest brains in the eastern world, legatees to the greatest civilization on the planet, were kept nurtured and in good spirits during all the trials of battle.

  The specific official task of his Sino-British Science Cooperation Office—later called SBSCO—was to bring succor and comfort to China’s academic community. He was to “cheer them up a bit” as Jimmy Crowther of the British Council had put it in London. He was to remind them they were not alone, that the world was thinking of them. But fine words butter no parsnips: what was really needed, Needham discovered as he made his first rounds of the ramshackle capital city, was supplies—laboratory equipment, reference books, and scientific journals. The universities inside free China needed to know what was going on in the world outside, and thus informed, they needed to begin their own research all over again. Such considerations were uppermost in Needham’s mind as he settled in at his new billet.

  Once he had got its measure, he found that the city was not at all as he had imagined. He wrote:

  To start with, it is an extremely sprawling place, running along at different levels for several miles, so that there is plenty of green about everywhere, and the sound of cocks and hens even in the midst of the city. Hence there is a certain resemblance to Torquay, which the reddish earth and some of the masonry makes you think of, but the hills are higher…. At night, when the lights are out, and you hear the sirens of the river steamers (an ever-present sound, though not so frequent as in New York), the place is said to resemble Hong Kong. It also resembles Harpers Ferry, where the Shenandoah joins the Potomac, and the sirens of the B & O trains redound…but the scenery is on a larger scale here. It seems that the city contains nothing old and beautiful architecturally, but rather masses of jerrybuilt structures put up after the bombings had destroyed everything that was there before.

  Some people might suggest that Needham was wearing rose-colored glasses, since most visitors to Chongqing in wartime, even though they liked its hugger-mugger spirit and zest, found it much less congenial and terribly dirty. It had dingy steps, slime-slippery alleyways, the stink of sewage, rats the size of small dogs,17 piles of rubbish spilling down the hillsides, scrofulous children, a million people crowded into a space originally meant for a third that number, and a cluster of immigrants and refugees so impossibly varied that communication was difficult, commerce frustrated, and service all but unobtainable. Moreover, the telephone service was virtually nonexistent, the electricity supply was fitful, there were no taxis, and living conditions generally were only tolerable. Because this was China, it was wartime, and everyone sent off to live in the capital had been forewarned that a stiff upper lip was a sine qua non, stoicism was part of the furniture, and fatalism went with the territory.

  But soon after Needham arrived he was able to effect an escape. Late in May the ambassador asked him to drive 200 miles to the west, on a first mission to practice the art of spreading good cheer in the capital city of Sichuan, Chengdu. It was a journey he anticipated with some eagerness—not least because one of the secretaries at the embassy, picking up quickly on his fondness for pretty young things, had written to tell him of the attractive women he might meet there. “If you like to see a beautiful girl, Lettice Huang…. Miss Kimmie Gao is also beautiful…. Don’t bother to see her unless you are inclined to have some female company.” He left the weary old ruins of Chongqing for the foothills of Chengdu with a certain spring in his step.

  His route went west through the fields and paddy terraces of Sichuan to the city in the foothills of the Tibetan plateau. Nowadays, on a seamless superhighway, it is a trip of less than three hours, but in the 1940s it was a three-day journey. On his way, Needham found that, to his great delight, he was once again able to indulge his academic curiosity as he had done so freely in Kunming. He dropped in on an alcohol factory (where he was able to speak in fluent German to the senior manager, who had trained in Frankfurt), he inspected a brine works, he gave lectures at two local universities, and he ferreted around in shops for old books—collecting on this first expedition a grand total of nine venerable volumes, including treatises, unavailable in any library back home in England, on the history of Chinese mathematics and astronomy, as well as books on Daoism and alchemy. After studying them, he slipped the volumes into the weekly diplomatic bag—the privileged embassy postal system—and eventually they made their way to Cambridge to await his return.

  When he reached Chengdu, the situation was precisely as the secretary at the embassy had told him. He enjoyed his stay hugely—in part because he did indeed find beautiful women there. Wielding his two techniques of flattery and breathtaking directness, which would soon become familiar to their many victims, he flirted, and not infrequently he pounced. “I can’t help writing to say what a charming person I think you are!” he wrote to one young woman, Zhu Jingying:

  I was much impressed when I first met you in the laboratory, and that was why I asked you to my party this evening, which certainly went with a swing. I have a good instinct about people: I know the right sort the first moment I see them. At the party I was more charmed than ever, for you seemed an enchanting mixture of seriousness and gaiety, reminding me of a girl I met in Kunming who drank a toast to Li Po in a way I shall never forget. With something so bright, so intelligent, something (and this is rare in women) so witty. Being easy to look at too. A Polish woman biologist (who afterwards became one of my greatest and most intimate friends) said to me once Je suis tout envahie de ton personalité, and that is rather how I feel about you. You are not ordinary.

  The reason I write like this is because in wartime life is rather uncertain and it may be that we shall never meet again: so I wanted you to know the admiration I felt.

  Don’t bother to answer this letter. Of course I do hope you’ll look me up at the British Embassy if you are in Chongqing; and I shall look you up when I come back here in August.

  There is no record that he ever met Miss Zhu again; nor is there any record of her reaction to this declaration. We shall never know whether she saw it as an honest and innocent expression of admiration, or as an artfully devised mash note.

  Whatever the fate of that particular meeting, a much more significant encounter took place during Needham’s brief stay in Chengdu. On this first westward venture, Joseph Needham met the young man who would be his secretary, confidant, and constant companion during most of his subsequent years of travel—and who would produce one entire volume of Science and Civilisation in China more than half a century later.

  He was Huang Hsing-tsung, generally known as H. T., and at the age of twenty-three he was working as a science teacher at a technical school just outside the city. He had been there for two years, after a somewhat dramatically interrupted career.

  He had been born in 1920 into the Chinese community of Malacca, on the south coast of the Malayan peninsula, and had gone to Hong Kong University to take a degree in chemistry. Shortly after he graduated, however, Japanese soldiers invaded and overran the tiny British colony—whereupon Huang decided to escape.

  He was first smuggled in a boat up t
he Pearl River. Then he managed to get himself, by walking or by begging lifts in passing carts, into the uncertain and ever-shifting no-man’s-land between the Japanese and the Nationalist Chinese lines. Then, after almost a year of wandering and considerable privation, and by managing all the while to stay one step ahead of the invaders, he fetched up in the far western city of Chengdu, and comparative safety. He presented himself at the closest local boys’ school, which was known as a Baillie School, after the Scots-American founder. Here, since he had a degree, spoke good English, and was evidently a man of considerable courage and initiative, he was hired as a teacher, almost on the spot.

  A few months later, and quite unexpectedly, he received a letter from Chongqing—a letter that was notable chiefly, he said, “for its prominent seals and stamps, one which stated ‘Sino-British Science Cooperation Office,’ and which endowed it with an undeniable air of authority.” It was from Needham, and it was brief and to the point. He wanted a secretary, desperately.

  The contact had been made by way of Gordon King, a Scottish professor of obstetrics from Hong Kong who was one of Huang’s former teachers, knew of Needham’s towering academic reputation, and was now himself in China. He had suffered through a hair-raising adventure, leading more than 100 Hong Kong students through the Japanese lines to where he was now teaching at one of Shanghai’s universities currently quartered in Chongqing. He found himself with Needham at an embassy event, and learning that Needham wanted help, promptly told him of Huang—a brilliant young man, he said, currently boxing well below his weight at a boys’ school across in Chengdu. It might profit Needham to make use of him in some capacity, King said—perhaps even as the very secretary he needed.