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

by Simon Winchester

  Three days later Huang and Needham were back in Chongqing—though not before visiting a local military arsenal and seeing a variety of plants that made, among other items badly needed by the soldiery, gun cotton, liquid oxygen, glycerol, phosphoric acid, and protective clothing. The most extraordinary thing about the arsenal was that almost all the production units were housed inside a vast network of natural caves—prompting the two men to wonder out loud, as their steamer sailed the last few miles downriver to the capital, how on earth all those immense machines, pipes, and distillation columns could have been moved through the gorges and across the fearsome rapids to be assembled in this remote riverside site. It was a further illustration of the imperturbable persistence of the Chinese people, for whom almost any task, it seemed, was ultimately possible.

  Once he returned, Needham found on his desk at the embassy a telegram from London, a message that in his view vindicated all the travels he had just undertaken.

  For the authorities had granted him permission at last to make use of the air bridge over the Hump to bring in supplies for the scientists who needed them. He had been allotted space on the inbound planes, and an acceptable tonnage, at least once a week, for a generous number of boxes that would be assembled in Calcutta on the basis of his requests. And so if a physicist in Chongqing needed copies of Nature, or a biologist in Chengdu wanted scalpels and a dissecting table, if the geologists at the Chinese Survey needed thin sections of rocks18 or a list of the poisonous plants of the Shan states, if a chemist in Kunming wanted the ninth edition of Kaye and Laby, and if the archaeologists at the Academia Sinica in Lizhuang needed the special brand of tissue paper that would enable them to transcribe the calligraphy from the old oracle bones—Joseph Needham could now get it all for them, and have the items flown in by the American military, all transportation costs to be borne by the British government.

  He was overjoyed by the news. It meant that real, tangible scientific cooperation was now beginning to take shape, and that the universities of free China would soon feel the benefits of the largesse of the faraway British. The intellectual communities of the world’s oldest civilization, lately almost comatose, would now soon begin to flicker back into life.

  Needham would say later that one of the greatest pleasures of performing the tasks he had been assigned in China was that he was enabled to understand the country’s culture and civilization without being constrained by the conventions of the type of people who in those days infested the country—the businessman, the missionary, the expatriate bureaucrat, and worst of all the “old China hand.” The scientists were very different: pure science itself was a neutral calling; the topics of study were invariably detached from the trivial political squabbles of nationhood. So the work that Needham performed brought him into direct, unmediated contact with men and women in laboratories and libraries who managed to be both aloof from the arguments of the day and yet fully aware and tenderly solicitous of the ancient culture of their country. No one to whom he spoke seemed to have an ax to grind—a situation he found gratifying and endlessly stimulating.

  Moreover, his endlessly open-minded and unaffected curiosity about China brought him into contact with people whom it might ordinarily have been difficult to meet—Zhou Enlai, for example, who would later become China’s first premier and foreign minister under the leadership of Mao Zedong, became a close and good friend.

  Zhou and the Eighth Route Army Bureau—the larger of the two main Communist armies—happened to be based in Chongqing at the same time as Needham. Needham had been given contacts in London, which early that same summer brought him a meeting with Zhou—and Zhou made it abundantly clear soon after their encounter that he liked Needham’s guileless interest in his country, that he admired his knowledge of and fascination with its past, and, most important, that he delighted in this Briton’s enthusiasm (albeit discreetly expressed, since the Briton was a serving diplomat of the crown) for China’s possible socialist future.

  Needham made little secret of the left-wing leanings for which he was so notorious in Cambridge. In his letters home, he remarked frequently on the economic inequities he was already witnessing in China, an unfair system that seemed to be fostered or ignored by the evidently morally flexible government of Chiang Kai-shek.

  It haunted him, for instance, that he had to pay so very little—477 yuan—for those nine extraordinary volumes he had bought in May in the bookshop on the Chongqing–Chengdu road. What he had spent would have bought him five pounds of rice at the local market. Inflation was appalling. Wages in 1943 bought just one-tenth of what they would have bought at the beginning of the war in 1937. Single men could barely survive on their salaries; men with families became desperate. And yet the widespread corruption meant that many senior government officials lived very well indeed—Needham wrote to Gwei-djen that he would often see senior officials with silk-gowned mistresses cruising through the streets of Chongqing in chauffeured American limousines, on their way to extravagant banquets, or to stores from which they would stagger with French perfumes, American cigarettes, butter, oranges, and imported coffee beans. While all this was happening, ordinary workers teetered on the brink of abject poverty.

  Those in the academic world were particularly hard-hit. Students and their professors alike in the cities of free China lived in cramped squalor; their food was limited, their illnesses were chronic, and their morale was low. And if, in those cities that had academic communities and thus libraries, rare books occasionally and mysteriously appeared on sale, and for inexplicably low prices, then one did not inquire too closely as to their provenance. Human survival was important, and if some potential purchasers who were in the happy position of being paid in foreign currencies—diplomats and foreign soldiers, mostly—were able to afford to buy those books, and if the purchases permitted the former owners of the books and artistic treasures to live, then what of it? The loss of a book was a trifling price to pay if it could be exchanged for the survival of a family.

  Small wonder, Needham remarked later, that once the war was over so many in China’s academic community who had experienced such inequity willingly offered their support to Chinese Communists. For many who experienced the harshness of those wartime years, Chongqing would remain a bitter memory. That so many of China’s cleverest and most creative men and women had to sell their books and their most precious carvings and family seals to keep themselves alive, while corpulent Nationalists and their friends dined well in local banquet halls, gave them some right to schadenfreude.

  Zhou Enlai, delighted that Needham shared at least the economic views of the party, made certain that Mao Zedong himself soon came to see Needham as an intellectual ally, someone with whom to keep in contact in the event that the Communists should ever win power.

  Come October 1949, on the declaration of the People’s Republic, Joseph Needham could well say to himself that in Chongqing, by cultivating his friendship with Zhou—and keeping his distance from the more obviously powerful associates of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government—he had indeed backed the winning horse.

  He became, in short, a true friend of China. He loved its past; and he believed in the trajectory of its future. And yet his fondness for the place transcended politics—it was more subtle, deeper, and more lasting. He once said he was genuinely and profoundly touched in later years when a famous Chinese meteorologist said of him that his work in Chongqing and his unalloyed support in later years, when China was going through trying times, exemplified the truth of an ancient Chinese definition of real friendship—that Needham was to China like “one who brings fuel in snowy weather.”

  THREE

  The Discovering of China

  On the Magnetic Compass

  It was [Chinese pilots who were] the first to employ the magnetic compass at sea. This great revolution in the sailors’ art, which ushered in the era of quantitative navigation, is solidly attested for Chinese ships by AD 1090, just about a century before its initial ap
pearance in the West…. The exact date at which the magnetic compass first became the mariner’s compass, after a long career ashore with the geomancers, is not known, but some time in the 9th or 10th century would be a very probable guess. Before the end of the 13th century (Marco Polo’s time) we have compass bearings recorded in print, and in the following century, before the end of the Yuan dynasty, compilations of these began to be produced. In all probability from the beginnings of its use at sea, the Chinese compass was a magnetised needle floating on water in a small cup.

  —JOSEPH NEEDHAM

  From Science and Civilisation in China, Volume IV, Part 3

  Joseph Needham swiftly realized that to accomplish all he had in mind in China he should now move very fast. He was certain that the British government would regard his mission as fully accomplished once the Japanese had been defeated and the war was over—and that might not be far in the future. Nearly all of the embassy’s military advisers, and those on the staff of the American embassy in Chongqing, too, doubted that Japan could hold on in China for more than a couple of years. And so from almost the moment his plane touched down, and well aware that on Churchill’s whim his duties could be brought to a sudden close, Joseph Needham began to whirl around China like a dervish.

  He led no fewer than eleven full-fledged expeditions around some of the wildest and loneliest places in the country, in the process logging somewhere around 30,000 miles. He probably covered more territory than the most doughty explorers who had gone before him. He would later make the bantering remark that he certainly saw more of China than his Chinese Communist friends saw on their famous Long March. They did a mere 8,000 miles—although Needham readily conceded that his mileage was done primarily in a series of wheeled vehicles whereas theirs was accomplished almost invariably on foot.

  Each of his expeditions had a threefold official purpose. First, he was to bring simple good cheer to the men and women working in China’s more remote scientific outposts. By now he knew only too well of their poverty and their improvisations, of their cheerful attitude of recycle and repair. He had heard countless tales—of tuning forks made from the spars of Japanese planes that had been shot down; of weights for chemical balances made by melting down coins of former dynasties; of vaccines stored in caves and kept cool with blocks of ice sawed from the surface of the Yellow River. Needham wanted to help these people, and he was fast developing a missionary zeal for helping.

  Second, to boost their morale—and to keep their vitally important scientific work going—he was to hand-deliver any equipment they needed. In performing this task he saw himself as something of a latter-day Father Christmas, delivering sacks of goodies to well-behaved, faraway recipients. Much later he recalled his pleasure in

  delivering large tubes of rare gases to the Chinghua University Radio Research Institute; or driving to the Peiping Academy’s retreat near the famous Taoist temple of Heilongtang with several substantial cases of optical glass, to help them in their courageous programme of manufacturing microscopes in the Chinese hinterland. A cathode-ray oscilloscope gladdened the hearts of the excellent physicists in Kunming, and a few grams of colchicines made all the difference to life at the Sichuan Provincial Agricultural Experiment Station. A consignment of rubber tubing arrived at a university in Fujian just at the moment when all research was coming to a stop because of the perishing of their previous stock. Electric motors in crates jolted over the road from Chongqing to Chengdu to help the excellent work going on in the Chinese Air Force Experiment Station there. A first-rate binocular dissecting microscope kept a first-rate embryologist full at work. These things are good to look back upon.

  Third, there was the nakedly diplomatic motive: he was to travel around China waving the flag for Britain. Few of his colleagues in the embassy had been granted as much freedom—and as generous a budget—to wander. It was felt that Needham—by traveling to unvisited nooks, places where the legendary Chinese suspicion of foreigners was still evident, and where few outsiders were ever seen or made welcome—might, if he acted judiciously, add a certain warmth to the rather cool official relationship between Britain and China. And if that happened, and once the Japanese were defeated and compelled to leave, London would be in a far better position to expand its influence, both in China (at whatever city the government might settle in) and then farther, across the region.

  A fourth possible official purpose is seldom mentioned. During those war years Britain, like all interested western powers, was eager to get to know all it could about the Chinese Communists. Joseph Needham was halfway to being a committed communist himself, and his contacts with the party leaders in Chongqing, and especially his burgeoning friendship with Zhou Enlai, could be of considerable use to the intelligence services. There is no evidence that Needham was ever in any sense a spy: prudence and scientific neutrality were his watchwords; he was always careful to retain the trust of the Chinese Communists as well as that of the Nationalist government to which he was formally accredited. But he had unique access, and the insights he gained from his visits to Zhou’s headquarters were uniquely valuable. His subsequent dinner conversations at the embassy, and his occasional discussions with military attachés from other embassies—especially with the “China hands” at Clarence Gauss’s American mission—were thus invariably listened to with great care, just in case Needham let some morsel of information drop.

  His expeditions also had an unofficial purpose. He traveled—and his superiors knew and recognized his pressing need to do so—to further his own personal academic investigations into the nature of China. His appetite for inquiry intensified the longer he remained in the country, and the embassy staff could not help noticing the huge number of books and pamphlets he was sending back to Cambridge, as well as the ever-increasing number of notepads and diaries he was filling. It was never entirely clear what he might do with the fast accumulating store of information, but that he was on his way to being the embassy’s premier China expert was becoming abundantly clear to all.

  Of his eleven expeditions, seven were short trips that took him only a few hundred miles out of Chongqing. The four others were anything but short—they were epics that took weeks, sometimes months, and were often risky, dangerous, and in at least one case, downright foolhardy. One journey took him through the jungles of southwestern China close to the frontier with Burma. Another went east and north, to Xi’an, the old capital city now known for its immense buried army of terra-cotta soldiers.19 A third went southeast, close to the Japanese front line—a somewhat mobile and intangible frontier which shifted with the fortunes of war, with the result that Needham and his small party were almost captured and made prisoners of war.

  The first expedition he undertook, beginning in August 1943, was the gem. This was by far the most complex and the most difficult—and, as it turned out, the most instructive and rewarding. Though many setbacks and minor disasters caused it to run months beyond schedule, it took him to the farthest northwestern reaches of China, far beyond the western terminus of the Great Wall and out into the hot and sandy deserts of what now is called either Sinkiang or Xinjiang but during the war was called, much more romantically, Chinese Turkestan.

  On this journey he headed to one specific spot in the Turkestan desert where there was a very small cave. Western scholars have given it a number, 17, and it is one of the 400 man-made Mogao Grottoes that line a cliff outside an oasis beside the far western desert town of Dunhuang, which is otherwise known as a rest stop on the Silk Road, with restaurants that offer steaks cut from local donkeys.

  For Needham, the importance of Cave 17 had nothing to do with his official duties. This cavern, whose doorway is so low that one must stoop to enter it, was the place where, thirty-six years earlier, in 1907, an immense and ancient Chinese library had been discovered, including a printed scroll that was now recognized as the oldest dated printed book in history. It is known as the Diamond Sutra, and it had been printed in AD 868.

  Map of Needham
’s Northern Expedition, Chonqing–Dunhuang

  That this book was made by a Chinese man demonstrated conclusively that printers had been at work in China six centuries before either Gutenberg or Caxton set their own first books in type in Europe. If any one thing in all creation gave the lie to the western notion that China was a backward country, this was it. The fragile document that had been plucked from the sands of Cave 17 showed that China was, quite incontrovertibly, a nation at the forefront of human civilization. From the moment Needham first read the story of the Diamond Sutra, he felt an irresistible pull: he had to get from Chongqing to the caves at Dunhuang, no matter what.

  He decided early on that his expeditions—certainly this first one, which he knew from the maps would be long and would cover difficult terrain—should be made in a rugged, reliable, go-anywhere kind of vehicle. After spending some days kicking tires, he chose a sludge-brown two-and-a-half-ton Chevrolet truck, a converted canvas-covered American ambulance that had been lent somewhat grudgingly by the Royal Air Force truck pool. He then hired to go with it a Cantonese driver, Guang Wei, whom he liked, and who agreed to double as a mechanic.

  On Needham’s instructions—given in English, since this was to be the common tongue among the participants, who came from London, Guangzhou, and Malacca, and so had three different linguistic origins—Guang painted “Sino-British Science Cooperation Office” in large white letters, as well as in Chinese calligraphy, on both of the truck’s cab doors and on both sides of its body. In addition he mounted two small flagpoles beside the headlights: one flying the Union Jack of Britain, the other the blue-quartered red flag, a white sun in its quarter, of Nationalist China. (Despite his friendship with the Chinese Communists in Chongqing, Needham felt it would be imprudent to fly any hammers, sickles, or red stars. This was an official British diplomatic adventure, and as a diplomat he was officially accredited to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government.) The flags would alleviate any possible doubt by friend or foe as to exactly who was traveling—and since stray parties of Japanese soldiers or strafing fighter planes had the habit of turning up in the most unexpected places, foes might well be encountered. Being able to demonstrate the mission’s innocently scientific purpose could, Needham thought, turn out to be a matter of life or death.