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

by Simon Winchester

  From Science and Civilisation, Volume IV, Part 3

  By the time they wheezed gingerly across the half-broken bridge into Lanzhou, everyone in the party was tired and dejected. Being mostly British and therefore generally phlegmatic, they elected to stay put awhile, so that full repairs could be carried out on their vehicles. They would replace all the doubtful-looking gaskets, springs, oil pumps, and piston connecting rods that had plagued them since Chengdu; and to do the work they hired a man named Liu who, it was claimed, was the finest mechanic in the Chinese northwest. Needham, his tooth recovered, promptly took off to explore.

  For the two weeks of his enforced stay in Lanzhou he buried himself in as much book-related science and technology as he could find. He talked to biologists at the Epidemic Prevention Bureau, to a man who made windmills and was trying to detect water underground with a technique more sophisticated than dowsing, to experts on potato viruses and horse illnesses and to vets who knew all about the strange problems that afflict sheep in the Gobi Desert. Needham looked around a machine works, a dry battery factory, a flour mill, a power station, and a hospital so modern that the lights in its operating room had mirrors incorporated inside them, the better to illuminate the patient. He took a raft across the Yellow River to see some people called Bairnsfather, found others with unusual names—a bishop named Buddenbrook, an American named Lowdermilk—and noted with pleasure that at the local technical school a man from Java was teaching two boys from the Tibetan frontier about engineering drawings, while a Chinese-Tibetan girl was doing the accounts.

  He also did a series of routine, quotidian, and generally pleasant things—he had a haircut, bought himself a sheepskin coat and a set of wonderfully warm Gung Ho blankets, and stumbled across a German mission library where he luxuriated in being able to read year-old newspapers from Berlin. He found cartons of cheap but tasty Russian cigarettes and locally made, less tasty fat cigars. He also had soapstone seals carved with his Chinese name and various honorifics.26 He ate moon cakes (during the Chinese autumn festival, which took place while he was marooned), and bought wool and darned his own socks. Finally, he had a tailor run up some khaki cotton trousers, and wearing these and his freshly polished Sam Browne belt, took the local American consul out to dinner in a Muslim restaurant.

  But Needham was also rather frightened, by a number of unsettling experiences and by a torrent of highly unsettling dreams.

  Lanzhou was a city poised uneasily between battlefields, where conflicts of one kind or another were invariably in full flood—fights between Japanese and Chinese, between Nationalists and Communists, between untamed warlords, between frontier tribal rivals, between Russian invaders and frontier protection authorities. All of these left sad, struggling human detritus in their wake. Needham reported seeing, for example, large numbers of captured rebel soldiers “tied like hogs” and being led off to be shot. He saw “a tall country girl” trying to offer one of these wretches a bundle, before being struck full in the face by a guard’s rifle and told to be off. He saw what he referred to as a “trachoma squad” of bewildered soldiers from Sichuan, who appeared to have no idea where they were and behaved like “the blind leading the blind.” He came across groups of malnourished, waiflike children, military camp followers who, he noted with distress, kept dying overnight. Eighty-eight of them died during one particularly ghastly stop, according to Rewi Alley.

  After days of distressing sights like these, it was perhaps not entirely surprising that Needham’s sleep suffered, and that his nights were interrupted with bizarre imaginings. As it happens, though, his nightmares had no obvious connection to the miseries of China, but were in fact all related to anxieties over his life in Cambridge. One of them was quite simple—he dreamed he had lost his readership in biochemistry, that he was arguing with the people at his laboratory, and that he thought he might not be allowed to come back to England once his stint in China was done. This was perhaps due to his anxiety over air travel, which he hated and had to steel himself to undertake.

  Another dream he found less obviously explicable. He had been standing on a railway platform with his wife, Dophi—the notation in his China diary relating to her is in Greek, as was his custom—when an express train flashed past, collided with a vehicle, and threw out a woman’s body, “which splashed.” Seven other women then rose up, one from between the railway lines, and, terrified, they all rushed away. Then soldiers came, and Needham tried in vain to find the stationmaster to tell him what had taken place. “It was all very vivid and startling,” he notes. “Was it a premonition of danger?”

  If nothing else these dreams—and there would be others, especially when the nighttime weather in China was dramatically bad—reminded Needham that, however irritating the daily difficulties of travel, his life in China provided him with a great escape. The professional and domestic trials of his everyday academic and domestic life were far away and out of sight—and if his subconscious chose once in a while to nudge his elbow and force him to think of Cambridge, of biochemistry, of his religious convictions, of his mother (who by now was near death), of his wife and his mistress, and perhaps of the consequences of his normally careless liking for sexual adventure—then perhaps it was a small price to pay. A few bad nights in exchange for a life of such license as he now enjoyed seemed a bargain, he later wrote, that most would be willing to accept.

  They left Lanzhou, their truck supposedly mended, in the middle of September. The team’s makeup had changed somewhat. Ed Beltz, the American geologist whom Needham had very much liked—he was “49, an excellent chap, and tough”—had left to work at an oilfield in Gansu province. Liao Hongying, the beautiful chemist from Somerville, had opted to stay behind in Lanzhou, ostensibly to help in a local school. And Sir Eric Teichman had gone off, too, bound for the far frontier. Needham was sorry to see him go, for although his high-handedness (particularly in the matter of requisitioning trucks and drivers) had caused some inconvenience, his intelligence and courage were of the first water.

  As it happened, Needham was never to see Eric Teichman again, and for the most melancholy of reasons. After Teichman left Lanzhou he traveled along the outer Silk Road and across the deserts of the Tarim basin; crossed the Chinese frontier, as planned, for the Pamir Mountains; and finally arrived in India, his months of wandering passing without unanticipated incident. He was then flown home from New Delhi. But a few days after he had returned to his country home at Honingham Hall in Norfolk, he disturbed an American serviceman who was poaching on his land, and he was shot dead. He was just sixty years old.

  Needham later described Teichman as a great mentor, and his death as a terrible loss. Perhaps the passing of the funeral cortege in front of Teichman’s truck in Chongqing had been an augury, after all.

  Rewi Alley alone would continue with Needham to look for a site to build a replacement school—and so the party heading up north now comprised merely Alley, H. T., and Needham, who wrote as they set off, “I simply had no idea, before I took this North-Western trip, of the sort of thing it would be. Great mountain passes, overwhelming scenery, unpredictable roads, bridges broken down, roads washed away…strange places to sleep in night after night.”

  Beyond Lanzhou the road divides—to the left a main branch heads toward Tibet; and then to the right at a further junction, a small road heads off in the direction of the Tarim basin and the notoriously hostile Taklamakan Desert. Needham took neither of these, but opted instead for the first main branch to the right, along the narrow, 600-mile defile known as the Hexi corridor, the sole passageway for traders from the outer west into China, and for most of the country’s history also the only way out.

  His trucks bumped along what was then little more than an execrably surfaced track. They shook themselves free of the loess hills and the choking yellow dust and muddy rivers that had caused them so much motor trouble, and headed north toward the dry grit and cold of the Gobi Desert. For several hundred miles they marked their progress by followi
ng roadside markers and the path of the western extension of the Great Wall.

  On the left rose a snow-dusted mountain chain, the Nan Shan, which in Needham’s time was known as the Richthofen Range, having been named for its discoverer, the Red Baron’s explorer-geologist uncle, Ferdinand Richthofen. On the right ran what looked like a low line of adobe, twenty feet high, with dozens of caves hollowed out at its base. This rather sorry affair, crumbling and inhabited—for people lived in the caverns, and large mastiff-like dogs would rush out and bark violently on being approached—was the relic of the original Great Wall, formed of rammed earth, stones, sticks, and (it is said, surely apocryphally) the bones of its builders.

  There was almost none of the brick-faced reconstruction which went on during the Ming dynasty of 600 years ago, and which gives the Great Wall elsewhere its look of impregnability and permanence. In the far west it is a rather pathetic affair, crumbled, weather-beaten, and—since it ends in a Ming fort at the village of Jiayuguan 200 miles from where it runs alongside the Silk Road—all too easy to skirt. Almost any Mongols and other marauders would have found it a comprehensively ineffective barrier, no better than an Oriental version of the Maginot Line.

  It does, however, mark a frontier—topographical, geological, anthropological, linguistic—and so is a reminder of why it was first built. Within its supposedly secure confines lies China. Without is the barbarian beyond, and the names of the towns and villages that lie on the far side of the Great Wall in the west—Ehen Hudag, Amatatunuo’er, Ar Mod, Qagan Tungg—are clearly those of an alien people, unconnected with the Chinese, other than being their neighbors and, in Needham’s time, their vassals.

  The high grasslands here, vivid green and speckled with grazing sheep, reminded Needham of the South Island of New Zealand, or the machair of western Scotland; and when he first saw the Great Wall there was a spectacle in the making, with a thunderstorm boiling over the southern mountain ranges, and little naked shepherd boys in fur cloaks running into the caves for shelter.

  He loved the fact that the more distant hills rising out of the Gobi were called the Cinnabar Mountains, and he thought the whole conjunction—of names, weather, and great antiquity—was vastly impressive. He thought this even more when he crossed a cwm called Black Crow Sand Pass, raced down the slope on the far side to the nondescript village of Anyuan, lunched at a nearby mission, and discovered that its abbot was from England and, moreover, an Old Etonian. Only later that night, when the truck broke down yet again and he had to spend the night in a truckers’ rest stop, did his equanimity falter: his night, he said “was like sleeping in a public lavatory with cocks crowing under the bed.”

  Northwestward the scenery became harsher, more desertlike. Soon there were camels. At first most of them were solitary, but later Needham saw some harnessed together, in baggage trains. These were Bactrians, with two humps and a great deal of hair; and though they appeared to be numerous enough in Needham’s day, an innkeeper in the oasis of Shandan27 recently reported that they have become very rare, and are currently endangered. There are maybe 500 Chinese Bactrians in the world, the innkeeper said, most of them living and working in this lonely part of Gansu province.

  Beyond Shandan was Jiayuguan, the rather ramshackle fort of turrets and angular baileys that the first Ming emperor threw up at the western end of the Great Wall in 1372. This, sited in what is known as the “First Pass under Heaven,” was the place where exiles used to be sent, to be dispatched to the dismal lands of the great beyond, far away from the civilizing delights of the Chinese empire. Jiayuguan was also the site of the first imperial customs post. All who came here from the great beyond—all the camel trains that trekked in from Arabia, and came up and over the Pamirs and the deserts of Central Asia—could pay their first taxes and fealties to the representatives of the Beijing court, no matter that they still had 2,000 miles of trekking before reaching the capital. And even when the capital was at Chang’an, today’s Xi’an, it was still 1,000 difficult miles away.

  The westernmost entrance of the fort, the most distant from the Chinese center, is known as the Gate of Sorrows, and through it were sent all those doomed to be exiled. For those dispatched through it by imperial edict, it was a gate of no return, and it was popularly known simply as “China’s mouth.” To be within, to be “inside the mouth,” was to be safe, whole, content, one of the Yellow Emperor’s beloved children. To be beyond it, however, beyond the reach of the Celestial Empire, was to suffer a dreadful and unimaginable fate in a land of monsters who had red hair, drank milk, had eyes in their ribs, and wailed in perpetual pain.

  In the final days before he reached his goal, Needham spent many nights at lonely hostels in the Gobi Desert. These were run by the New Life Movement, one of Chiang Kai-shek’s half-baked schemes for reviving Confucian ideals. Needham liked the inns, noting that in one the spoons came from Leningrad and that another had been built into a sandstone fort resembling one he remembered in Dubai, in southern Arabia. The shops he found were stocked with Russian goods; the smuggled Japanese canned foods that could be found elsewhere had clearly not penetrated this far.

  And then, at the end of September, almost two months after leaving Chongqing, and 300 miles farther on, he was finally at his destination, Dunhuang. Out of the sand suddenly rose the green trees of the oasis—and somewhere nearby were the caves.

  At first it seemed as if this might be a bit of a letdown. Needham’s diary suggests that he was somewhat underwhelmed. One has to imagine that after getting bogged down more times than he cared to relate in the fine white sand that surrounds the town, he was now simply dog-tired. His remarks relate to comfort far more than to culture: Dunhuang, he noted, was very clean, and the nectarines, the pears, the crabapples that looked like large cherries, and the Hami melons from the great Turfan depression some miles ahead were “most delicious.”

  The following day he did drive out, as planned, to see the town’s famous caves, the hundreds of hidden cliff-grottoes which housed innumerable paintings and carvings of the Buddha—and where the Diamond Sutra had been found. But his notations are still perfunctory—“worked on caves all day” is about his only written remark, and seemingly written without very much enthusiasm.

  But this would all change, thanks to what, in view of the earlier experiences of his epic journey, he might well have anticipated. The truck broke down once again—this time so catastrophically (its main bearings sheared) that Needham and his party would be stranded—not for the next six hours or six days, but for the next six weeks.

  The Dunhuang oasis, where palm trees and melon vines suddenly rise out of the endless sands of Turkestan, exists thanks to a river called the Daquan, and to a small body of crystal-clear water called Crescent Moon Lake, which, despite being surrounded by fantastically high dunes, is by some hydrological mystery never filled in. The view from the highest range of these dunes, the Hills of the Singing Sands, is unforgettable. Dawn is the best time to climb: the sky (like the lake) is invariably crystal-clear, the robin’s-egg blue of early morning. The lower dunes rise and fall and glitter, immense sharp-sculptured waves of pale yellow crystal, as far as it is possible to see. The sun rises fast over a white-hot horizon. To the west, toward the trackless wastes of the Taklamakan and Lop deserts, all is still dark, but cloudless, and the summits of the distant dunes are tricked out with gold as the sun catches their edges.

  And then, rising from between the closer dunes, their vertical spires contrasting dramatically with the desert realm of the horizontal, are green trees by the thousands. There is water, somewhere nearby. This truly is an oasis, a place of refuge and settlement—and among the trees there are buildings that glint as the sun catches them, scores of structures, the upswept eaves of a nest of pagodas, the minarets of a mosque or two, a cluster of hotels.

  Dunhuang is the most important junction of this section of the Silk Road, a place where the merchants and pilgrims of centuries ago had to decide whether to pass to the north or to
the south. If they were heading toward India and Arabia, the southern route was the better; if bound for Antioch and the Mediterranean, they would strike out to the north. Dunhuang was where travelers on the outbound journey would rest and decide which route to take; and on the way home it was where they would rest and give thanks for having survived.

  Of the hundreds who passed by way of the Dunhuang junction, the Buddhists in particular offered the most profuse gratitude. They did this in three specific sites near the town, in gorges made by the river where the eroded cliffs stood tall enough and wide enough to allow the creation of what Indian Buddhists had long ago shown a liking for—scores on scores of intricately decorated caves, designed specifically for their mendicants and meditations.

  Of the three cave sites, by far the largest and most important was a cliff, one and a half miles long, at Mogao. Wandering monks began incising caverns into the soft sandstone cliffs of Mogao and in neighboring valleys during the fourth century, and by the time the last cave was dug in the fourteenth century, more than 700 had been created—some as small as coffins, and made for sleep and shelter; others many stories high, containing gigantic statues of the Buddha, and used for worship and salutation.

  One of the twentieth century’s memorable explorers of Asia, the Hungarian-born British citizen and archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein, reached this set of caves in the spring of 1907—with consequences that were to have a considerable bearing on Joseph Needham’s later work.

  Stein, who was born beside the Danube in the city of Pest in 1862, took degrees in Sanskrit, Old Persian, and the new science of philology at the universities of Vienna, Leipzig, and Tübingen. By the time of his discoveries in Chinese Turkestan he was in early middle age and revered for being doughty, implacable, imperturbable, and case-hardened to any trials that might befall him on the road. Since the beginning of the century, when he had completed a two-volume translation of a twelfth-century Sanskrit work, the Rajatarangini, he became obsessed with a single fascinating story: how Buddhism was carried from its birthplace in the high Himalayas of India, across the ranges and into the vast and protectively xenophobic empire of China.