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

by Simon Winchester

  —FROM CHUN QIU FAN LU, BY DONG ZHONGSHU, 135 BC; EXPLANATIONS BY JOSEPH NEEDHAM, 1956

  From Science and Civilisation in China, Volume II

  Senior members of Cambridge University usually are granted, as one of the perquisites of their standing, permanent rights to a college room or suite of rooms fashioned for two functions: scholarship and sanctuary. Some rooms in the relatively modern colleges are rather ordinary, more monastic than majestic. Some, such as those looking out over the river and the lawns at King’s, are enormous and sought-after: ancient grandeur personified. A room in a court at the heart of Gonville and Caius College, one of the senior collegial institutions of the university, is—because of its vast history—likely to be a particularly agreeable place, a perfect little gem, a home to be cherished by anyone fortunate enough to be granted the right to live there.

  The entrance to such a room will probably be a pair of ancient oak doors folded one against the other, the outer one to be occasionally closed, or “sported,” to indicate “Do not disturb.” There will be small mullioned windows, edged with weathered limestone, that look out onto a panorama of lawns and shrubberies. There may be a window box, with gillyflowers or honeysuckle, their fragrance wafting in during the long summer evenings. There will be a small sitting room, with a stone fireplace that is slightly larger than necessary, ensuring a fug on even the rawest of winter days. Often there will be a two-bar electric heater, to take the chill off the room first thing. The bedroom will be tiny, spartan, and seldom with enough cupboards. The plumbing will be elderly, and British.

  Of course it is quite possible for the occupant to make himself toast or crumpets on a fork in front of the electric fire, and perhaps even to brew tea in a pot suspended over the coals. But other than that there is no need to cook, since both the combination room and Hall are just a stroll away. Tradition requires that the college provide the service of a congenial woman of uncertain age known as a bedder, to look after your laundry, wash your dishes, and empty your wastepaper baskets.

  A good college room at Cambridge, where generally the only disturbance comes from fellows crossing the lawn (students are forbidden to cross it), or from the old clocks around town chiming the hours, is very much a place to keep. It is a place that, once granted, is to be held on to with tenacity and pleasure, to be abandoned only for the grave.

  Joseph Needham had secured his tiny suite of ground-floor rooms, identified (since they were on staircase K) by the initials K-1, in 1930. He had been given them on the retirement of their previous occupant, his old tutor, the biologist Sir William Bate Hardy. They were ancient—they had been designed in the 1560s to house an entire group of students—and despite having been paneled in the early eighteenth century and redesigned for the use of one student alone, they were still very cramped. Needham further compressed the available space by cramming it with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves so that only the tiniest of assistants could creep between them. He liked their snugness, however, convinced that it helped keep them warm and cozy through the bleakest Cambridge winters.

  Much happened during the six and a half decades of his tenancy. Dozens of wars would be started, fought, and finished. Communism came and, at least from Europe, mostly went. Four monarchs presided over Britain’s affairs during his stay, and thirteen prime ministers—Ramsay MacDonald being the first. Herbert Hoover was in the White House when Needham first occupied his room. And whereas other dons tended to work in libraries or laboratories, Needham made most use of this tiny bastion of scholarship deep in the old center of his college: for all the many years he occupied them, the rooms were witness to a ceaseless whirlwind of thought, activity, and creation.

  The work began almost immediately, and Needham let it be known throughout the college that his firm intention was to hit the ground running. He arrived from Paris in March. He spent most of April unpacking, brushing the combined dust of China and France from his well-worn boots, and reestablishing himself among the other dons of the Caius combination room. By the end of the month he rolled up his sleeves, opened a fresh packet of the tiny black Burmese cheroots he now liked to smoke, and set about typing out the formal beginnings of his project. Two weeks later, on May 15, 1948, he sent off by college messenger a short document: it was addressed to Cambridge University Press and it was red-stamped with the single word “Confidential.”

  The document was twelve pages long, and it was headed “Science and Civilisation in China”—the first time these five words had been assembled into the title that they would eventually form. Needham immediately got to the point. This, he wrote, was a “Preliminary plan of a book by Joseph Needham, FRS. It will be addressed, not to sinologists, nor to the general public, but to all educated people, whether themselves scientists or not, who are interested in the history of science, scientific thought, and technology, in relation to the general history of civilisation, and especially the comparative development of Asia and Europe.”

  Needham’s original proposal for the Science and Civilisation in China project. He envisaged it would make one large volume: so far it is twenty-four volumes, with still more in preparation.

  As a statement of intent this single sentence would remain unchanged through the entire making of the book. It was a statement that indicated, if subtly, that the book was going to be two things.

  Needham intended the book to address, on one level, the entire history of science in China. But on another it was also—and perhaps rather more importantly—to be a history of how the science and civilization of all humankind had developed, and the story of how over thousands of years China, in relation to the general history of civilization, had contributed to this development. It was Needham’s considered view that China had contributed to a far greater degree, and far more actively, than all other nations, and moreover had done so far more than was either known or recognized.

  He underlined this point in a speech to the China Society in London: “What is really very badly needed is a proper book on the history of science and technology in China…. It would have a wide bearing on the general history of thought and ideas.”

  The notion that China had for centuries been unconnected to these thoughts and ideas, and had stubbornly remained on the sidelines of the world’s development, was now to be swept away, once and for all. With this set of books, Joseph Needham—a man who was neither a specialist on China nor a historian but a biochemist with no reputation for scholarship involving the story of human civilization—intended now to bring out the evidence, thrust the Chinese into the spotlight, and tell the world in detail of the debt it owed to these remarkable, ancient, highly cultured people.

  Cambridge University Press accepted Needham’s proposal readily, with little debate or demur. Not that anyone at the press had any illusions: the undertaking would surely be formidable and very costly, and as a commercial venture was unlikely to make a profit for decades. But university presses are not generally established to make a great deal of money, and Needham’s early plan did not make the project seem unmanageable: the initial proposal suggested he could accomplish all in a single volume, and the letter of reply from the press dated May 22, 1948, formally accepted this as a target. Within weeks, however, reality apparently struck home, and Needham revised his estimate upward, dramatically. He could now do it in seven volumes—no more! he felt obliged to promise—and moreover he could finish them all with what in the academic publishing world might be regarded as dispatch. With the same self-confidence—or hubris—that had characterized the founding editors of the Oxford English Dictionary a century before, he airily told the Syndics, the wise men who form the editorial board of the press, that his project could and would be finished in what for an academic work would be fairly short order. Ten years, he thought, at most.

  Not everyone accepted the plan with the same equanimity. It was swiftly pointed out by a small group of naysayers that as a reader appointed by the university, Needham was still officially supposed to be teaching—that, after all,
was why he was paid. Some graybeards in some combination rooms felt that instead of writing a book about China he should simply stick to teaching undergraduate embryology and carry on with his research into the mysteries of such biochemically fascinating substances as inositol, which had occupied him six years earlier, before he had taken off for Chongqing in 1942. It might be better for all concerned if he simply stopped meddling in matters for which he was not officially qualified, and which thus should not concern him.

  But luckily only a very few took so stringent a view, and within weeks Needham’s interest in China was formally recognized by the university, and he was granted official leave to teach just biochemistry. He no longer had to be cumbered with the irksome responsibility of supervising graduate students. That was one small victory. A few weeks later came a second: he was told he need no longer teach at all; nor did he even have to turn up again at the department of biochemistry. He could instead remain in his college and draw up his plans for the books there, full-time.

  This eventual consensus from his academic colleagues was a credit to his very apparent doggedness. Everyone suddenly came to realize that this extraordinary man would go on to create his magnum opus one way or another. Moreover, if it was ever completed it might well bring luster to the university’s reputation—and so it would be foolish to let such details as teaching the complexities of the Krebs cycle to nineteen-year-old undergraduates stand in the way of the project. From the summer of 1948 on, he was essentially set free. “It was a schizophrenic period,” he was later to write, “but in the end I was able to follow my star without distraction.”

  So pleased were the fellows of Caius College to have the undivided attention of their most eccentric member that they then allowed him to act as temporary librarian, a task which suited him perfectly. Still, when he first visited the Caius library, ancient, revered, and rich with the smell of old leather and beeswax, he was vividly reminded of the insularity of those among whom he worked: vast oak bookcases were devoted to subjects such as constitutional history, ecclesiastical history, local history, and European history; but there was just a single tiny shelf labeled “Outside World.” It was an imbalance he set himself promptly to correct.

  Despite Needham’s manic energy and infinite resourcefulness he quickly realized—especially when looking over his own ever-expanding library—that he was going to need an assistant. The man he chose, who would loyally remain with him for the following nine years, and help oversee the publication of the first three volumes, was the Chinese historian Wang Ling. The two men had met in China in June 1943, when Needham stepped off a downstream ferryboat and found the almost evacuated headquarters of the Academia Sinica, in the city of Lizhuang on the banks of the Yangzi.

  Wang had been so stimulated by a lecture Needham had given to the academy members that he decided, there and then, to research all he could possibly discover on the history of gunpowder. So impressed was Needham by his eventual efforts that he asked Wang to come to Cambridge once the war was over, and lend him a hand with the project, if it ever took off. Five years later, almost on the anniversary of their first meeting, Wang Ling arrived in Cambridge from Shanghai to take up a position at Trinity College, and to assume a formal post as assistant editor of Science and Civilisation in China. The pair collaborated, became fast friends, and remained inseparable for the rest of their lives. In the early days Needham even shared half of his university salary with Wang, until the Cambridge University Press saw fit to pay Wang a decent wage.

  Before work could begin, Needham realized he would have to assemble in one place his ever-enlarging research collection of books and papers on China. There were thousands of them—some valuable, some worthless. All of them had been sent from China piecemeal as the war dragged on, or had been flown back by the Royal Air Force at the end of Needham’s tour, as part of the nearly limitless allowance that was then offered to repatriated diplomats. The boxes and crates that the Chinese freight loaders had jammed into the holds of westbound cargo planes held pile upon pile of books, papers, and manuscript texts that Needham had begged, bought, or borrowed during his years in China. Among them were some very rare items: he had bought ancient wood-block books, for instance, whose export would be strictly banned once Mao came to power in 1949. But Needham had good friends at both the Ministry of Culture and the Academia Sinica, and he continued to be sent banned materials until at least 1958, whatever the regulations.

  All through that early summer Needham arranged these books, shelved them, classified them, and filed the papers. The task seemed to require an almost superhuman fortitude. And it was to become, very suddenly, a great deal worse.

  Without any warning a large number of wooden tea chests and still more crates and cartons began to arrive at the Caius porters’ lodge—and each one held a vast quantity of even rarer and more obscure papers and books, not one of them collected by Needham or by anyone especially familiar to him. They were, it turned out, a gift.

  The boxes had all come from a man Needham had met in China but had almost discounted at the time and had quite forgotten since his return. He was a paleometeorologist, Dr. Zhu Kezhen, who in 1944 was president of Zhejiang University, called the “Cambridge of the East.” As with so many Chinese universities, the war had obliged Zhejiang to move from its site near Shanghai to a temporary home in the grimy, impoverished town of Zunyi, in China’s farther west.

  Dr. Zhu, who had a particular interest in the climatic history of China, had been doing his level best to maintain Zhejiang’s national reputation—and part of his plan was to ask for a visit from Joseph Needham of the British embassy, who might supply British and American textbooks and equipment. Yet he evidently had made little impression on Needham, who mentions him only briefly in his contemporaneous notes, marking him down simply as “China’s leading meteorologist” and reporting no special conversations or memories.

  Needham did tell Dr. Zhu that he planned to write a history of Chinese contributions to world civilization, but that was all. Needham’s diaries note that he was actually much more captivated by researchers at Zhejiang who were doing work on the mechanics of silk, color-pattern inheritance in ladybirds, the presence of flavonoids in jujubes, and the high levels of ascorbic acid in the local Chinese rose hip.

  He had no inkling of the enormous impression he made on Dr. Zhu—who seemed, as he later recalled, a rather taciturn and distant man. Zhu, however, had thought deeply about Needham’s plan to write a book and realized that he could be in a unique position to help.

  So as soon as Needham had returned to England, and by the time the Japanese had scurried home and the political and military situation in China became somewhat more stable,35 Dr. Zhu started collecting books and papers for him, packing them securely, and sending them to Cambridge by ship.

  One particular item Zhu sent turned out to be of extraordinary value, in terms of both money and of usefulness. It was a complete copy of an edition of 1888 of what was then and remains today perhaps the largest book in the world: the imperial Chinese encyclopedia, Kuchin Tu-shu Chi-cheng (Gujin tushu jicheng, in pinyin) or The Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings of Ancient and Modern Times. This was a distillation—or rather a conflation, since nothing seems to have been left out—of everything that was known to the greatest minds of the capital city of the Celestial Empire. It was the sum, in other words, of all Chinese knowledge.

  The book36 had been commissioned in 1700 by the Kangxi emperor—one of the earliest of the Qing emperors, and, with his reign of sixty-one years, the longest-serving in all Chinese history. It took its authors twenty-six years to complete, and when first published, having been printed with movable bronze type at the Peking Imperial Printing House, it reputedly contained 10,000 volumes and 170 million characters.

  The definition of volume was then somewhat different from our own—the word section or fascicle might be more appropriate. The edition Needham received, which was created a century and a half after the first (and
which, because of its fragility, is now packed away in boxes in Needham’s archive), comprised very nearly 2,000 books: the edition currently at the Library of Congress in Washington sports almost 6,000. Also, the word anthology might describe the work most accurately—it is not alphabetical but topical, and it is essentially a collection of everything important that had ever been written down in Chinese. Its usefulness to Needham was paramount. His debt to Dr. Zhu turned out, as he later readily admitted, to be incalculable.

  Once the books were in place and the rooms more or less in shape, a routine was soon established, as well as a commute. Joseph and Dorothy owned a house a little more than a mile away from the college, at 1 Owlstone Road. When Lu Gwei-djen returned from Paris in 1957 she would live a few yards away from them on the same street, at number 28, conveniently for all purposes. The walk between home and college—or the drive; Needham loved driving, and at irrationally high speeds—was fantastically pretty: in springtime and in summer the half hour it took to cross the lawns of King’s College, to stroll under the chestnuts beside the Backs, to pass down along the Cam by way of Newnham Road, and, finally, to cut through the rabbit warren of Edwardian houses to Owlstone Road, presented as perfect a cross section of Cambridge’s loveliness as any tourist might desire.