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

Page 31

by Simon Winchester


  Professor Gregory Blue, who teaches world history at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, served as Joseph Needham’s personal assistant in Cambridge through most of the 1980s; the advice and assistance he offered to me was quite invaluable, as was his hospitality when I traveled to Victoria.

  H. T. Huang, who was Needham’s secretary and long-suffering travel companion during most of his wartime years in China, offered much help and advice from his present home in Alexandria, Virginia. His own long life—with its interludes as escapee, refugee, distinguished scholar, and science policy maker—could well be the subject of a fascinating book. I greatly enjoyed meeting him in Washington and listening to his reminiscences.

  Red Chan, who teaches at the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Warwick, accompanied me on all my journeys throughout China, acting most ably as translator and general fixer. I am greatly indebted to her.

  I should also like to record my gratitude to the following, who had specific knowledge of aspects of Needham’s life, or of China, and who were happy to share their knowledge or advice: Paul Aiello (Hong Kong), Robert Bickers (Bristol), Anne-Marie Brady (Canterbury, New Zealand), Francesca Bray (Edinburgh), Tom Buchanan (Oxford), Daniel Burton-Rose (Berkeley), Eric Danielson (Shanghai), Alan Donald (London), Ryan Dunch (Alberta), Gisele Edwards (London), Stephen Endicott (Toronto), Daniel Fertig (Hong Kong), Stephen Forge (Oundle), Edward Hammond (The Sunshine Project, Austin, Texas), May Holdsworth (London), Elisabeth Hsu (Oxford), John Israel (Kunming), Ron Knapp (New Paltz, NY), William Mackay (Hong Kong), Martin Merz (Hong Kong), George Ngu (Fuzhou), Peter Nolan (Cambridge), Michael Ravnitzky (New York), Priscilla Roberts (Hong Kong), Donald Saari (Irvine, California), Elinor Shaffer (London), Michael Sharp (Cambridge), Nathan Sivin (Philadelphia), Martha Smalley (Yale), Neil Smith (Dulwich School), Rob Stallard (SACU), Michael Sullivan (Oxford), Tony Sweeting (Hong Kong), Michael Szonyi (Harvard), David Tang (Hong Kong), Robert Temple (London), Dan Waters (Hong Kong), Jocelyn Wilk (Columbia U.), George Wilson (Bloomington, Indiana), Frances Wood (British Library), Lilian Wu (Hong Kong).

  My agents—especially Suzanne Gluck of the William Morris Agency in New York, with the able assistance of Georgia Cool and Sarah Ceglarski, and together with the help of Eugenie Furniss of the William Morris office in London, championed this book from the moment they first saw it, and did much to keep my spirits high through any trying times during the writing and editing process. Sophie Purdy kindly read the first rough draft of the manuscript and identified the more egregious of the longueurs, arguing forcefully for their excision or distillation.

  In Henry Ferris I am fortunate to have one of the most robust and scrupulous editors in New York, and he managed, with just the right mix of courtesy and firmness, the delicate business of trimming and adjusting the manuscript that I first submitted. His enduring assistant, associate editor Peter Hubbard, helped also with the task of acquiring illustrations and maps: between the two of them the text was whipped into something infinitely more fit for publication than when it first arrived. Mary Mount also added the very considerable benefit of her perspective from London, and made countless suggestions for improving the text, almost all of which I was eventually very content to accept. The book drew great benefit from the work that these three performed upon it; my gratitude to them is boundless.

  SW

  SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

  The bulk of Joseph Needham’s personal papers are held at the University Library, Cambridge, where all have been cataloged and most are available for inspection. A few personal files remain closed at the discretion of the librarian until 2045. A small number of documents relating specifically to college business are held in the archives of Gonville and Caius College. Documents relating to Needham’s involvement in the Korean War are held in the library of the Imperial War Museum, London. Papers relating to the creation of the series Science and Civilisation in China are held at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge. Cataloging was completed in July 2007. Dorothy Needham’s personal papers are held by Girton College, Cambridge.

  Beaton, Cecil. Far East. London: Batsford, 1945.

  Bergsten, C. Fred, et al. China: The Balance Sheet: What the World Needs to Know Now about the Emerging Superpower. Center for Strategic and International Studies and Institute for International Economics. New York: PublicAffairs, 2006.

  Brady, Anne-Marie. Friend of China: The Myth of Rewi Alley. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

  ———. Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

  Brooke, Christopher N. L. A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. 4, 1870–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

  Broomhall, A. J. Strong Tower. London: China Inland Mission, 1947.

  Brunero, Donna. Britain’s Imperial Cornerstone in China: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854–1949. London: Routledge, 2006.

  Bukharin, N. I., et al. Science at the Crossroads: Papers from the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology 1931. Foreword, Joseph Needham. London: Frank Cass, 1971.

  The Caian: The Annual Record of the Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 1 October 2003–30 September 2004. Cambridge: Gonville and Caius College, 2004.

  Chambers, James. The Devil’s Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979.

  Ch’ang Chiang Pilot, 3rd ed. London: Royal Navy Hydrographic Department, 1954.

  Chang, Gordon G. Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World. New York: Random House, 2006.

  Chang, Iris. Thread of the Silkworm. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

  ———. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

  Chang, Jung. Qian Zhongshu: Fortress Besieged. London: Penguin, 1979.

  Chang, Jung, and Jon Halliday. Mao: The Unknown Story. New York: Knopf, 2005.

  Chang, Raymond, and Margaret Scrogin Chang. Speaking of Chinese: A Cultural History of the Chinese Language. New York: Norton, 1978.

  Chen, Guidi, and Wu Chuntao. Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants. New York: PublicAffairs, 2006.

  Cheng, Pei-kai, et al. The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection. New York: Norton, 1999.

  Chow, Tse-tung. The May Fourth Movement; Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960.

  Clegg, Arthur. Aid China 1937–1949: A Memoir of a Forgotten Campaign. Beijing: New World, 1989.

  Collis, Maurice. Foreign Mud: An Account of the Opium War. London: Faber and Faber, 1946.

  ———. The Great Within. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1970.

  Colquhoun, Archibald R. China in Transformation. New York: Harper, 1898.

  Cronin, Vincent. The Wise Man from the West. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955.

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  Cullen, Christopher. The Dragon’s Ascent: The Civilisation the World Forgot. Hong Kong: PCCW IMS, 2001.

  Dalley, Jan. The Black Hole: Money, Myth, and Empire. London: Penguin, 2006.

  Dawson, Raymond. The History of Human Society: Imperial China, ed. J. H. Plumb. London: Hutchison, 1972.

  Dyer Ball, J. Things Chinese. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1982.

  Elcoat, Geoffrey. A Brief History of the Vicars of Thaxted. Thaxted, UK: Elcoat, 1999.

  Elvin, Mark. The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

  Endicott, Stephen, and Edward Hagerman. The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

  Epstein, Israel. From Opium War to Liberation. Peking: New World, 1956.

  Fairbank, John K., and Denis Twitchett, eds. The Cambridge History of China, 15 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986–.

  Fei, Hsiao-t
ung. China’s Gentry: Essays on Rural-Urban Relations, ed. Margaret Park Redfield. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

  Feifer, George. Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe, and American Imperialism in 1853. New York: Smithsonian Books and HarperCollins, 2006.

  Fenby, Jonathan. Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost. London: Free Press, 2003.

  Feuerwerker, Albert. China’s Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsuan-huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise. New York: Atheneum, 1970 (1958).

  Fleming, Peter. The Siege at Peking. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959.

  Friedel, Robert. A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

  Garrett, Martin. Cambridge: A Cultural and Literary History. Oxford: Signal, 2004.

  Girardot, Norman J. The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

  Goldsmith, Maurice. Joseph Needham: Twentieth-Century Renaissance Man. Paris: UNESCO, 1995.

  Goullart, Peter. Princes of the Black Bone: Life in the Tibetan Borderland. London: John Murray, 1959.

  Gribbin, John. History of Western Science, 1543–2001. London: Folio Society, 2006.

  Guest, Captain Freddie. Escape from the Bloodied Sun. London: Jarrolds, 1956.

  Habib, S. Irfan, and Dhruv Raina. Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Hahn, Emily. China to Me. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1944.

  Han, Suyin. Destination Chungking. London: Mayflower, 1969.

  Harman, Peter, and Simon Mitton, eds. Cambridge Scientific Minds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

  Herzog, Maurice. Annapurna: Conquest of the First 8000-Metre Peak. London: Jonathan Cape and Book Society, 1952.

  Hibbard, Peter. The Bund: Shanghai. Hong Kong: Odyssey Books and Guides, 2007.

  Hinton, William. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.

  Ho, Peng Yoke. Reminiscence of a Roving Scholar: Science, Humanities, and Joseph Needham. Singapore: World Scientific, 2005.

  Hogg, George. I See a New China. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1944.

  “Holorenshaw, Henry” (pen name for Joseph Needham). The Levellers and the English Revolution. Foreword, Joseph Needham. London: Victor Gollancz, 1939.

  Hook, Brian, ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

  Hsiung, James C., and Steven I. Levine, eds. China’s Bitter Victory: The War with Japan 1937–1945. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1992.

  Huang, Ray. 1587: A Year of No Significance—The Ming Dynasty in Decline. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.

  ———. China: A Macro History. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1997.

  Ingram, Jay. The Velocity of Honey: And More Science of Everyday Life. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2003.

  Israel, John. Student Nationalism in China, 1927–1937. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966.

  ———. Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

  Jinshi, Fan. Dunhuang Grottoes. Beijing: China Travel and Tourism Press, 2004.

  Johnson, Gordon. University Politics: F. M. Cornford’s Cambridge and His Advice to the Young Academic Politician. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

  Kahn, E. J., Jr. The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them. New York: Viking, 1975.

  Keynes, Margaret. A House by the River: Newnham Grange to Darwin College. Cambridge: privately printed, 1984.

  Kynge, James. China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future—and the Challenge for America. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

  Landes, David. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. London: Abacus, 1998.

  Lee, Sherman E. A History of Far Eastern Art, 5th ed. New York: Abrams, 1994.

  Legge, James. The Chinese Classics, vol. 1. Hong Kong: Lane, Crawford, 1861.

  Levathes, Louise. When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  Li, Guohao, et al. Explorations in the History of Science and Technology in China: Compiled in Honour of the Eightieth Birthday of Dr. Joseph Needham. Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics, 1982.

  Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

  Lin, Yutang. Moment in Peking: A Novel of Contemporary Chinese Life. London: William Heinemann, 1940.

  Lindqvist, Cecilia. China: Empire of Living Symbols. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989.

  Low, Morris F., ed. “Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, Technology, and Medicine in East and Southeast Asia.” Osiris, vol. 13. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

  Lu, Gwei-djen, and Joseph Needham. Celestial Lancets: A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

  Lyons, Thomas P. China Maritime Customs and China’s Trade Statistics 1859–1948. Trumansburg, NY: Willow Creek, 2003.

  Macartney, Lord [George]. An Embassy to China: Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney during His Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung 1793–1794, ed. J. L. Cranmer-Byng. London: Folio Society, 2004 (1962).

  Macfarquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.

  Maclure, Jan. Escape to Chungking. London: Oxford University Press, 1942.

  Mateer, Rev. C. W. A Course of Mandarin Lessons, Based on Idiom. Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1922.

  Mayor, Adrienne. Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2003.

  McAleavy, Henry. The Modern History of China. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967.

  McCune, Shannon. The Ryukyu Islands. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1975.

  Mendelssohn, Kurt. In China Now. London: Paul Hamlyn, 1969.

  Miyazaki, Ichisada. China’s Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China. New York: Weatherhill, 1976.

  Mukherjee, Sushil Kumar, and Amitabha Ghosh, eds. The Life and Works of Joseph Needham. Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1997.

  Needham, Joseph. Time: The Refreshing River (Essays and Addresses, 1932–1942). London: George Allen and Unwin, 1943.

  ———. Science and Civilisation in China. 24 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954–2004.

  ———. The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969.

  ———. Within the Four Seas: The Dialogue of East and West. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969.

  Needham, Joseph, and Dorothy Needham, eds. Science Outpost: Papers of the Sino-British Science Co-Operation Office (British Council Scientific Office in China) 1942–1946. London: Pilot, 1948.

  Owen, Bernie, and Raynor Shaw. Hong Kong Landscapes: Along the MacLehose Trail. Hong Kong: Geotrails Society, 2001.

  Pan, Lynn. China’s Sorrow: Journeys around the Yellow River. London: Century, 1985.

  Payne, Robert. Chinese Diaries 1941–1946. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1945.

  ———. Chungking Diary. London: William Heinemann, 1945.

  Pomfret, John. Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of a New China. New York: Holt, 2006.

  Powell, Timothy E., and Peter Harper, eds. Catalogues and Supplementary Catalogues of the Papers and Correspondence of Joseph Needham CH FRS (1900–1995). Bath: National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists, University of Bath, 1999.

  Preston, Diana. The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China’s War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900. New York: Walker, 2000.

  Price, Ruth. The Lives of Agnes Smedley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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  Raverat, Gwen. Period Piece: The Cambridge Childhood of Darwin’s Granddaughter. London: Faber and Faber, 1952.

  Redding, Gordon. The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990.

  Ronan, Colin A. The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: An Abridgement of Joseph Needham’s Original Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

  The Seige of the Peking Embassy, 1900: Sir Claude MacDonald’s Report on the Boxer Rebellion. Uncovered Editions series. Tim Coates, series ed. London: Stationery Office, 2000.

  Serres, Michael, ed. A History of Scientific Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

  Shaw, Raynor. Three Gorges of the Yangtze River: Chongqing to Wuhan. Hong Kong: Odyssey Books and Guides, 2007.

  Simon, W. How to Study and Write Chinese Characters. London: Percy Lund, Humphries, 1959.

  Snow, Edgar. Red Star over China. New York: Random House, 1938.

  ———. The Other Side of the River: Red China Today. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.

  Spalding, Frances. Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family, and Affections. London: Pimlico, 2004.

  Spence, Jonathan D. To Change China. New York: Penguin, 1969.

  ———. The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895–1980. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.

  ———. The Search for Modern China. London: Hutchinson, 1990.

  ———. The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds. New York: Norton, 1998.

  ———. Treason by the Book. New York: Viking, 2001.

  Stilwell, Joseph W. The Stilwell Papers, ed. Theodore H. White. New York: William Sloane, 1948.

  Sun, Shuyun. The Long March: The True History of China’s Founding Myth. New York: Doubleday, 2006.

  Temple, Robert. The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention. Introduction, Joseph Needham. London: André Deutsch, 2007 (1986).

  Tennien, Mark. Chungking Listening Post. New York: Creative Age, 1945.

 

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