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

by Simon Winchester

  52He also kept a hookah, which he had bought at a Uighur market in Chinese Turkestan. Though the device lies today in the Caius archives it is not known if he ever smoked it, either privately in his room or, even less probably, among the other fellows in the relaxed coziness of the senior combination room.

  53By now he had sold the magnificent Armstrong-Siddeley and had replaced it with a rather more prosaic car, a Ford Cortina. But had Mao known he would have approved: Needham had ordered the vehicle painted jingtailan, a word now taken to mean cloisonné, but in fact meaning an exquisite Chinese shade of pale blue.

  54Played by Peter O’Toole in Bertolucci’s film masterpiece The Last Emperor (1987).