The Man Who Loved China

by Simon Winchester

  By the time Needham arrived, this view had changed, reflecting the melancholy new reality of China itself. In 1911, with the suddenness of the gallows, the ancient Chinese empire had fallen and its celestial court had been consigned to ignominy. The country that was then beginning its long struggle to emerge from thousands of years of imperial rule was in a terrible state. It was shattered by the bitter rivalries of a dozen regional fiefdoms; it was seething with the conflicting ambitions of newly imported ideologies; greedy foreign powers were gnawing away at its major cities and at its outer edges. The culminating humiliation was the Japanese invasion, begun formally in 1937, which by the time Needham arrived had resulted in the military occupation of one-third of the country.

  “This booby nation,” the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson had complained in 1824. He was well ahead of his time. Most of his generation saw China as an exotic Oriental enigma, pushed well beyond the mainstream of global culture, an irrelevant place that could offer to the outside world little more than silk, porcelain, tea, and rhubarb, and all wrapped in a coverlet of unfathomable mystery.

  Some few took a longer view. John Hay, America’s secretary of state at the turn of the twentieth century, remarked in 1899 that China was now the “storm center of the world,” and that whoever took the time and trouble to understand “this mighty empire” would have “a key to politics for the next five centuries.” But his was a view drowned out by the onrush of events—not the least of them being the dramatic collapse of the empire itself. By the 1920s, when Chinese warlords were battling furiously with one another, when millions were dying in an endless succession of civil wars and millions were suffering from poverty of a kind that was hard to imagine elsewhere, the country was widely regarded by most outsiders with a mixture of disdain, contempt, and utter exasperation; and the more simplistic views, like Emerson’s, were now widely held.

  But Joseph Needham would alter this perception of China, almost overnight and almost single-handedly. Through his many adventures across the country this quite remarkable man would manage to shine the brightest of lights on a vast panorama of Chinese enigmas—and in doing so he would discover, like no other outsider before or since, that the Chinese, far from existing beyond the mainstream of human civilization, had in fact created much of it.

  He found that over the aeons the Chinese had amassed a range of civilizing achievements that the outsiders who were to be their ultimate beneficiaries had never even vaguely imagined. The three inventions that Francis Bacon once famously said had most profoundly changed the world—gunpowder, printing, and the compass—Needham found had all been invented and first employed by the Chinese. And so, he discovered, were scores of other, more prosaic things—blast furnaces, arched bridges, crossbows, vaccination against smallpox, the game of chess, toilet paper, seismoscopes, wheelbarrows, stirrups, powered flight.

  The achievements turned out to be of such a scale—of such depth, range, and antiquity—as to mark off from everywhere else the country which first made them. They spoke of centuries of intellectual ferment that, though precious few were aware of them, had gone on to change the face of the entire world. They had also, moreover, created the very special circumstances—icy self-assurance, isolation, a sustained attitude of hauteur—that had made China seem so separate from all others. They had created the anthropological architecture that, in short, had made China China.

  By making these discoveries, Needham slowly and steadily managed to replace the dismissive ignorance with which China had long been viewed—to amend it first to a widespread sympathetic understanding and then, as time went on, to have most of the western world view China as the wiser western nations do today, with a sense of respect, amazement, and awe. And awe, as fate would have it, was in time directed at him as well.

  For Joseph Needham would assemble all his findings and their significance between the covers of a book—a book so immense in scale and so magisterial in authority that it stands today alongside the greatest of the world’s great encyclopedias and dictionaries as a monument to the power of human understanding.

  The book, the first volume of which was published in 1954, and which had swollen to eighteen volumes by the time Needham died in 1995, continues to be produced today and now stands at twenty-four volumes, with 15,000 pages and 3 million words. It is called Science and Civilisation in China, and it is universally acknowledged to be the greatest work of explanation of the Middle Kingdom that has yet been created in western history. And all of it was planned and a huge proportion of it written by this bespectacled, owlish, fearless adventurer—a man who, since he was also a nudist, a wild dancer, an accordion player, and a chain-smoking churchgoer, was seen by some as decidedly odd, and who had first arrived at Chongqing airport aboard the battered American warplane in the spring of 1943.

  But of course he knew nothing of this just now. This March evening in his embassy cottage in Chongqing he was no more than yet another bewildered newcomer, a man whose first encounter with the country had left him overwhelmed, astonished, and quite understandably exhausted. He had no literary ambition on his mind—nor probably any ambition, other than getting his travel-stained self clean, fed, and well rested.

  So he spent two delicious hours bathing, ridding himself of the accumulated grime of his journeying. Then he dined—and very well, since the embassy’s Chinese cooks assigned to his care were highly skilled. He went out on the terrace to smoke an evening cheroot. Finally, with a whisky at hand and a cigarette freshly lit, he sat down at the writing desk, and in the impeccable hand for which he was renowned, he drafted a brief letter to Gwei-djen, addressing it to her in her tiny apartment on Haven Avenue in upper Manhattan.

  His reason for writing, he told her, was first simply to say that he had arrived, that he was well, that he missed her desperately and longed for her to join him—as he knew she surely would once her research allowed. But he also wanted to thank her, and deeply, for starting him on this journey. He was at the commencement of an adventure, he felt absolutely certain, that would leave him a changed man.

  He was more right than he could ever know. The extent to which China in time did change the life of Joseph Needham and the manner in which that change would affect the thinking of the entire western world lie at the heart of the story that follows.

  ONE

  The Barbarian and the Celestial

  On the Worldwide Repute of Early Chinese Bridges

  Foreign admirers of Chinese bridges could be adduced from nearly every century of the Empire. Between AD 838 and 847 Ennin never found a bridge out of commission, and marvelled at the effective crossing of one of the branches of the Yellow River by a floating bridge 330 yards long, followed by a bridge of many arches, when on his way from Shandong to Chang’an. In the last decades of the 13th century Marco Polo reacted in a similar way, and speaks at length of the bridges in China, though he never mentions one in any other part of the world…. It is interesting that one of the things which the early Portuguese visitors to China in the 16th century found most extraordinary about the bridges was the fact that they existed along the roads often far from any human habitation. “What is to be wondered at in China,” wrote Gaspar da Cruz, the Dominican who was there is 1556, “is that there are many bridges in uninhabited places throughout the country, and these are not less well built nor less costly than those which are nigh the cities, but rather they are all costly and all well wrought.”

  —JOSEPH NEEDHAM, 1971

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

  Joseph Needham, a man highly regarded for his ability as a builder of bridges—between science and faith, privilege and poverty, the Old World and the New, and, most famously of all, between China and the West—was obliged to make an early start in the craft, as the only child of a mother and father who were ineluctably shackled in a spectacularly disastrous Edwardian marriage.

  Joseph Needham, the father, was a London doctor, a steady, unexciting, reliable sobersides. It
was as a lonely widower, in 1892, that he met the young flame-haired Irishwoman who was to become his second, and singularly ill-chosen, wife. It took him only six weeks to decide to marry Alicia Adelaide Montgomery, the daughter of the union between the town clerk of Bangor, County Down, and a French gentlewoman. It took him the better part of thirty turbulent years in the genteel London suburb of Clapham to repent.

  Alicia Needham was generously described as having “an artistic temperament,” which in her case meant a combination of wild, childlike exuberance and the staging of almighty tantrums, which were colored by her liking for throwing things (plates, mainly) at her husband. She was profoundly erratic, moods blowing up like storms, her torrents of tears being followed by gales of cackling laughter. She was fascinated by psychic phenomena, knew all of south London’s local mediums, read tarot cards, held séances, was interested in ectoplasm, and took photographs of spirits. She spent money like a drunken sailor, her spending binges frequently bringing the family close to ruin.

  It was eight years before she became pregnant. The son who in the closing days of 1900 entered this most fractious of households was to be their only child. Trouble began at the font: such was his parents’ animosity toward each other that each chose to use a different Christian name for the boy: from the four he was given at birth his mother selected Terence; his father, perhaps mindful of the time of year the child was born, instead chose to use Noël. The boy would sign letters to each with the name each preferred; but when finally left alone to choose, for both convenience and filial compromise generally used, and eventually settled on, Joseph.

  His was a solitary, contemplative childhood, lived out in his fourth-floor room, where he played alone with his Meccano erector set and his building blocks and a large model railway layout, and was bathed, shampooed, and dressed by a humorless French governess shipped in direct from Paris. But it was also an intellectually stimulating upbringing. His severe and learned father, to whom he was by far the closer, saw to it that he had a solid grounding in worlds both bookish and practical. He taught the boy how to write when Joseph was little more than an infant (his mother banging hysterically on the locked door protesting that the child was far too young), leaving a lifetime legacy of the neatest handwriting, perfectly legible and elegant. He taught him woodwork, bird-watching, the geography of Europe, the taxonomy of the back garden, and an antimaterialist philosophy that would remain with him all his life: the need to “give things only a passing glance.”

  Noël Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham and his leashed cat at home in Clapham, southwest London, 1902. Dresses for boy toddlers—a convenience for mothers and maids alike—were much in style in Edwardian England.

  There was spiritual instruction, albeit of an unusually rigorous kind. The family took the clanking steam train up to the medieval Templars’ church in the center of London each Sabbath day to hear the controversial mathematician and priest E. W. Barnes preach one of his so-called “gorilla sermons.” Barnes, who would later become bishop of Birmingham, was at the forefront of a movement to remodel Christian doctrine in the light of scientific discovery—most notably Darwinian evolution, from which the “gorilla sermons” took their name.

  He was an uncritical supporter of Darwin, denied the existence of miracles, opposed the fundamental beliefs about the sacraments, and outraged the orthodox members of the Church of England, who accused him of heresy and demanded his condemnation by Canterbury. And the schoolboy Needham listened to him enraptured. In an interview much later in life Needham explained the legacy that Barnes had left, summing it up by saying he had basically liberated religion from the “creepiness” that put off so many other people. Barnes and his modernizing zeal transformed faith, thought Needham, into the best of good sense.

  Not content with keeping up the academic pressure on his son even on Sundays, the elder Joseph Needham also took the boy to France on study holidays. The parents, ever fighting, invariably (and prudently) took separate holidays, and young Joseph, fearful of being embarassed by his high-strung mother, rarely went with her, except for a couple of times when he traveled to see a rather pretty niece who lived in Ireland. So much did he like France that he eventually spent a term at school there, at Saint-Valérysur-Somme, and was able to speak passable French by the time he was twelve, with some help from his gloomy governess.

  It was also in France that, when he was twelve, he had his first social encounter with the working class from whom his parents had tried so sedulously to shield him. He and his father were stranded on a remote railway station platform in Picardy, in the village of Eu. The hotels were full, but a track worker cheerfully took in the pair. “I remember how he invited us in to his humble home and made us most welcome there.” That men from classes shabbier than his own could be so decent came as something of an epiphany for the boy: he would reflect many years later that this small event in France played no small part in the construction of his later political sympathies.

  A respect for tidiness, order, punctuality, and routine was also instilled in the boy by the fussy, kindly old doctor—but in the Needham family, unlike so many Victorian and Edwardian households, it was done affectionately, not harshly. Maxims helped: “Never go upstairs empty-handed,” his father used to say. “Never have three helpings of anything. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. More flies are caught by honey than by vinegar.”

  The library his father had built up at home was prodigious, and books spilled off the shelves in almost every room. Young Joseph was captivated by the collection, and consequently his reading habits were precocious in the extreme—he remarked that he was only ten when he swallowed up Friedrich Schlegel’s The Philosophy of History in one go (learning to speak German en route).

  There was one figure, a family friend, who helped nudge the youngster toward his lifelong fascination with science. He was a diminutive, Napoléon-like Cockney anatomist who had originally been named John Sutton and was the son of an impoverished Middlesex “farmer, stock slaughterer and amateur taxidermist.” He later adopted the surname Bland-Sutton, won a knighthood, and when he became a constant teatime visitor to Clapham Park owned the kind of name and profession that the socially ambitious Needhams very much liked: he was now Sir John Bland-Sutton, baronet, surgeon.

  The schoolboy Joseph found Bland-Sutton’s tales endlessly fascinating—how he had dissected no fewer than 12,000 animals, from fish to humans, and had investigated the anatomy of more than 800 stillborn babies. How he had developed a diet for pregnant zoo animals, had found a cure for rickets in lion cubs, and had discovered that lemurs were unusually liable to cataracts. And how his peculiar early love for teeth, jaws, and tusks was in time supplanted by a growing surgical fascination with the genitalia of women.

  Bland-Sutton essentially invented the hysterectomy, though was widely criticized at the time for being a “criminal mutilator of women.” He wrote two definitive books: one on ligaments, the other on tumors. He entertained on a Lucullan scale, and built a house in Mayfair that had thirty-two columns topped with bulls’ heads and was modeled after the temple of Darius at Susa, in Persia. He had few close friendships other than a robust closeness with Rudyard Kipling—the pair, both top-hatted, were regulars on the London social scene.

  When the boy was considered old enough—nine—Bland-Sutton let him attend a simple operation, an appendectomy, at Middlesex Hospital, and paid him a sovereign for assisting. And though Needham soon decided he would never himself make a surgeon, he worked in the operating theater as an assistant to his father during his teenage years, handing instruments and catgut to the nurses while his father attended to the flows of ether and nitrous oxide that kept the patients asleep. Needham came to have a thorough knowledge of human anatomy as a result.

  And then, in August 1914, with the German attack on Belgium came the outbreak of the Great War. Joseph Needham was swiftly sent off to Northamptonshire, 100 miles to the north, to study at one of England’s oldest, costliest (he won no sc
holarship), and most distinguished public schools, Oundle. The education he received there was, for the time, unusual and excellent, and was due mainly to the school’s still fondly remembered headmaster, F. W. Sanderson.

  “Think,” Sanderson would proclaim to his boys in every welcoming speech and in every valedictory address: “Think in a spacious way. Think on a grand scale.” H. G. Wells was one of those in Edwardian England who heard the message and decided to send his sons to Oundle; eventually he wrote an admiring biography of Sanderson. It was an echo of the message that was then being conveyed by another Edwardian hero, Admiral Jackie Fisher of the Royal Navy, who often exhorted his audience to “think in oceans.” Put aside the mean and the pettifogging, the details and the trivia, Sanderson would say: just stand back and think big.

  While he was at Oundle, this child of two determinedly bourgeois parents first began to declare a real sympathy for the ordinary working-class man, and first began to display hints of the firmly socialist views that would eventually define his political life. His brief contact in Picardy four years before had suggested some early stirrings. Then one day in 1917 when he left school to visit a dentist in Peterborough, about thirty miles away, he opted to go by train, and delays forced him to wait for several hours. A kindly railwayman, who Needham recalled in old age was named Alfred Blincoe, took the bored youth up into his locomotive, stood him on the footplate in front of the controls, and taught him how to drive. After a few minutes of instruction, Needham remembered, “I could…take over the regulator and the Westinghouse brake and crack a walnut (as they say) gently between the buffers.”