The Man Who Loved China

by Simon Winchester

  H. T.’s ultimate mission—once he made sure his boss would be rescued—was to get home to Chongqing. He was supposed to ride the animals across the desert to a road where he might catch a bus, find his way by road to Lanzhou, then somehow find an airplane bound for the capital, and once there go to Needham’s office and restart the work that the boss was having to ignore—supplying universities with their various needs and ordering these goods from India.

  But his trip home became just as frustrating as the expedition itself. H. T.’s bus slid into a ditch; a car he rented blew a gasket and had spark plug trouble; and when he finally reached the Lanzhou airfield he was ejected from every plane he tried to board, because all the aircraft had been commandeered to carry immense quantities of Hami melons to Chiang Kai-shek and his melon-loving wife.

  He waited at the aerodrome for the better part of a month before deciding to return to Lanzhou. When he got there, he found that Needham’s party had also made it that far. A crew of mechanics from a desert oil field had done some limited repairs on the engine, the truck had managed to limp to Lanzhou, and a more competent local technician there would make it ready for its 1,000-mile journey home.

  There remained one small problem. Although Needham and H. T. were both in Lanzhou, Needham was south of the Yellow River and H. T. was north of it, and the bridge was down.

  “So we both spent a great deal of time crossing the river each day,” wrote H. T. some years later. “I particularly enjoyed…the sheepskin raft, which gave me the sensation of sitting right on top of the churning current. As the weather got colder, chunks of ice began to appear on the water and by early December the whole river was solidly frozen. It was an awesome sight to see the mighty river turned into a solid sheet of ice, all within the space of two weeks.”

  By early December, with Needham having done all he could in the Chinese northwest, he joined a long list of people trying to get on the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) flight. He had connections aplenty, thanks to his journeying; and after a mere two weeks of waiting, one of them finally worked the necessary wonders. Room was found on a beat-up old American warplane, and crammed in with baggage, melons, and a few other hastily boarded emergency travelers, Needham took off. At five p.m. on December 14 the plane touched down at Chongqing’s sandspit of an airfield, where there was an embassy official on hand to greet him. He had expected to be away for a month: he had been gone for four.

  Meanwhile, H. T. Huang had still to get home in the wounded old Chevrolet truck. It took him a further month of misery—at one stage he ran out of lubricant and resorted to filling the engine with rapeseed oil. But in late January 1944, five and a half months after leaving, he and Needham were reunited, and the two men were able to breathe a sigh of relief, turn the truck over to the embassy garage, and never set eyes on it again.

  There was one other pleasing coda to the journey—a romance which blossomed right under everybody’s nose, and yet passed unnoticed by all, thanks to the journey’s abundance of difficulties. Liao Hongying, the pretty young woman whom Needham had dropped off in Lanzhou, met there a visiting British diplomat, Derek Bryan. The pair had come back to Chongqing in H. T.’s truck. During the journey Bryan remarked on the discipline and efficiency of Mao Zedong’s Communist soldiers—and Liao realized that he was clearly not a stuffed-shirt supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, as in her view most foreign diplomats were, but rather was “one of us, one of the people.”

  They fell in love, were engaged within the month, were married soon after—and became subsequently an abiding fixture, first in Beijing and then later in England among the small corps d’élite who, during the 1950s and 1960s, campaigned in earnest and unwavering support for the ideals of the People’s Republic of China.

  Bryan and Hongying were not communists but, like Needham, committed socialists. Either way, though, they incurred the disfavor of the British Foreign Office, which eased Bryan from the diplomatic service in 1951 after he told an American diplomat that he rather approved of Mao Zedong’s social reforms.29 They were ardent Quakers, and with Needham they later helped found the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, membership in which was one of the only ways for Britons to be permitted to enter China during its most exclusionary years. They taught Chinese, did research, then spent their retirement in Norwich. When they died—Hongying in 1998, the ninety-two-year-old Derek Bryan in 2003—they left a considerable sum in a trust to help support Chinese students who wished to come to Britain.

  However arduous Needham’s trip to the northwest had been, its route, as far as any risk from the war was concerned, was reasonably safe. There were essentially no Japanese soldiers to the west of Chongqing, and the Japanese air raids had more or less ended by 1941.

  The same could not be said of the Chinese east. By 1943 Japan was in firm control of much of eastern China from Manchuria down to a point on the coast well to the south of Shanghai; and Tokyo also held tightly on to territory that ran from the old treaty port of Xiamen southwest to the borders of Indochina—Vietnam in particular. All of southern Guangdong province—including, since the surrender on Christmas day 1941, the British crown colony of Hong Kong—was ruled strictly by the mandate of the Japanese emperor. Where the two armies met—the more or less united Nationalist and Communist armies on the Chinese side, the Japanese imperial army on the other—was the ever mobile front. Cities in this swath of contested countryside changed hands with baffling frequency and experienced fighting, bombing, and all the manifold horrors of total war.

  Nearly incredibly, however, the Japanese forces let one rockbound stretch of the eastern Chinese coast, 300 miles that very roughly ran along the seashore of Fujian province, remain free of their control. There are many theories as to why, but most probably the planners had decided it was more important to go for the major manufacturing centers and transportation links and leave the more isolated and unpopulated countryside to its own devices. So although much of Fujian had been occupied briefly in the late 1930s, by 1944 it was back in Chinese hands. And halfway along the coast was the province’s principal city, the former treaty port of Fuzhou; it, too, was now stubbornly under Chinese control, and continued to run as it had before the Japanese arrived.

  Needham was fascinated. For one thing, it astonished him to discover a British consulate operating in Fuzhou, in territory that was almost surrounded by the enemy—the possibilities for espionage, or for other kinds of mischief, were surely legion. Immediately, he became curious about how the academic communities were faring in this part of China, hemmed in tightly either by the Japanese invaders to their north, west, and south, or by the sea to the east. And so, with his interest piqued by the extraordinary situation in Fuzhou, he set out once again.

  He began his great “South-Eastern Journey,” as it was later to be called, in April. A few weeks earlier, his wife, Dophi, had arrived from Cambridge, to take up the post of his chemical adviser. But he chose not to take her along. His companion was once again to be H. T. Huang, and their vehicle would be a converted Chevrolet ambulance, very similar to the ill-starred wreck they had taken before, though slightly smaller and less powerful. It was similar but, crucially, it was not the same.

  Map of Needham’s Eastern Expedition, Chonqing–Fuzhou

  In any case, because of the geography of the Japanese occupation Needham and H. T. had to drive the truck due south30 and then get aboard a steam train. They rented a flatcar to carry the truck and hooked it onto the back of the train, and for the next five days the railway-obsessed Needham was in an adolescent rapture—“saw first train, with British-looking 2-8-0 with two day-cars and two bogie wagons.”

  His enthusiasm for trains was much like his ardent devotion to young women, and in his diary he expressed the keenest interest in both almost every day. “Saw many pretty Miao girls in bright kilts”; “face of woman cooking…perfect curve under black hair”; “lovely boat-woman, strong and handsome”; “found very nice Jap-trained girl at observatory”; “shared
compartment with nice girl of purest Red Indian appearance.” His excitement sometimes carried him away: the “Red Indian” girl turned out to be Chinese, from the same school Lu Gwei-djen had attended in Nanjing; and the giant 2-8-0 railway train he discovered was not British at all, but made in Czechoslovakia.

  Needham and H. T. soon settled into the routine of train travel, and Needham would get off at every stop to talk to the engineer or to make notes about the various steam locomotives he spotted shunting in the yards. American and British soldiers were everywhere, helping the Chinese hold the front line against the Japanese—and in traveling to their various billets these foreigners took up most of the first-class seats and sleeping compartments.

  But one advantage offset the crowding: Americans often traveled with interpreters, and if these interpreters were young women and pretty, the genial old dog from Cambridge had an opportunity to befriend them. On the first day he found Miss Zhao Baoling, a fine soprano whose seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of Chinese folk songs entertained Needham for hours. H. T. felt obliged to write the lyrics down for posterity, for the archives. “It is all research,” Needham would say. “Sure it is,” said H. T.

  There was plenty of military activity to keep the soldiers busy: few days passed without Needham’s noting an air raid or some other scare suggesting that the Japanese were up to something.

  Train should have left at 1:50, but then came air raid alarm, two balls raised [on the signal-box flagpole], train shunted back into the country and everyone dispersed into the wooded hills. The two balls came down, but nothing happened so people drifted back to the train. Then sound of planes: everyone ran into the woods. Seven U.S. fighters, probably P40s, circled four times and went away. Everyone drifted back to the train again. Sound of planes; everyone ran to the woods; two unidentifiable planes flying rather low, circled once and withdrew. At last all-clear gongs went and the train left at 4 p.m.

  Unknown to Needham and his superiors at the embassy in Chongqing, the Japanese were indeed planning something.

  Tokyo had at long last wearied of the inconvenient existence of the Allied-held salient in their eastern Chinese holdings, and had ordered its local commanders to either annihilate or throttle it. And so, at almost the same moment that Needham and H. T. began their train journey toward Fuzhou, the Japanese air force and army were moved to seal off the area completely, to close the gaps that allowed the Chinese to bring men and matériel—and visiting scholars like Needham—into the region.

  So just as they were venturing farther and farther into this seemingly carefree part of eastern China, the Japanese were slamming closed all the entrances and exits. If Needham didn’t move swiftly, or have enormous luck, he would find himself trapped—and as a very high-value prisoner of war.

  But he knew nothing of this, and as April ended and May began (“bush tunic and shorts this morning—first time this year”; “morning nice and hot…violent storm with rain, lightning and thunder in the afternoon”) he continued merrily on his way. Just as he had on the northwestern journey, he devoted as much time as possible to visiting universities, factories, and schools; giving lectures; collecting shopping lists for the flights over the Hump; flying the flag; and generally keeping up morale.

  But all this was much more difficult as the days wore on. The Japanese skirmishing attacks were becoming more numerous, and though no one knew why, their increased frequency was making many Chinese fretful or physically ill. A college librarian Needham met in the town of Pingshi, whom he described as “nuts, but rather nice,” was newly suffering, as was his wife, from a chronic form of malaria. “Compared photos of them in Canton before the war when she looked very spry, and they had a car as well as a house, while now they both look yellow and haggard. But he has carpentry as a hobby, and is making dolls’ houses.”

  Needham seemed to find amusing people everywhere he went. In one small town he reported meeting a parasitologist squirreled away in a back street, doing very little science but happy with the arrival of a dozen microscopes which had just been smuggled in from Hong Kong. At a small observatory he discovered a Princeton-educated phoneticist who had recently been captured by bandits and held for four months in a cave. In Ganxian—which is where Rewi Alley was once stationed, which Needham declared was the cleanest and most prosperous-looking city he had seen in China thus far, and which had colonnaded buildings like the center of New Delhi—he found a young Chinese man who spoke good Greek. The two had tea, and, with Needham applying his formidable linguistic abilities, “an enjoyable chat.”

  Needham might have been justified in describing the malarial librarian as “nuts,” but his own oddities frequently surfaced, as H. T. discovered time and again. In Ganxian, for example, Needham’s unusual breakfasts caused comment and some consternation. He always liked his morning toast burned black. The charcoal, he said, brought inestimable benefits to his stomach. The cook at the China Travel Service inn, where they were staying, had his own ideas on what constituted properly made toast and he served it to Needham brown. Three times an increasingly impatient Needham sent the toast back to the kitchen, and the matter was not resolved until H. T. applied the invaluable combination of diplomacy and chemistry that described his job. “We have here a famous and very eccentric Professor from England,” he explained. “Please tell the chef not to worry about getting the toasts burnt. That is the way he really likes them—and the carbon is good for his digestion.”

  In mid-May the car needed repairs—they had retrieved it from the train and were now driving over the Fujianese hills, which Needham said reminded him of the Jura—and so they took the opportunity to have it looked at while they waited for local flooding to subside. For three days they had nothing to do and no visits to make, so Needham, ever a man for improving each shining hour, decided to translate some Chinese folk songs into English while keeping the original meter (the exercise proved woefully unsuccessful), and to teach some passing Chinese lovelies how to sing the three songs he knew best: “Gaudeamus igitur,” the communist “Internationale,” and the “Horst Wessel Song,” a tune then beloved of all good Nazis.

  He also wondered briefly—while being interrogated by a Chinese chemist he met—about a supposedly distinguished British scientist whom the Chinese gentleman was certain was named Queenie Woggin. After some head-scratching Needham realized he was being asked about Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, an expert on fungi who went on to be head of the women’s branch of the British army. She most certainly had a queenly manner, which he supposed might have accounted for the error. Walking swiftly away from his interrogator, he fell into a hole in the road, up to his neck, a feat which he later said greatly amused everyone, particularly the women. He took himself off to a neighbor’s verandah to restore his bruised dignity, lit his evening cigar, and spent an hour gazing in rapture over the blue hills of Fujian, the masses of rhododendrons trembling in the cooling breeze, the scent of gardenia in the air.

  He wrote down, quite simply, that China, at moments like this, was surely the loveliest place on earth.

  Finally, after they had spent a month on the road, their destination was in sight. Wearying of driving over mountain ranges, they decided to travel to Fuzhou—an island of westernized civility set down in a sea of Japanese malevolence—on a steam-powered riverboat. The Min courses placidly down to the sea from its source in the Jura-like mountains to the west, and Fuzhou sits foursquare at its mouth—so a boat was a far more reliable means of getting to the town, and Needham loved boats almost as much as he loved trains.

  While he was waiting for the steamboat in the riverside town of Nan-ping he happened—again, typically—on an American whom he thought of principally as an ornithologist, John Caldwell. Needham, an amateur bird-watcher, had long owned a copy of Caldwell’s definitive work The Birds of South China. More officially, however, John Caldwell, China-born and a native speaker of Chinese, was something else altogether.

  Ostensibly he was employed as a journalist for the U.S. Off
ice of War Information. But in fact, like many of the racy, mysterious foreigners who then operated in this part of China, he was a spy. And he was quite a talkative, matter-of-fact spy. He seemed to know what was going on locally, and felt that all of a sudden the situation seemed ominous. There were, he warned Needham, faint—but to him unmistakable—indications of a gathering storm. He told Needham that he was “getting jumpy” and was preparing to evacuate his father and mother, who lived nearby. It was a subtly coded message that Needham well understood: from now on, be very, very careful; the Japanese were planning something.

  Yet whatever it was, Needham still had a mission to accomplish for the Crown. The boat to Fuzhou left in the dark on the appointed day, Needham sitting happily in the bow as it lurched down the infamous rapids of the Min. The voyage took a little over twelve hours, and the first man he met when the boat tied up at the Fuzhou docks that afternoon turned out to be a spy also. This time, though, his new acquaintance was a British spy: Murray MacLehose, who at the time of their meeting was on a top-secret mission. Eventually, MacLehose would manage to escape from the murky business of espionage and embark on a glorious and very public diplomatic career.

  Murray, later Lord, MacLehose was a giant of a Scotsman who spent almost all of his life—aside from a brief spell in the late 1960s when he was unaccountably made British ambassador to Denmark—working in the East, and who ended his career as probably the most fondly remembered of all the colonial governors of Hong Kong. At the start of his working life, when he joined the Malayan civil service, he was sent to the Chinese treaty port of Xiamen, then known as Amoy, a couple of hundred miles down the coast from Fuzhou, where he was now posted, and where he could learn the local coastal dialect of Hokkienese. But in December 1941 the Japanese captured Amoy and hauled off whatever British diplomats they could find, including MacLehose. At first they interned the British; then, accepting the terms of the Geneva Convention, they called in the Red Cross as an intermediary and sent them all home to Britain.