The Man Who Loved China

by Simon Winchester

  MacLehose might have remained at home, except that the wily old men of the British intelligence services had other plans. They decided to send this ambitious, impressive-looking, linguistically competent young Scot right back to China—to the port of Fuzhou, which was still free. He would work there under cover of being the British vice-consul and would train Chinese guerrillas to operate behind Japanese lines and carry out sabotage. This was what he was doing, officially but covertly, when he and Needham first met, beside the old Fuzhou river bridge in May 1944.

  Because of the secret nature of this work, Needham chose to remove all material relating to MacLehose—who was arguably one of the most interesting and celebrated Britons Needham ever encountered in China—from all his subsequent published works on China. “The following morning we took the river-steamer down to Fuzhou,” he writes in his book Science Outpost, “where we spent an enjoyable five days. The narrative resumes after our return.” And that was that.

  Even the few references to MacLehose and to the British consul, Keith Tribe, that appear in Needham’s private and unpublished diaries are fairly circumspect, and anodyne. He says that MacLehose took him to stay in the consulate in the old Foreign Concession—which reminded him of Clapham, where he grew up. He writes that it was a lovely old property full of objets d’art, and that H. T., being Chinese, was asked to stay in a hotel across the street. He says his bedroom was enormous, with a very large bathroom. They had tea—rolls, honey, jam—and he could close his eyes and imagine himself back home.

  The men then evidently went on to have a grand old time. They had elaborate massages; took a junk out to the Pagoda Anchorage, where the China tea clippers used to take on cargo; spent time at the still elegant Fuzhou Club, whose bar was frequented by prosperous western swells; visited a number of the lacquer and ceramics factories for which the city is famous; and dined on fish with the equally well known Fuzhou sauce of fermented red rice and wine, the making of which—the mash contained Monascus yeasts—excited Needham greatly (he noted down the details for his book). They also visited two great antiquarian bookshops for which Fuzhou was well-known.

  Needham had to purchase two enormous rattan trunks in which to ship all the volumes (including fifty-six that were presented to him by members of the Fuzhou Club) back to Chongqing. Most were devoted to the history of Chinese science, and all are still housed in Cambridge today, in the great East Asian science library he accumulated over the years.

  All told, the five days passed in a whirlwind of activity, much of it undertaken with Murray MacLehose—and yet Needham did not leave behind one remark, either in his published book or his private diaries, relating either to their conversations or to the vice-consul’s duties. Once in a while the man’s initials appear, as in “lunched with MM” or “MM at dinner”—but that was all. Others get much fuller treatment: a Mr. Pearson is described as “pompous and talkative,” Keith Tribe as “interesting and nice.” But there is nothing of Murray MacLehose.

  And then Needham and H. T. set out for home—this time, because of the reports from the consulate (and presumably from the two spies) that the Japanese were now bent on quickly closing the net.

  It was a race. Almost every town they passed through had already been visited by Japanese bombers whose crews were softening up targets ahead of an infantry push. They often had to take long diversions to get around ruined buildings and broken roads. On May 29, the Chinese state radio broadcast the news that a Japanese offensive had started—and within hours the highways began to choke with panicked refugees, and the air came alive with waves of aircraft, mostly American and Chinese, heading west and north to head off the enemy incursions.

  Needham still insisted on visiting places of interest—a tungsten mine here, a gasworks there, an epidemiology laboratory in this town, an experimental farm there—but H. T. was pressing him ever onward. H. T. understood Hokkienese, as Needham did not, and was fully aware of the growing danger. The crucial point on the journey came with their attempted crossing of the great Xiang River bridge at the city of Hengyang—a crossing they had accomplished without a moment’s thought three weeks before.

  Now the Japanese were licking at their heels, and for the first time Joseph Needham’s legendary calm showed signs of crumbling. If they didn’t cross this bridge ahead of the Japanese, they would be trapped, imprisoned, interned—or very much worse. Usually he was indifferent to the vicissitudes of war, preferring to read his Chinese-English Dictionary as the attacks went on. But now, on June 2, he called a council of war with H. T. He had wanted to visit a number of factories in the provincial government center of Taiho, but he was worried. He wrote in his journal: “Even if Changsha holds out, there may be severe dislocation of traffic at Hengyang, preventing us getting to the west with our truck and the valuable records so far. So decided—not to go.” They now had to make for the bridge, or bust.

  They heard alarming reports—that Hengyang had been bombed continuously for three days; that the Americans had bombed and destroyed twenty-two Japanese steam locomotives at Hankou; and, most ominously, that Japanese troops were racing north from Guangzhou to meet those streaming south from north of the Yangzi, and the two armies would soon meet in a giant all-crushing pincer movement. Needham started taking all this very seriously, at times even listening to the radio—“I can hear the American plane pilots and the ground staff talking!” he exclaimed excitedly.

  They decided to race for the bridge. They stopped briefly at a second tungsten mine and watched men washing the wolframite from the crushed quartz—H. T. grinding his teeth in frustration—but then pressed on, the urgency growing by the hour, the situation becoming ever more perilous.

  Saturday 3rd June. After lunch passed an unusual number of trucks…mostly full of gasoline for the American airfields…some evacuating office or factory personnel. Passed several miles through an inferno of activity—thousands of men and women carrying loads of stone, no doubt for a new airfield. Not a day to be lost now.

  Sunday 4th…progress interminably slow…air raid alarm, so we pulled out of the station and waited in a thick drizzle. Regrettably the decapitated corpse of a coolie between the railway tracks…after such an accident the railway people leave the results lying around for hours with a crowd of people looking on and saying “ai-ya”—perhaps pour encourager les autres. Afterwards, as dusk fell and moonlight came on, smoked a cigar with H. T…. beautiful mountainous countryside in the night all around.

  The steam engine strained slowly up the final range of hills before beginning its slow coast down into the Xiang River valley. From time to time it would stop unexpectedly, sometimes because of air raids, sometimes to allow passengers in their long gowns to clamber unsteadily down to the tracks and scuttle off into villages hidden in the woods. Each time they stopped, though, many more would-be passengers were clamoring to be let on the train, to escape the steady progress of the Japanese infantry. Needham and H. T. made way for newcomers until their compartment was crammed with sweating, frightened humanity; with baggage; and with a variety of farm animals. From time to time Needham tried to lead the refugees in song to keep their spirits up—but they were too nervous, and most of them kept staring anxiously out of the dirt-encrusted windows. Above all else they loathed the Japanese, and were gripped by fear at just what the troops might do.

  Tuesday 6th. Hengyang at last. Saw stationmaster who says he will put us across the river by the great railway bridge in 3 hours or so…situation very calm and normal except for soldiers making machine-gun posts and putting the station in a posture of defence. The railway is putting on three expresses daily in the Guilin direction, which is clearing the evacuees pretty well.

  Throughout the day great air activity, squadron after squadron of P-40s, and other fighters with the Chinese star on them, coming up from the airfield just east of the station and heading north—other squadrons returning—a marvellous sight—the planes often flying very low, with the tiger-faces prominent. Two trainloads of e
vacuees from Changsha, several trainloads of rails, signals and miscellaneous railway equipment, going across the river, to comparative safety from the Japs.

  On the platforms some very good Chinese soldiers, tough-looking, with swords, fans and umbrellas, as well as rifles, listening to a talk by a captain with a revolver and a walking stick.

  Examined two large (4-8-4 and 2-8-2) engines, English and German respectively, too badly damaged to be repaired; and then finally, about 5, when all hope seemed to be gone of crossing this day, engines came and remarshalled us and set up a train to go across.

  Not off till 7 though, and then stood on the bridge approach for a long time—a lovely target. Sat on our own flatcar in the brilliant moonlight and smoked cigars. Bathed in a pool, then fell asleep.

  It must have been the deepest of sleeps—because Needham’s next notation reports the outcome:

  Woke at 11:30 to find we were already across, and in the West Station.

  So we got some tea.

  They had escaped just in time. Two days later the Hengyang bridge was blown up, and the east bank of the Xiangjiang was irretrievably lost. Within a matter of days, just as had been feared, the entire Chinese salient in eastern China was forcibly folded into the Japanese empire. Chongqing, the country’s capital, would now be totally cut off from the east for the remainder of the war.

  Needham decided to take the long way home. He spent time with his old friend Alwyn Ogden (H. G. Wells’s look-alike), the consul in Kunming, which was still untouched and just as peaceful as before. He reconnected with a woman friend there, who had a week’s vacation owing. The couple went deep into the Yunnan countryside, walking in bamboo forests, gathering wild strawberries, and bathing nude in the natural hot springs—all in the name of recovering from having been so close to a Japanese army that so unexpectedly had gone on the offensive.

  And then, on July 1, with the Ogdens’ help, he managed to find a seat on a flight to the capital. He ended his account of his great Southeastern Journey simply, and laconically: “There was no-one to meet me, but got a lift in Brigadier Wilson-Brand’s car. Found Dophi at dinner.”

  Needham would make many further journeys around the country, though none so ambitious as these. The most dangerous was the one he undertook in 1944, when he tried to get to the Burmese frontier. Fighting was continuing there, between the Japanese on one side and the British and Americans on the other. The Japanese were now in deep trouble,31 and were fighting with the tenacity of the cornered and the desperate. Yet it was not war but the region’s geological instability, and the resulting landslides, that presented Needham’s expedition with its greatest nuisance. It did not help matters that his truck crashed and overturned while he was zooming down one side of the Mekong River valley. The party lost much of its equipment, but no one was hurt.

  During this tropical adventure he visited botanists, plant physiologists, and nutritionists—finding out, among other things, that they had just discovered the world’s richest source of vitamin C, the plant Emblica officinalis, which was known locally as the Chinese olive, “but which in fact belongs to the Euphorbiaceae.”32 Others were working on ways to improve the resin production of the lac insects, from which shellac is made. Someone was producing a “Guide to the Caterpillars of Yunnan,” “with special reference to the pests”; and someone else was about to finish a comprehensive guide to Yunnan’s flora.

  And that was in only one building. In another he came across scientists who were looking at the electric responses of plants, at the underground fruiting of the peanut, at the metabolism of silkworms, at creating a taxonomy of mushrooms, at how wheat blight is spread, and at making a vast catalog of the pharmaceutically useful plants found in China—this last project being conducted in an old village temple with a gigantic image of Guanyin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, gazing down with impassive approval.

  Many of the scientists were French speakers, a fact that reflected France’s colonial influence in this corner of China, and the closeness of the Cochin-Chinese territories of l’Indochine. The European tradition was strong: all the courses in the medical school were being taught in French, and one of the researchers in the biology department had been raised in Germany, and talked to Needham in her adopted tongue about her studies into the anatomy of frogs’ noses.

  Outside the city, in a town called Lufeng, Needham spent time with the geologists who had just astonished the world by finding a nearly complete fossil of the small plant-eating dinosaur that is now called Lufengosaurus. He also bought a number of pairs of scissors, since before Lufeng became associated with the beasts of the Jurassic, it was famous for its cutlery, and its sharp edges were treasured throughout the old empire.

  In a Confucian temple nearby he then found dozens of statisticians working under a stern image of the sage inscribed on a golden tablet. Needham, delighted beyond words with his visit, remarked in his diary that Confucius would have been pleased to see his temple so used, in the service of a people of whom he had once, in Analects 13, so famously written, “Enrich them first, then educate them”; and in Analects 12, “What is needed in governing is sufficient food and sufficient weapons; as for the people, make them sincere.”

  Yet Needham did find moments to stop, and wonder. The most important came just as he was leaving the city for his failed attempt (thanks to the later truck accident) to reach the frontier. In his diary he considers that although Kunming showed how the learned Chinese have a fathomless capacity for inquiry, there remained one mystery: why, if the Chinese were so clever and so endlessly inquisitive, inventive, and creative, had they for so long been so poor and scientifically backward?

  Why had the kind of inquiry into the natural world, which Needham’s research suggested they had been pursuing for a thousand years and more, evidently become moribund for so very long? The question bothered him, nagged at him, vexed him—and always stayed in his mind, no matter how impressive the efforts of places like Kunming might be today. It was an expansion of the note he had scribbled on the BBC letter two years before: “Chinese sci. Why not develop?” Something had happened, perhaps hundreds of years ago, that somehow blighted the promise of those earlier times. Needham vowed that one day he would determine just what that something might be.

  This would later become famous as the “Needham question.” It is a puzzle that manages to define China and Chinese history. And as far as the world’s academic community is concerned, it is a puzzle that also helps define Joseph Needham.

  Joseph Needham would remain in China for eighteen months more. By the time he left he had visited 296 Chinese institutes, universities, and research establishments; he had arranged for the delivery of thousands of tons of equipment and chemical and scientific journals; he would read, endlessly and voraciously, the various thousands of documents which he had collected and which he felt certain would enhance his knowledge of China; and he spent much of his final months laying the foundations for a diplomatically privileged organization to support Chinese science—an organization that would continue to function without him long after he had left.

  Despite now having Dophi with him he was rather lonely. He missed Gwei-djen sorely: he wrote loving notes to her in his diary, and there are moments of great poignancy that seem almost to have brought him to tears. He recorded a moment in western China when he came across an American forces’ post exchange, where he could buy shoes to replace his own—if he could pay in American cash. In his wallet he found one five-dollar bill, left over from his trip to New York to see Gwei-djen two years before. He was overwhelmed, he wrote, by a sudden, terrible wave of nostalgia. Needham wrote her a long letter, one she later said she treasured above all others. It remains as much as anything his testimonial to China:

  Nothing could exceed the impact which your country and your people has had on me since I first came here. It has been a time of much confusion, but for that very reason I have been able to penetrate everywhere into the life of villages and towns (roughing it of cou
rse a great deal in the process); and bend my solitary steps into Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist temples, often deserted, able therefore to savour to the full the great beauty of the traditional architecture in its setting of age-old trees and forgotten gardens. And I have been free to experience the life in Chinese homes and market-places, and see at first hand the miseries of a society in collapse, awaiting the dawn which must come soon. And when I say “roughing it” this is no exaggeration. Sometimes I set up my camp bed in an empty temple, sometimes at the back of a cooperative workshop. Besides all the usual insect pests there are rats in plenty—they used to bump up and down all night on the canvas ceiling when I was lying in bed at Jialing House with a temperature of 104° from the Haffkine plague vaccine. But on the other hand, what gastronomic delights I have found, and often from stalls in village streets; things to eat that most conventional Westerners (and indeed some of my Embassy colleagues) would fear to enjoy. Nothing could ever make me forget doujiang with bing tung and you tiao taken in the open air on a spring morning at Ganxian in Jiangxi, or the you zha bing of Guangdong straight out of its boiling oil, or in a Lanzhou winter, the huo guo and the bai gan’er to warm even the soul, while the icy wind blows through the torn paper on the windows.

  But then there came an unexpected opportunity to see her. By chance in early 1945—when it was clear the war was winding down—Needham was asked to fly to Washington for a regional diplomatic meeting and to discuss a postwar plan for the United Nations which would later involve him. A succession of military aircraft brought him to the American capital. Once his meetings were done he took the Pennsylvania Railroad express to see Gwei-djen in Manhattan, and told her immediately how intolerable it was for him to be apart from her. She, to his great delight, then asked if perhaps she could come out to China. Her work at Columbia was done, after all, and she would very much like to come to her home country, to be with him and perhaps, once the Japanese were defeated, to see what had happened to her family.