The Man Who Loved China

by Simon Winchester

  And so, late in 1945, Needham cunningly contrived to have Gwei-djen sent to China from New York, to be brought onto his staff as a salaried employee, classified as an expert on nutrition.

  The war was over by then—Germany and then Japan had surrendered—and as a newly impressed diplomat Gwei-djen was able to come to China by air, quickly and fairly easily. Needham was impatient for her to arrive, and he wrote “Groan!” in large letters on the closing page of the diary he kept on his last major trip, to the Chinese north, when he got back to the embassy and found that she had not yet arrived. But a few days later she did make it; and Dophi records the two of them taking afternoon tea together with the ambassador’s wife33 in early December. Dophi goes on to note that her husband’s mistress spoke eloquently that afternoon on the need for China to be allowed to import “the right kind of soybean,” not a low-fat variety that some foreign firms were then trying to sell. Joseph Needham’s love life was evidently back to normal.

  But the arrangement did not go down at all well with his colleagues. Gwei-djen’s appointment caused a fluttering in the diplomatic dovecotes because it seemed so blatantly nepotistic. There was no pressing academic need for Gwei-djen to come to China, and she remained there only long enough to take one trip across the south.

  No complaint was as vitriolic in tone as one formal memorandum that found its way back to the head office in London, having been written by one of the more remarkable—and angriest—members of Needham’s team, the biologist Laurence Picken.

  Picken, who died in early 2007, was a polymath like few others. He started his career in biology as a specialist—rather like Dorothy Needham—in the elastic properties of muscle. He joined Needham’s team in China in late 1943 as a biophysicist and an agricultural adviser. But then, fatally for his biological career, he learned to play the qin, a seven-string Chinese zither. From that moment, muscles had to move over. Picken became hooked on music—especially its ethnology, ranging from the social aspects of birdsong to the modern adaptability of Tang dynasty court music.

  A colleague of Picken’s at Cambridge recently described him as “a bachelor don of the old school, an established scholar in the fields of biochemistry, cytology, musicology, Chinese, Slavonic studies and ethnomusicology, world expert on Turkish musical instruments, Bach cantatas, ancient Chinese science and reproduction of cells. You could pick up from him an amount of knowledge on any number of subjects—from Baroque keyboard ornamentation to the vinification of Burgundy, from the wave structures of the benzene ring to the translation of the Confucian Odes, from Frazer’s theory of magic to the chronology of Cavalcanti—and the very irrelevance to the surrounding world of everything he knew made the learning of it all the more rewarding.”

  But in the autumn of 1945 it was evident that Picken was a man with a mean streak. His memorandum, sent to London and addressed to a mandarin on the British Council, Sydney Smith, was a rant of some style:

  [Needham] has talked the Science Department into appointing a Chinese nutrition expert to the staff. God knows what she will do (she will be drawing a salary bigger than I or Sanders). But the real reason for the arrangement seems to be that she is one of his mistresses. You would scarcely credit it, but her personal file (on which are all papers relevant to her appointment) contains letters otherwise official from Needham to her with marginalia in JN’s dog Chinese such as Little Joseph Longs for Younger Sister’s Fragrant Body. Dophi reads these letters but does not understand Chinese! Usually Joseph keeps these locked up, but it had to be consulted the other day in his absence. Incidentally, when he does get back from Xi’an (where he has been for two months) he has got to face the query: was his journey really necessary? The Council has at last sent out a Finance Officer and Administrator, and JN will have some pretty difficult explaining to do. His little jaunt to the only region where he has not been in Free China, where there are none but third-rate institutions, and very few of these, will have cost the Council £3,000. The attraction [is that] of the ancient capital of Chang’an, second in beauty and historic interest to Beijing. If he had a cast-iron excuse for going there he could fly in three hours. But his God-complex is titillated by going by truck, and so he goes that way, spending several weeks on the journey and spending I don’t know how much money. Dophi has gone along too, and one of the staff as companion for Dophi, and an interpreter. For the female companion it is a holiday at the Council’s expense, and with her salary paid too. She is another affinity.

  But I think he’s had his last fling. With the exception of old Percy Roxby [a geography professor sent temporarily to China from the University of Liverpool], who is a noble soul and sees no wickedness in anyone, all the British staff and some of the Chinese are aware of this situation. As JN said himself on one occasion—I am not serving the Council; the Council is serving me.

  Needham was stunned when he got home from his trip and saw the memorandum. To be sure, he was fond of repeating the calming Arab maxim “The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on,” but at the same time this irritated him, and he was determined that Picken would not get the better of him. So he promptly wrote to Smith in London, assuming the air of authority that he felt was proper for him as head of SBSCO: “You’ll have seen Picken’s letter—the man’s going mad…he has been going queer for many months past…possibly some disappointment in the affairs of the heart.”

  With that, he imagined, heading off any possible inquiry from London, he then proceeded to get his own back. He wrote a formal assessment of Picken, which was to lie like a deadweight in Picken’s personnel file for the remainder of his career: “A more unfriendly and disagreeable colleague I never hope to meet…unpleasant and indeed inexplicable.” The venom was diluted, the vitriol repelled.

  It would be idle to imagine that l’affaire Picken had any significant effect, so towering and unblemished was Needham’s standing in China, in London, and in Cambridge. Yet less than six months after the memo was written, though probably the two events were quite unconnected, Joseph Needham’s first great adventure in China was at an end.

  He decided to leave, and this decision came with bewildering suddenness. One morning in early March, out of the blue, he received an urgent telegram from the biologist Julian Huxley, his old left-wing friend at Cambridge.

  For the last three years Needham had been involved in discussions about the possibility of establishing, once the war was over, a worldwide scientific organization to encourage cooperation in research. Others had had similar ideas, and by 1946 the plans for creating a much wider organization—one that would embrace culture and education more generally—had found favor. So, Huxley asked—would Needham care to come to England, on the double, to help form this new organization, which would be created under the auspices of the successor to the League of Nations, the United Nations. The body was to be called the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and it was designed to promote world peace by encouraging cultural exchange and cooperation. Everyone, including Huxley, thought that because of his experiences in China, as well as all his correspondence about such a body (and his one trip to Washington, in February 1945), Needham would be the ideal man to set up its Division of Natural Science.

  He would do a great deal more than that. That March morning he acted speedily. He replied to Huxley, accepting the offer. He told his ambassador, Sir Horace Seymour, that he was leaving—but it turned out that Seymour had already been told, and moreover had been asked by the Foreign Office to give his official blessing for the departure of his senior diplomatic colleague. Needham sent a telegram to Dophi, who had already gone back to London to recover from tuberculosis, which she had contracted in China earlier that winter. And finally, he told a delighted Gweidjen. She was to pack, he said. The two of them were leaving forthwith. They would travel in three days’ time to Nanjing, Shanghai, and Beijing, and then to Hong Kong, from where the Royal Air Force would fly them home. There was no time to be lost.

  There f
ollowed two days of frantic housekeeping, with books to be packed, files to be organized, keys to be handed over, bills paid, and expenses settled—and for the gun and ammunition he had drawn in Calcutta to be handed in to the British military attaché for return to Fort William. A number of lunches and dinners were hastily arranged to allow the Chinese community to say farewell. Needham was not a sentimental man: once he received his new orders, he wanted simply to turn on his heel and go. But the Chinese had to observe the protocol, and he knew it. Hence at each banquet he smiled his way through an interminable list of dishes and an insufferable parade of speech makers.

  “He is leaving us in two days,” said the secretary-general of the Chinese Academy, his voice cracking. “We are sad…. He is family to us, and we do not want him to go. Friends in time of need are the friends who are missed most.”

  Needham promised in reply that he would be back in five years. One imagines he already communicated this notion to Zhou Enlai’s headquarters: as a good socialist Needham naturally hoped that the Chinese Communists would wrest power from the Nationalists now that the war was over, and all the evidence indicated to him that they would indeed triumph, and before too much longer. And if so, then he wanted to be on good terms with the new government, which presumably would be led by the Communist Party chairman, Mao Zedong. He knew Mao only slightly; Zhou, however, he considered a friend who he hoped would put in a good word for him, when the time came. For one thing, he would need a visa next time he came to China, and he suspected that it might be difficult to acquire.

  Needham was capable of tact and discretion, and that spring evening he kept his expectations of a communist victory from his audience. The thought that he might soon return seemed to cheer everyone up, however, although one man told the diners that his own melancholy could hardly be dispelled by the hope that Needham would come back. “Returning from seeing a friend off at the shore,” he said, quoting the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, “one feels as far away as the horizon.”

  They gave Needham a commemorative scroll as a leaving present, and filed silently from the room. China would be an altogether changed place, outwardly barely recognizable, the next time he visited.

  On a blustery April English morning three weeks later the aircraft carrying Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen bumped down onto the tarmac of Northolt aerodrome, west of London. Shivering in the cold, the couple made their way to the terminal building. It was exceptionally crowded today because Northolt, usually a military field, had been opened to civilian aircraft that were unable to use the grass strips at nearby Heathrow, which were being paved for its enormous postwar expansion.

  Waiting for them was the man who had first secretly invited Needham to China four years before: J. G. Crowther, the British Council’s science officer and former correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. He had just resigned from both positions, since his outspoken criticism of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan the year before had distanced him from the scientific establishment. Huxley had hired him, however, and now he was campaigning for science to be included in this new organization’s mandate—science, he and Needham had long argued, was the property of all mankind, and its corruption by capitalism should be resisted. He took the couple in to central London, talking excitedly about Huxley’s plans for the new body—almost to the exclusion of asking Needham about his time in China.

  Within days Needham had a new London office, in Belgravia, and he became a commuter. The Needham family house at No. 1 Owlstone Road in Cambridge was still intact, as was his old room at Caius College. He began a new routine: with permission from the biochemistry department, which had become accustomed to Needham’s long absences, he began his two years of work for the United Nations. In time the UNESCO office was moved to Paris; but in 1946 the new body was in a terrace house near Victoria Station, so small and cramped that Needham’s first interviews, for a team of secretaries, had to be conducted in the bathroom.

  It was not long before the press discovered him. “Doctor Needham is home!” wrote one of the London newspaper columnists shortly after he arrived, travel-stained and weary. “A very tough egg is Dr. Needham—large, muscular, a chain-smoker, 46, with a scalding brilliant tongue and no time for fools. I do not know whether he inherits his tongue from his father, the anaesthetist, or his Irish mother Alicia, the pianist. On his way to Chongqing he had a brush with bandits—any tackling him now would be lucky to get away with a black eye and an earful of deranged epithets. Dr. Needham can learn anything—he has been answering all sorts of riddles, about sugar beet and foxglove seeds, yeast cultures and wooden shoes for Chinese airmen.”

  Needham missed China dreadfully. He also worried about neglecting his biochemical research. But in the end he agreed that, for the time being, and out of a sense of polite public obligation, he would indeed do as Huxley had asked. He had, after all, been intimately involved in the long-distance planning of the new body, knew how best to cut his way through the bureaucratic thickets that are inevitable in such a project, and so would do all he could to help UNESCO’s founders realize their dreams. He could and would, as his admirers later said, “put the ‘S’ into UNESCO.”34 After all, the work gave him ever more standing and status, he was pleased that it took him to Paris frequently, and he generally approved of UNESCO’s stated aims—though he found the preamble to its constitution, “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed,” a little rich for his taste.

  He stayed in the traces for two years. In Paris he watched with grim fascination, from his temporary offices in the Hotel Majestic, as the victors of World War II—Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and the United States—squabbled over the precise role of the new body. Some people assumed it was really a cover for espionage. Needham’s idea of placing scientific field offices around the world, modeled on his own SBSCO in China, was to the more paranoid minds no more than a thinly veiled means of putting spies in place, under deep cover.

  The Americans were the most suspicious. The Central Intelligence Agency’s station in Paris placed the Majestic Hotel under immediate surveillance, and by February 1947 was alarmed enough to warn President Truman specifically that UNESCO was being infiltrated by communists. General Hoyt Vandenberg, director of the CIA, wrote a top-secret memo to the president, dated February 15, 1947, in which he pointed to Needham as the principal problem:

  Embassy Paris reports that Professor Joseph Needham, a temporary British UNESCO official, who is apparently a protégé of Julian Huxley (Director-General of UNESCO), is a member of the Cambridge University Communist Group. Huxley dismisses the matter with the observation that Needham is a “good” Communist. Pursuant to authorization from the UNESCO general conference Needham proposes to negotiate an agreement between UNESCO and the [Soviet-backed] World Federation of Scientific Workers…. The announced plans for UNESCO, together with the recent conviction of another British scientist, Dr. Allen Nunn May, of giving uranium samples to the USSR, point to the grave dangers implicit should Communists occupy strategic posts in the scientific projects of UN.

  Alarm bells started to ring. Within a month President Truman’s administration had placed numerous bureaucratic hurdles in Needham’s way, and had flatly refused to allow UNESCO to hand out grant moneys to any scientific unions that Washington deemed left-wing. To the surprise of very few, Needham promptly resigned, relieved to be getting back to his studies and away from the fratricidal feuding that characterized this period of the cold war.

  By March 1948 he was in Cambridge, and the only souvenir of his time in Paris was an immense oak directors’ desk, ornamented with gold anchors at the corners. It had belonged to a German admiral, who had been based at the Majestic and had been in charge of Axis naval operations during the war. Needham had done his UNESCO paperwork at this magnificently Teutonic piece of furniture, and Julian Huxley agreed it should be sent back to Cambridge with him, in gratitude, and as a memento.

  Now he was back
in his university, with his wife and his mistress on hand, and his mass of books beginning to trickle in from China. His love for his Chinese muse was now fully settled, his obsession with China was firmly held, and he would now start to implement the task that would define the remainder of his life.

  Spring was just beginning, a time when Cambridge is at its prettiest, a time of freshness and new beginnings. He thought it perfectly appropriate that he was back, away from the grim infighting of Paris. Now he could immerse himself in the joys of scholarship. His traveling—the first phase of his research—was over. Now it was time to begin his mission—to create the volumes that he felt sure would put China’s reputation in its properly deserved place in the pantheon of the world’s leading nations. It was time for his book to be born.

  FIVE

  The Making of His Masterpiece

  On the Fundamental Ideas of Chinese Science

  Heaven has five elements, first Wood, second Fire, third Earth, fourth Metal, and fifth Water. Wood comes first in the cycle of the five elements and water comes last, earth being in the middle. This is the order which heaven has made. Wood produces fire, fire produces earth (i.e. as ashes), earth produces metal (i.e. as ores), metal produces water (either because molten metal was considered aqueous, or more probably because of the ritual practice of collecting dew on metal mirrors exposed at night-time), and water produces wood (for woody plants require water). This is their “father-and-son” relation. Wood dwells on the left, metal on the right, fire in front and water behind, with earth in the centre. This, too, is the father-and-son order, each receiving the other in its turn. Thus it is that wood receives from water, fire from wood and so on. As transmitters they are fathers, as receivers they are sons. There is an unvarying dependence of the sons on the fathers, and a direction from the fathers to the sons. Such is the Dao of heaven.