The Man Who Loved China

by Simon Winchester

  He cut an impressive figure, at least in part because he was so tall and broad, built like a bear. He invariably wore a dark suit, pin-striped, double-breasted, rumpled. The collar of his shirt, freshly laundered, was nevertheless always disarranged; his tie was askew; and his shoes, though clean, were scuffed, the laces frequently broken and retied. He kept his brown tortoiseshell glasses well polished, however. He parted his thick hair on the right, and was careful always to have it well brushed, though it was usually just a little too long.

  There was a dusting of ash on his lap, but during the composing of the book he set a firm rule: he would take no cheroot or cigarette before noon. He was fiercely disciplined in this: as the morning wore on he would peer anxiously at the college clock—with one cylinder of tobacco already out on the desk, and his box of Swan Vestas at the ready—and the moment it struck twelve he would light up, and then smoke like industrial Pittsburgh for the rest of the day. He kept the cigarette in his mouth all the while, his head wreathed in ribbons of curling blue.

  Once in K-1 he sank into a brown study, and remained there, stolid and undisturbable, for hour upon Chinese hour. Only Wang Ling could interrupt his reverie, to pass him a paper, look up a reference, or translate one of the finer points that no dictionary or encyclopedia could settle. Once started each morning, Needham worked nonstop, often until long after dark.

  He employed neither a typist nor a secretary. He typed everything himself on one of his Royal typewriters—either a black portable, which he carried in its venerable case, covered with airline stickers; or a large Royal desk machine37 with an extra-wide carriage. He used only two fingers, and yet managed to type at a fantastic speed (as many two-finger typists mysteriously do). His typing was always very accurate; his first script was always his final draft, and it was from these drafts that the Cambridge University Press prepared its galleys (these, by contrast, usually required many changes—edits which he often performed in his head, while lying awake in bed).

  Needham working in K-1, the room in Caius College, Cambridge, that he occupied for almost seventy years. Later he also took the room next door, now occupied by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking.

  He did not take kindly to interruption, and though generally a polite and thoughtful man, could be crashingly rude if disturbed. Once when his old friend Julian Huxley, who had been the first director general of UNESCO, telephoned from the porter’s lodge to announce that he had arrived for a visit, Needham said, with glacial courtesy, “I am frightfully busy. You come without an appointment, so I am afraid I cannot see you.” Huxley promptly returned to London, his day entirely wasted.

  On another occasion Sir Ronald Fisher, an eminent geneticist, knocked on the door of K-1, opened it without waiting for a response, and was halfway in when Needham barked out “I’m frightfully busy” and went on hammering away at the machine. Fisher tried to explain that he had come simply to say that yes, as Needham had asked at breakfast that morning, a pair of visitors from China could indeed make use of Fisher’s college rooms for the coming weekend. He raised his voice. No response. Then he shouted to Needham over the clattering din of the typewriter, “You asked me, and I say ‘Yes.’” And then he left abruptly. Needham, despite having been granted a favor, never even bothered to look up.

  On one occasion he relented, and happily so, since the interruption proved of great benefit. A stranger telephoned, explaining that he had just arrived from France, and badly needed a reprint of a paper he had seen mentioned in Needham’s trilogy Chemical Embryology. Needham barked at him politely, telling him he had no such reprint and would he kindly not disturb him any further?

  But the man persisted, inviting Needham to lunch, pleading once again that he had come all the way from France. And so Needham, who was something of a trencherman, agreed. The man then described how making use of an obscure embryological point mentioned in the trilogy had completely transformed his egg-producing business in France. And then he did what he had really come to Cambridge for—he handed Needham a check for an enormous sum of money.

  Needham seldom dined in the college, preferring to work through the dinner hour and then go home late. Christopher Brooke, a prominent medievalist who was a junior don when Needham was beginning his work on China, recalls that on those few occasions when Needham did turn up in Hall he would forcefully quiz his dinnertime colleagues on matters that seemed relevant to his book, and would carefully jot the answers down on the backs of menu cards and on paper napkins. The younger men liked talking to him: they found him rum, not dangerous. And they knew how he worked, really worked, and that he was often exhausted as a result. Once he flopped down into one of the chairs at the high table right beside the young, nervous Brooke, declaring simply: “Make amusing conversation to me: I’m really very tired.”

  Wang Ling recounted a story about how preoccupied his boss became when he was in the middle of working nonstop:

  The Chinese have a proverb to describe a hard-working scholar reading books all the time, even reading while travelling on horseback. Needham travels by train, always buying a first-class ticket, not because of any snob value but because only the first class has empty compartments where he can spread his books and manuscripts around, jotting down notes…. Even while travelling by car, while driving he always discussed some topic of his book. However, there was one occasion when he did not discuss the book. He was driving at top speed on our return journey from a meeting in Oxford. He was engrossed…[when] suddenly he noticed the passenger seat beside him was empty. As one would expect, a Chinese was too polite to ask him to stop the car in order to secure the latch on the door, which was not properly closed, so I had fallen out of the fast-moving car. Fortunately I landed on a pile of snow or else I would not live to tell the story. Joseph turned back to look for me and I got back in. He was upset beyond description—but I have survived to tell the tale. And the offending car-door was thereafter secured with a dog-chain.

  Despite Needham’s occasional air of autocratic disdain, people were eternally eager to help him, support him, and surround him with care. He employed a woman whom he called Auntie Violet to make him breakfast and tea: she worked for him, buttering the crumpets he liked to toast on his electric fire, until she was well over ninety. And once it was realized that even a Stakhanovite like Needham could be tempted to join others for afternoon tea, a variety of distinguished men and women, crumpet lovers and tea drinkers all, would stop by to dine informally with him, often memorably.

  One professor stopped in to talk about rain gauges—whereupon Needham discovered for him, quite accidentally, a reference to what turned out to be the first rain gauge ever made, in a book on mathematics in the Yuan dynasty. During a teatime conversation about sternpost rudders with a team of acknowledged experts on shipbuilding from London, Needham turned out to know far more about the subject than any of the specialists. They returned to the Maritime Museum in Greenwich chastened, rubbing their eyes in astonishment both at the marvels of ancient China and, in comparison with Needham, their own newly revealed ignorance. And a Russian scientist arrived for tea, and asked, just in passing, if Needham knew who had translated one of the Russian’s own books, published in Moscow, into English—whereupon Needham reached around and fished the very book out of his shelves. He looked at it and nodded, remarking that, yes, the title did sound familiar. Yes, he said again, after thinking for a few more moments—he himself had actually been the translator, when he was an undergraduate. But he doubted that he could repeat the feat: his Russian was not so good today—though his German, Greek, French, and Italian, and of course his Chinese, were still well-nigh impeccable.

  But aside from such meetings as these, what exactly was Joseph Needham doing in his rooms? Just what was he trying to sift out from all the material he had gathered, and from all his memories? And, once he had it all, how exactly would he go about assembling all the building blocks into this massive, multivolume work?

  He decided initially to make a great histor
ical list, a list of every mechanical invention and abstract idea—the building blocks of modern world civilization—that had been first conceived and made in China. If he could manage to establish a flawless catalog of just what the Chinese had created first, of exactly which of the world’s ideas and concepts had actually originated in the Middle Kingdom, he would be on to something. If he could delve behind the unforgettable remark that Emperor Qianlong had made to the visiting Lord Macartney in 1792—“We possess all things…. I have no use for your country’s manufactures”—if he could determine what exactly prompted Qianlong to make such a claim, then he would perhaps have the basis of a truly original and world-changing work of scholarship. But he needed evidence, and a great deal of it.

  Accordingly, he and Wang Ling spent the remaining months of 1946, and most of the next five years, searching for every invention and original idea that was mentioned in the ancient Chinese literature.

  Needham proceeded in a patient, methodical, ruthlessly efficient way. He was an extraordinarily well-organized man. He was, for a start, a copious and fanatically driven note taker and file maker. In the piles of boxes that remain today in his archives in Cambridge are dozens of green steel card indexes, most of them filled nearly to bursting, not with index cards bought by the quire from stationers, but with menu cards from teahouses that he was forever cutting up in a process he called “knitting”—snipping, slicing, and folding—which would drive mad those uninitiated few who might accompany him to the café for a cup of Typhoo and a toasted tea cake. He would sit there cutting, cutting, smoking, and cutting—and a day later the cards would all be stacked in their boxes, each one covered with details, in his almost perfect copperplate, about arcane creations from China’s distant past. On the reverse side would be a half-legible copy of Today’s Special Lunch or Today’s Fare for Afternoon Tea.

  And one by one, he and Wang began to find things. True, he had made discoveries while he was in China—the antiquity of the abacus, for example, and techniques of grafting plums. But buried among the papers and the documents he had assembled in Cambridge there was much more. He was able to note excitedly:

  What a cave of glittering treasures was opened up! My friends among the older generations of sinologists had thought that we should find nothing—but how wrong they were. One after another, extraordinary inventions and discoveries clearly appeared in Chinese literature, archaeological evidence or pictorial witness, often, indeed generally, long preceding the parallel, or adopted inventions and discoveries of Europe. Whether it was the array of binomial coefficients, or the standard method of interconversion of rotary and longitudinal motion, or the first of all clockwork escapements, or the ploughshare of malleable cast iron, or the beginning of geo-botany and soil science, or cutaneous-visceral reflexes, or the finding of smallpox inoculation—wherever one looked, there was “first” after “first.”

  Needham first found a geographer of the Song dynasty named Shen Gua, for instance, who, in a document firmly dated at AD 1088, described the technique of using a magnetized needle suspended from a length of a silk to determine the direction of south—a full century before the first reference (in AD 1188) to the use of a magnetic compass anywhere else in the world. “I shall never forget the excitement which I experienced when I first read these words,” Needham wrote later. “If any one text stimulated the writing of this book more than any other, this was it.”

  He then found that Chinese ironworkers experimenting in the sixth century BC had managed to make iron that was malleable and not brittle, and that farmers had fashioned a plow from this metal, and added a moldboard to it, thus making a plow that was a vast advance on the primitive scratching device known as an ard, which was used in Europe at the time.

  He uncovered old writings and drawings showing that the Chinese had invented breast-strap harnesses for horses in the third century BC, when Europeans still had their horses and oxen drag plows by the cruel and inefficient means of a rope looped around their necks. The Europeans would continue to use neck ropes for at least 1,000 years more.

  He found that Chinese emperors, goading their subjects with the familiar valediction—“Do this, tremble, and obey!”—had built immense dams, irrigation projects, and canals (like the Grand Canal, which was started in the fifth century BC) hundreds of years before people in the waterlogged rest of the world (Mesopotamia excepted) thought they might be able to control their own rivers. Needham found documents showing that the Chinese created a tradition of subduing nature’s excesses while people in the West were simply lying back and cursing the inevitability of fate.

  The Chinese learned how to cast iron, for example, and to smelt it with coal. From the fourth century BC on, they were able to make long-lasting pots and pans, axes, chisels, saws, and awls—and a number of tall pagodas, some still standing today. In the seventh century after Christ an ironworker made a palace tower 300 feet high and weighing 1,300 tons, topped with a massive iron phoenix and covered with gold leaf. In the tenth century, when Chinese ironmaking was unequaled, foundrymen working for the emperor in Hubei province in central China made him an enormous commemorative cast-iron lion, twenty feet high and weighing forty tons, which still stands as a memorial to a defeat of Tartar invaders.

  But the founding of cast iron marked only the start of China’s remarkable metallurgical progress. By the second century BC foundry workers were managing to produce a much more malleable and less brittle version of the metal, which today is called wrought iron, doing so by way of a process to which they gave the culinary term chao, since it involved “stir-frying” the molten mass very slowly for hours at a time, to remove the excess carbon. Contemporary ironworkers would call the technique puddling. To further strengthen the puddled iron—which could be used by a blacksmith to make such things as stirrups and swords—some Chinese engineers of 2,000 years ago reintroduced a very carefully calibrated amount of carbon by hammering particles of it into the metal surface, producing a kind of crude steel.

  The puddling method, which the classic encyclopedia of the second century, the Huainanzi, called “the hundred refining method,” was often fancifully reckoned to be the fons et origo of the Bessemer process. The myth seemingly started because in 1855 the American steelmaker William Kelly hired a number of Chinese “experts” to work alongside his ironmasters in his mills in Kentucky, to give advice. In fact these “experts” were no more than manual laborers hired from a teahouse in New York City, men who had no special knowledge of steelmaking of any kind. They were simply cheaper to hire than the local Kentuckians. China had indeed an advanced and very ancient ability to make useful iron and some primitive kinds of steel—but Henry Bessemer’s process, like William Kelly’s, was entirely homegrown.

  Countless other clever devices followed. Chains were invented—permitting, among other conveniences, the making of the chain drive, which Needham discovered appearing in Chinese life in the tenth century, seven centuries before it was first seen in Europe. Long before that, in the first century, illustrations started to appear of the mysterious-sounding square-pallet chain pump—an enormously practical device that allowed farmworkers to raise water from rivers and streams by as much as fifteen feet, and so allow the irrigation of waterless fields. To operate it men drove their feet against large wooden paddles attached by sprockets to a chain of small wooden buckets: the device is in universal use in China today, so perfect a creation that it remains essentially unchanged after 2,000 years. Chains also meant chain suspension bridges, aeons before western suspension bridges were first made. Many of these Chinese bridges also remain today—the most famous being the nearly legendary Luding Bridge, which was built in 1701 across the Dadu River in Sichuan.

  In those corners of the empire where iron was less easy to obtain, engineers contrived to use stone for bridges crossing rivers, creating what is now known as the segmental arch bridge, a type of construction that remains perhaps the greatest feat of China’s early civil engineering.

  Three hu
ndred years before the Italians copied it, entirely thanks to the close observations of Marco Polo, this one type of Chinese bridge was to have an influence on communication and architecture like few others. The principle behind the bridge was first established in the seventh century by a northern Chinese engineer, Li Jun. Li had built many ordinary arch bridges—like those built by the Romans as early as the first century after Christ—but he realized that a bridge incorporating only the very top of a circle into the arch could be stronger, lighter, and more enduring than a tall, stone-hungry semicircle-arch bridge. He began experimental constructions at the end of the sixth century, and his first completed and truly segmented arch bridge, more than 120 feet long, was thrown across a river in Hebei province outside Beijing. It is still standing today—1,400 years after its construction in AD 605, and after centuries of floods, battles, and earthquakes.

  Less obvious and less dramatic improvements in human life were being made in China all the while, and Joseph Needham worked patiently during 1946 and 1947, through the most terrible British winter of all time, when most of the world outside Cambridge was flooded and miserable, assiduously chronicling each of the discoveries.

  Some were purely practical: the wheelbarrow, for instance, or the fishing reel. The sternpost rudder came about in the first century after Christ; and once the compass had been perfected it was possible for Chinese sailors to venture, as they did, to Australia, to Mogadishu, around the Cape of Good Hope, and on rather less daunting adventures to the Philippines and Indonesia. Then again, the rolling of the ships at sea caused a problem that another Chinese domestic invention neatly solved: it was a device of interlaced metal rings which keeps a light permanently upright and which is generally known as a set of gimbals, later used to hold a compass, a chronograph, and the ship’s gyroscope. And there was much, much more: the umbrella, the spinning wheel, the kite—and the sliding measuring instrument that engineers in the west copied and called a pair of calipers.