The Man Who Loved China

by Simon Winchester

  Soon after Needham stepped down as master—being permitted as a courtesy to retain the rooms for a while—the pair amalgamated their book collections. They then formed a trust that had two aims: to keep the project going and to find a permanent home for it. The trust then underwent mitosis, remaining in existence, but joined by two sister organizations, one based in Hong Kong to raise funds for the project’s home, the other in New York to seek money for the book’s continued publication.

  Needham and Gwei-djen began a rigorous program of shuttling to Asia, making speeches, attending dinners, jumping the hurdles and ducking through the various hoops that were the necessary rituals in persuading rich men and foundations to part with their money. Almost every time the couple went to China, they had to endure the gastronomic purgatories of banquets, often laced with awards. But Needham remained courteous and in puckish good form throughout: at one moment after he was awarded yet another plaque or medal or brooch or scroll of calligraphy, he turned to the camera crew recording the event: “All this,” he asked “—all this for little me?”

  The couple’s greatest success was with a former bicycle repairer in Cambridge, David Robinson, who had made a small fortune in the 1950s renting televisions to Britons too broke to buy them, and had then invested the resulting cash in horse racing and turned it into a very large fortune indeed. In the late 1970s he was endowing a new college at Cambridge near the University Library (and across the road from one of Britain’s few Real Tennis courts), and after a meeting at dinner and a series of long conversations, he offered to give Joseph Needham’s East Asian History of Science Trust a plot within the college site. He offered land—something that in the city of Cambridge was rare and precious.

  On this piece of land, Robinson imagined, there would rise a building to house all of Needham’s books on China, serve as headquarters for publishing the remaining twenty-odd volumes of Science and Civilisation in China, and allow research to be conducted on various aspects of Chinese history. And in time all this came to pass: Robinson College opened its doors in 1980, and the Needham Research Institute in 1987, just as David Robinson was coming to the end of his long and remarkable life.

  The queen opened the college; her husband laid the foundation stone of the institute; and the university vice-chancellor and the Chinese ambassador were both on hand to declare the Needham Research Institute open for business.

  But it was a project that had taken its toll. The financial crises attendant on its opening were profound, complicated as so often is the case by politics and competing egos. At one especially low point an anonymous donor gave sufficient money to keep the project tottering along—this turned out to be Lu Gwei-djen herself, who handed over part of her estate in Nanjing. Both she and Needham gave the titles to their houses on Owlstone Road—his at number 1, hers at 28—for the benefit of the trust. And from his personal funds (which were not inconsiderable: he was as judicious in financial matters as in his scholarly work) he paid Francesca Bray during her research for agriculture, much as he had paid Wang Ling for his help with the early volumes.

  But more poignantly, the work was taking its toll on the health of the three now very elderly and increasingly frail protagonists of the story. Everybody noticed. Some observers were aghast. In the winter of 1986 Needham showed up in Hong Kong, walking slowly and painfully with the help of a stick, to ask for yet further funds from people with unimaginable fortunes. As he stood up after giving a talk, and hobbled off, one his oldest friends in the room, Mary Lam, cried out: “Those people in Cambridge are so cruel, sending such an old man to go around asking for money. Give Dr. Needham what he wants!” (This they did, to the tune of $250,000.)

  Dorothy Needham was the first to die, three days before Christmas in 1987. The affection she and Joseph had displayed for each other never dimmed. The loving tone that marked their early correspondence—seen in hundreds of postcards and letters from Switzerland, Albania, Babbacombe, the Isle of Mull, O’Donnell’s Sea Grill in Washington, D.C., and everywhere imaginable in China—remained intact for all of their lives.

  Dorothy—Li Dafei, “graceful plum blossom”—had begun to suffer the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease soon after Needham retired. Thereafter she could travel very little, and was unable to take part in any discussions about the science to which she had once devoted her life. While still able to comprehend, in 1979, she had been elected an honorary fellow of Caius—one of the first women to be admitted, three years after her husband’s mastership had ended. Very occasionally the couple would dine in the college. When confused, she had to be led to her table by a steward, while Needham, now being wheeled through the college in a chair pushed by colleagues, would be hauled up to the hall in the dumbwaiter from the kitchen, along with the vegetables.

  Dorothy Needham’s last academic testament and magnum opus, written in 1972, was a book, Machina Carnis, on how muscles work: antiquarian booksellers still stock it, charging as much as $250, and it remains a classic. It had been a puzzle to her that despite her distinction and what her husband had once called her “complete freedom from worldliness,” she remained officially unrecognized by her university, and existed only on research grants, which were the basis for a hand-to-mouth existence and for which she applied and reapplied year after year through the decades of her active life.

  She died peacefully at home on December 22, 1987, at age ninety-two, having lived just long enough to be told that her husband’s institute had opened its doors—though it is doubtful that she ever truly understood. A flotilla of nurses were her final companions. The sadness of those close to her at her death was mixed with very evident relief that the ten long years when she was non compos mentis were finally at an end.

  Gwei-djen was not well, either. Though she—unlike Needham—had stopped smoking, she had had serious bronchial complaints for years, probably brought on by the chain-smoking of her youth. As far back as 1982, when she and Joseph had traveled to the mountains of Sichuan to investigate a cave painting that illustrated the first Chinese gun, she had just had part of one lung removed, and she had to be carried up to the caves on a litter. Some time soon after that, she was found staggering around the college in the dark—Joseph and Dorothy were at the movies—and was rushed to a hospital with a perforated appendix. In 1984 she collapsed in a hotel in Shanghai and had to be removed to Hong Kong, where she was treated. She recovered well enough to accompany Needham to Taiwan, where they had what both agreed was a wonderful time. But her collapse seemed ominous, and from then on she had a frail look about her, seeming very different from the tough little spitfire she had been in her youth.

  In 1989, more than half a century after they first met, Needham and Lu Gwei-djen were married in Cambridge. She died two years later, whereupon Needham invited three other women to marry him. All politely declined.

  There was an unanticipated coda to this story. In the early autumn of 1989, Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen married.

  The woman from Nanjing, who had been named for the sweet-smelling osmanthus tree and as a thing of great value, had first met Joseph Needham in 1937 and had fallen under his spell in 1938. He had been thirty-seven years old, she thirty-three. They had become lovers, and ever since had been inseparable boon companions. Now, after fully fifty-one years of waiting in the wings, during which her essential presence in Joseph’s life was wholly accepted by Dorothy, Gwei-djen was at last to marry the man with whom she had shared this undying passion.

  For more than half a century he had given her his unwavering affection. She, by way of return, had given him a great deal more: she had committed herself to him entirely, but she had also given him one further and incalculably valuable gift: China. “Joseph has built a bridge between our civilizations,” she had remarked in the 1960s. “I am the arch which sustains the bridge.”

  The couple married in the Caius College chapel on the morning of September 15, 1989, a Friday. The wedding photographs show the two ancient lovers as they emerge through a sandston
e archway, both stooped and with pure white hair, Joseph—the frailer of the pair—supporting himself with a tricycle walker and his chestnut stick, Gwei-djen leaning on a silver-tipped malacca cane. She is wearing a blue cheongsam with a bold peony print, he a crumpled double-breasted blue suit that had seen better days, and a blue bow tie. A lapel button shows his Chinese Order of the Brilliant Star. Both wear sprays of lilies, and are smiling broadly. “It may seem rather astonishing,” said Joseph at the celebration lunch in Hall, “for two octogenarians to be standing here together, but my motto is: Better late than never.”

  It was to be a very brief marriage, lasting just a little more than 800 days. Late in the autumn of 1991 she slipped and fell in a dark Cambridge restaurant, breaking her hip. A few days later, lying immobile on her back in Addenbrooke’s hospital, she found it increasingly difficult to breathe, her cough worsened, and antibiotics offered to treat the very obvious infection in her already badly damaged remaining lung became ineffective. Early in November the doctors decided to send her home, where she died, peacefully, on November 28. The official cause was bronchial pneumonia. She was eighty-seven.

  She had been inspired throughout her life in the West by one simple truth, something her father—Lu Shih-kuo, the “Merchant-Apothecary in the City of Nanking” to whom Needham dedicated the first volume—had said before she left China in 1937: “However strange the doings of the old Chinese might be in the eyes of modern people in the West, they always knew what they were doing, and some day the world would recognize this.”

  There was some untidiness following her death. A number of hitherto unknown relatives wrote urgently to Needham, having heard that she had left a small fortune in carefully managed stocks and shares, and demanding ample portions of it. She died intestate, and though Needham tried to make certain that his late wife’s wish—that the bulk of her estate go to the charitable trust—was fully honored, he had his lawyers fire off a barrage of letters to the various aunts and uncles and in-laws who had written so importunately from China, Canada, and New York state, rejecting most of their requests. Some claims, however, were still unsettled nearly two decades later, in 2007, and were being painstakingly handled by Lu’s executors. The outstanding cases have been of a complexity and a duration to rival Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. It is grimly supposed by many that the lawyers, working at a glacial rate, will consume an all too large portion of the remaining proceeds.

  Yet there was a curious reason Lu did not make a will. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, work on the book was proceeding in a way that some critics found puzzling. Needham, now well on in age, seemed somehow to lose his early grasp on the need for a coherent plan for completing the project—managing to write no fewer than four separate (but magnificently irrelevant) volumes on alchemy, for example, and to shoehorn them uncomfortably into the series. This caused some ructions: not a few people in Cambridge began to fret that if Needham became subject to increasingly eccentric editorial whims like this, the series might never be finished.

  The worry became so intense that it prompted one unalloyed supporter of the book and its founder to fly to New York to reassure the principal American financial champion of the project—the futurist and computer guru John Diebold—that all was in fact well, and that Science and Civilisation in China would be completed (and he was quite direct in saying so) by 1990. It was the most foolhardy of predictions—and when it became clear to Diebold that the target date would actually be missed by decades, he became understandably furious.

  This led to much argument and recrimination between Cambridge and New York, with the conviction growing in the minds of the aging and stubborn Needham and Gwei-djen that some kind of plot was now being hatched in New York, and led by John Diebold, to shut down the project completely. In consequence, and by the time she married Joseph, Gweidjen determined that she should not in fact make a new will—as she should have done—until she had engineered a financial structure that, whatever the villains in New York might do, would guarantee the future of the books, or as she and Joseph then insisted on calling them, “our children.” But she died before completing her plan.

  Needham was devastated by her death—much more so than he had been by the passing of his wife four years before. Moreover, he was now very much alone, for the first time since he had married Dorothy seven decades before. The sudden and unanticipated lack of female companionship evidently unhinged him, and he swiftly and impetuously (but serially rather than simultaneously) wrote proposals of marriage to three women—all of them East Asian, one the Miss Shih of Toronto with whom he had enjoyed a brief but intense relationship twenty years before. All three women turned him down.

  His loneliness was exacerbated by the fact that all his academic contemporaries were now gone, and the people at his institute were young men and women who—though they waited on him hand and foot, treating him like an emperor and behaving with all the deference of courtiers in the Forbidden City—had little in common with him, and were much more absorbed in their own fields of study.

  Physically, too, he was weakening. He was bowed over with scoliosis and had developed Parkinson’s disease and a variety of other ailments. But his mind remained sharp—waspishly so, said those who got on his wrong side—and he continued working through the early 1990s at the Sisyphean task he had set himself nearly half a century earlier.

  To make his life a little easier, he had sometime before been moved into a house that stood in the grounds of Robinson College just next to the institute, no more than a two-minute wheelchair ride to the sun-drenched office where he liked to work. The house, built in the minimalist style of the 1930s, had been designed for one of the university’s most celebrated couples: the economist Michael Postan and his historian wife, Eileen Power. Needham would have been amused to learn of one unexpected connection: in 1930 Eileen Power, traveling in China, became engaged to Reginald Johnston, who was the immensely handsome tutor54 of the last emperor of China, Pu Yi. The engagement was called off in 1932.

  In 1992 Needham was awarded the Companionship of Honour, and was brought to Buckingham Palace to receive this most exclusive of British awards from the queen. One of his caregivers—since Gwei-djen’s death he had a full-time helper, Stanley Bish—dressed him in a black silk Chinese robe for the ceremony. Needham was supposed to have said—but outside Her Majesty’s hearing—“About time!” There were many who thought that he should have received an honor rather earlier in his life, beyond the purely academic recognition he had amassed. But he was content with his lot, and cherished the uniqueness that this particular honor conferred: “Joseph Needham, CH, FRS, FBA,” said a notice published by the Royal Society: “one can count the number of living holders of these three titles on one finger of one hand.”

  He worked until the very end, faithfully taking a ginseng pill each morning—just one; Gwei-djen had long before told him that his previously customary two were excessive—in the belief that it would lengthen his life. He loved his office: he loved being surrounded, almost encased, entombed, enwrapped, and swaddled by the accumulated thousands of books and stacks of papers and scrolls, and by walls that were hung with pictures and charts and maps and lined with the file cabinets, supremely well-organized, that helped him in his work. And there were innumerable objects, too, attesting in aggregate to the extraordinary range of his travels and fascinations.

  There were clay models of masks from the Beijing opera. Chinese chess pieces brought back by Dorothy’s aunt Ethel. A small abacus. A bag from a sake brewery in Kyoto. A piece of the Berlin Wall. A model of a nineteenth-century beam engine. A baby’s urinal “collected by Rewi Alley in Xinjiang.” Seeds from a Chinese tea plant from Meijiawu. A Han dynasty bronze whistling arrowhead. An ivory box for keeping fighting crickets. A crossbow trigger, probably a Ming copy. A set of Chinese scales and a single slipper. A cigar holder engraved with Chinese characters written by Needham himself. Scores of seal ink containers, including one described as “very nice,” from the Qianlong era,
made when Lord Macartney was visiting China in the late eighteenth century. A plaque stating that October 28, 1984, was officially Joseph Needham Day in the state of Illinois. Two pairs of slippers for bound feet. A rice pounder. A Sichuan spinning top. A toy railway train and one piece of track. Two of Dorothy’s earrings. Railway timetables and tickets galore. Photographs of churches from around the world. Pictures of himself morris dancing, while playing the accordion and smoking. A Chinese wooden puzzle. A sample of gypsum. A model of a spoon once used as a lodestone.

  These props helped, as did the ginseng, for Needham was still managing to work—though dozing for much of the working day, it must be said—during the following three years, writing, filing, napping, writing. He would be wheeled over to the institute at noon, and return at five. When he came back he would eat ice cream and watch Chinese television, and sometimes he would sing—once singing “The Red Flag” so loudly he was asked to pipe down. He did not miss a day in the office, keeping to his routine of five hours at his desk laboring on the book, then going home to domestic letter writing, ice cream, and bed.

  On Thursday, March 23, it was clear to all that the end was coming. His colleagues at the institute noticed that he was failing, and the next morning it was suggested that, for the first time in memory, he take the day off. It was a Friday, after all: he could make it a long weekend. He could charge his batteries for the week ahead. “All right,” he said. “I’ll stay at home.”

  He got up for a while and sat at his breakfast table, classical music playing in the background. At noon his nurses put him back to bed. The dean of Caius came by, unannounced, and said a brief prayer with him, saying he would return the next morning to give Joseph Holy Communion. The old man slept through the early evening, wrapped in a sheepskin rug.

  Then his caregiver asked if he was frightened. “Oh no,” he replied, weakly. Christopher Cullen, his successor as director of the institute, asked him if he was in pain. “No, no pain,” he returned, quietly. Stanley Bish later wrote that a friend and neighbor, the distinguished historian of literature and science, Elinor Shaffer, came by, though she had wondered if she should, since she had a bad cold. She brought a daffodil, a sign that the brisk March weather was nonetheless the start of another spring, the ninety-fifth through which Joseph Needham had lived.