Bomb, Book and Compass

by Simon Winchester

  Eggs and potatoes for supper. H. T. paid. Slept fairly well in and around the truck. During the night 100 more mulecarts came by and were only stopped at 3 a.m. by a driver behind us who drove his truck across the road.

  Had a lovely bathe about 5 a.m. in the river and a good breakfast. At about 8.30 a.m. an awful air force officer forced passage with four southbound trucks – had an awful job stopping southbound traffic: Ed was stationed at the top of the road and H. T. at the bottom while we brought our truck down, breaking a support on the way. We were ready to cross when miles and miles of army supplies on foot came through, cutting us short and making everyone wait. Finally got across at 12.10, a 26 hour delay.

  After several more days like this, Needham decided to call a halt. They stopped at the small town of Shuangshipu, nestling in a hollow in the hills eighty miles away from the Silk Road. He chose it for his caravanserai in part for simple convenience, and to get repairs for his truck’s newly broken spring. But he also stopped at Shuangshipu in the hope of seeing one of China’s more celebrated foreign residents – a man with the unusual name of Rewi Alley, who thanks to this brief stop would soon become a privileged member of Needham’s inner circle. ‘No better friend,’ said Needham much later, of this formidable and controversial character, ‘and no more reliable colleague.’

  Rewi Alley could lay claim to many things – one of his biographical entries lists him as ‘writer, educator, social reformer, potter and Member of the Communist Party of China’ – and is also undeniably the most famous New Zealander ever to have lived in China. He lived there for sixty years, becoming a mythic figure in his own lifetime, an intimate of the Chinese Communist leaders, a man regarded by his admirers as almost godlike and by his enemies as a charlatan, a traitorous propagandist, a libertine, and a pederast.

  He was remarkable-looking – short, stocky, sunburned, with legs like tree trunks. He had been named for a Maori chief and was the son of a schoolteacher and of a mother who was an early suffragist. He was a fanatic about keeping fit, an eager nudist, and – an admission made much of by his detractors – an unabashed homosexual.

  Alley first came to China in 1927, impelled at least in part by his eager interest in young Chinese men (he had been sexually initiated by a soldier from Shandong whom he had encountered in France when both were serving in the final months of the Great War). He lived in Shanghai, a city that offered him a wide array of erotic amusements, and worked there first as a fireman, then as a factory inspector. During his ten years in the city he learned Chinese well-nigh perfectly, wrote volumes of homoerotic poetry, volunteered for famine- and flood-relief projects and other humanitarian causes in the countryside, and demonstrated a passion for social work and improving the lot of the ordinary Chinese. He left a distinct impression on all who met him – including, in the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.

  But in 1937, when the Japanese bombers struck targets in Shanghai and their troops overran the city, he fled. He went west, settling initially in the city of Hankou on the Yangzi. Here, the following year, in the company of Edgar Snow and his wife, Helen Foster (who was also known as Peg Snow and by her nom de plume, Nym Wales), and the secretary to the British ambassador (the ambassador in those days was the colourful Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, who wrote all his diplomatic despatches with a quill), Rewi Alley sat down to help create a revolutionary new industry.

  The guiding principle was simple. Since by now the Japanese either controlled or had destroyed almost all of China’s major manufacturing capability, and since the Chinese military response to the mighty invading army was based on guerrilla tactics of harassment and surprise, why not organize guerrilla industry, too? Why not build hundreds of factories that were light, flexible, and perhaps even mobile; that could operate in the far beyond of inland China; and that could simultaneously provide low-paid work for the locals and low-cost output for the national good? The idea — no one is entirely sure who at the meeting came up with the concept, but supporters of Rewi Alley like to say he did – was immediately and widely accepted as entirely brilliant. The Chinese government chipped in some money; international appeals were launched to ask for more; and an organization known as Indusco, or the Chinese Industrial Cooperative (CIC), was formally set up.

  By happenstance the first two characters of this new organization’s Chinese name were gung ho – and though there was no linguistic connection, the two words were very soon afterwards adopted as a motto by a friend of Alley in the US Marines. They became the battle cry of this marine unit, and such were the unit’s successes on the battlefield that the phrase – much like ‘Up and at’ em!’ or ‘Banzai!’ – slipped into the American English lexicon. In short order gung ho acquired a new meaning – a little different from its start as a battle cry and a lot different from its Chinese industrial origins. It now signified unquenchable and almost careless enthusiasm. But since ironists might say that both spirits, old and new, also underlay the cooperative’s efforts in China, there may be a certain symmetry to it all. (The fact that the phrase was first coined at a meeting of four foreign left-wing sympathizers in an office of the Yokohama Specie Bank in Hankou in early 1938 has, on the other hand, no symmetry to it at all.)

  Once the supporters’ money was received, messengers and organizers fanned out into the hinterland and tiny factories sprang up in remote towns all over China. They were factories that generally employed just twenty or thirty workers – seven was the usual minimum, and rarely did a CIC factory ever have more than a hundred in its workforce. The factories produced a bewildering variety of goods that war-torn China needed. They made candles and lightbulbs; they printed pamphlets and mined bauxite; they tanned leather, spun cloth, and hammered out boilers, tin roofs, small boats, and spare parts for railway engines – everything that was needed and that was not being made in the bombed-out factories in places such as Shanghai, Fuzhou, Tianjin, and Wuhan was being made in the countryside, by an energized, optimistic, and newly purposeful Chinese rural workforce.

  Rewi Alley was invariably out in the field at the sharp edge of the process, while the Snows and the other theorists of the movement (which would be much admired by E. F. Schumacher and the adherents of his ‘Small is beautiful’ movement in the 1970s) remained behind in the capital. Alley bicycled, walked, and hitchhiked for thousands of miles across China in the early 1940s, lecturing on the CIC’s ideas, attracting volunteers, setting up plants, and then moving on. He was seen as a golden-hearted gypsy of a man, and by April 1940 Time magazine reported, clearly approvingly, that his wanderings had helped to bring into existence some 2,000 CIC factories, which employed 50,000 workers and produced goods valued at $6 million each month, well beyond the reach or interest of the Japanese bombers.

  Rewi Alley was often compared to Lawrence of Arabia – Edgar Snow, for one, wrote that ‘where Lawrence brought to the Arabs the destructive technique of guerrilla war, Alley was to bring the constructive technique of guerrilla industry… It may yet rank as one of the great human adventures of our time.’ There was a sustained effort by Snow and other left-wing journalists and writers to advance Alley – with his formidable looks, his romantic past, and his swaggering, devil-may-care attitude – as the public face of the ‘Gung Ho’ movement; and millions of dollars were indeed raised on the back of his story.

  But he was a figure of much controversy, too. Later, when he was elderly and had moved to Beijing to live out his retirement as an official ‘foreign friend of the Chinese people’ in a house donated by the government, he described the occasional precariousness of his position during the 1940s:

  I had many enemies, who stuck at nothing in the way of stories to pull me down. I was a British Agent, trying to get hold of Chinese industry; a diabolically clever engineer trying to find out about Chinese resources for foreign interests; a sentimental religious adventurer out to make a name for himself at the expense of the Chinese people; a sex maniac with a wife in every big city in the countryside; how I took an a
ctress to sleep with me on long journeys; a Japanese agent, spying for the Japanese. A Communist sympathizer. An agent of the Russians. An agent of the Third International, a fool who knows nothing of industry, a gangster who was piling away a fortune in banks in India.

  The Discovering of China Rewi Alley, the most famous New Zealander ever to live in China, and who would become one of Needham’s most enduring friends. He gave the world the phrase gung ho.

  By the time he got to Shuangshipu, his enemies had seemingly triumphed. In 1942 he had been summarily sacked when it was alleged that some of his Gung Ho factories had been forging guns and weaving blankets specially for the Chinese Communist armies. The Nationalists were infuriated, not least because Chiang Kai-shek had personally seen to it that about $2 million in government funds had gone to help Gung Ho establish itself.

  So Alley was removed as field secretary, and demoted. He remained on the payroll of the cooperative, but his duties were downgraded to those of a teacher in the schools that trained the Gung Ho apprentices. These were known as Baillie Schools, after the American missionary Joseph Baillie, who had first recognized the need for technical training. Since the students were invariably young and male, Alley took his demotion in high spirits, and by the time Needham came to meet him in the summer of 1943, he was contented and philosophical in his new incarnation as a master in a school for young boys.

  The damage to the truck was far worse than Needham expected, and he would have to spend some time in town while the necessary repairs were made. So he set out to look for Alley, going first to the Baillie School behind the town gasworks, and then to Alley’s famous cave house – but the great man was bathing. A servant was sent to fetch Alley; and while he waited, Needham looked in on a cotton-spinning cooperative that was just being built, and traipsed through a machine shop that had been set up some months before.

  Finally Rewi Alley arrived. The men shook hands; took off for the curious cottage-cum-cave where the New Zealander had lived for the past year; and had high tea – corn on the cob, honey, the large flatbread known as da bing, eggs, tomatoes, and coffee. Needham developed a peculiar liking for bread and honey from that moment on, and for the rest of his life. On his eightieth birthday Gwei-djen reminded him of how, ‘when one is hungry in China, and when one feels like a sweet taste, schooled by Rewi Alley, one goes to the drug-shop and buys a jar of honey to eat with the cart-wheel Gansu bread’.

  The men next went to the school, where by now the boys, an irrepressible group numbering about sixty, most in their mid-teens, had been primed to line up and perform for their distinguished diplomatic visitor. They sang folk songs from the Chinese northwest, and both Needham and H. T. reported being deeply moved by one haunting melody – it was twilight, and as the boys sang the flag was lowered for the evening.

  Then Needham took the stage and sang a medley of English folk songs, his thin, high voice clear in the evening air. He sang ‘Lilli Bulero’ and ‘The Saucy Spanish Boy’, and, after concluding from the applause that it all had gone well, he decided to forget how foolish he might look in front of the children, ripped off his army jacket, rolled up his sleeves, picked up a heavy stick – and for fifteen breathless minutes performed a series of particularly wild and whirling old English morris dances, singing lustily all the while. To all who saw his performance that August evening the image of morris dancing in China remained profoundly haunting. It left the schoolboys open-mouthed with astonishment and, Needham later assumed immodestly, delight.

  He said later that he felt that while he was no Fred Astaire, what he lacked in elegance he made up for with historical accuracy and gymnastic enthusiasm. One of his colleagues agreed, writing: ‘Dr Joseph Needham/Dances with philosophic freedom./You’d better watch your toes if/You dance with Joseph.’

  The friendship with Rewi Alley was sealed. Needham did not care one whit if homosexuality kept Alley in China, or specifically in this remote corner of China. In later years Needham, though an ardent heterosexual himself, would champion the cause of gay men and women – and in all likelihood he did so in part because of his deep admiration for Alley, whose sexual habits were unashamed and flamboyantly expressed.23

  His headmaster in Shuangshipu, a young, aristocratic Englishman named George Hogg, was later to write of life in Alley’s peculiar house:

  The main distinctive feature of Rewi’s cave in Shuangshipu is exactly the same as that of his former house in Shanghai – that at any time out of school hours it is filled with boys. Boys looking at picture magazines and asking millions of questions. Boys playing the gramophone and singing out of tune. Boys doing gymnastics off Rewi’s shoulders or being held upside down… Boys pulling the hairs on Rewi’s legs, or fingering the generous portions of the foreigner’s nose. ‘Boys are just the same anywhere,’ says Rewi. ‘Wouldn’t these kids have a swell time in New Zealand?’

  North of Shuangshipu the scenery changes almost in an instant. The mountains, which up to this point on the journey had been of unforgiving granite clothed with stands of bamboo, give way at the summits above town to soft rolling hills, all terraced and gorse-hedged and with small flat expanses for wheat, corn, or paddy, and with the soil, most significantly, a warm shade of yellow.

  This yellow soil gave its name to the Yellow River, into the wide valley of which Needham’s trucks were now beginning to make their long, slow descent. The Yellow River, the Huang He, is yellow because it tears away from its banks a huge amount of this rich soil – 1.5 billion tons each year – and carries it unstoppably down to the sea. This is the muddiest river in the world, thirty-four times as muddy as the eau de Nilcoloured Nile. The mud, say many Chinese, is China. The Huang He has long been known as ‘China’s sorrow’ because the river is tearing out China’s heart and pouring it into the ocean.

  The soil – fine, friable, and easily ploughed – is known as loess and was so named in Germany, where geologists first noticed it. The common belief is that it is the windblown relic soil of the last great Ice Age. It is thick and extensive – loess deposits are found all over central Europe and central Asia, in vast tracts of northern China, and in the central plains states of America. It is much loved by farmers, being defined by one Victorian as ‘a loose light soil of prodigious fertility, and the joy of the agriculturist’.

  But it was not much loved by Joseph Needham, who discovered just outside Huixian that the Yellow River’s tributaries are as loaded with silt and yellow loess as the great river itself. ‘We reached a difficult crossing – a sea of mud, the mountains dissolving like dilute brown cream. Rewi paddled and checked it.’24 Three trucks – Needham’s two and one other, a stranger – were stuck for many hours in the torrents of mud. Needham, patiently waiting it out, contented himself with photographing the peculiar waveforms in the river.

  Needham noticed one other change in the landscape. The first evidence of the presence of Islam appeared just beyond the town of Huixian. ‘Visited the mosque… very beautiful,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Must be the most easterly mosque in Central Asia.’ He made a drawing of it and wrote a caption with an additional description:

  Mosque hall, garden, terrace with three old men sitting on it, ablution courtyard, road spirit wall; towers of three storeys ([with a] muezzin) in Chinese style with Arabic as well as Chinese inscriptions. This included arch in lower storey. Mullah’s house with his own ablution pavilion. Bamboo-shaped bricks in the arches. Brick panels of rhomboid-shaped bricks. Trees very pretty. The whole well-painted and kept up. Everybody very friendly and obviously proud to be Muslims.

  As it wore on, the journey became worse and worse, with the trucks behaving impossibly. Each day the party was held up because of broken head gaskets, oil leaks, transmission problems, flat tyres. So accustomed were the travellers to mechanical upsets that a fractured piston or two seemed a mere bagatelle, and Needham met each episode with equanimity and good spirits. ‘Bought marvellous peaches,’ he would write. ‘Sun came out. Had nice breakfast.’ ‘Lovely rugs. Pots of
flowers everywhere.’ In one village he found that the people were less than fetching, being ‘very poor and smelly’, but he was thrilled to find that their daughters had bound feet. The village women still wrapped young girls’ feet in long cloths – having broken their toes, sliced into their soles, and pulled out their nails to speed the process of creating the ‘lotus feet’ that men seemingly craved. Needham exulted over the discovery of a custom that, however barbaric, had not been completely eradicated. The republic had banned the practice from 1911 on and had ordered all women to unbind their feet – but the unbinding was as painful and crippling as the binding had been in the first place. Needham, while revolted, found it all fascinating.25

  He kept discovering treasures that he knew would be useful for his book. ‘Found Song dynasty pottery shards in a fort above the village,’ he recorded at one enforced halt – and then whiled away the time waiting for the mechanics to repair a water pump, or some such, by ruminating on the methods of early Chinese ceramicists, and of how their techniques of throwing, glazing, and firing had been much more advanced in China in Song times – the tenth and eleventh centuries after Christ – than they had been in Europe. Lord Macartney’s China trade expedition of 1792 had brought newly created pottery from Josiah Wedgwood’s factory in Etruria as a gift for the Chinese emperor: small wonder, Needham noted, that the emperor huffily refused to accept the pieces – English ceramics must have seemed primitive to him in comparison with the Chinese porcelain of the day. (Some scholars offer an alternative explanation for the emperor’s refusal. By deigning to accept the gift of Wedgwood he would have been tacitly admitting that the English ware perhaps actually was of a quality equal to that made by his homegrown craftsmen. Such an admission would have resulted in a loss of face for every ceramicist in the empire.)