Bomb, Book and Compass

by Simon Winchester

  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.

  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 that he had collected and that 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 course 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 post-war plan for the United Nations that 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.

  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 go 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 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 [personnel] 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 kn
ow 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 enquiry 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 favour. 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 Gwei-djen. 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 followed 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 post-war 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 terraced 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. ‘Dr 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’.34After 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 the Second World War – 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, modelled 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.