Warring states period 112
water and hydraulics, role in Chinese history 109–13, 191, 200
Watson, James 250
Wells, H. G. 18, 34, 64
Weltfish, Gene 218
West Rebecca 34
wheelbarrow, Chinese 193
Wheldale, Murial 22
Williams, Samuel Wells 69n.12
Williams-Ellis, Amabel 34
Williams-Ellis, Clough 203, 34n.5
Winant, John 61
women
Chinese foot binding practice 123–4
Joseph Needham’s relationships with 25, 27, 856, 90, 150–51 248–9
Joseph Needham’s traditional attitudes toward 241
Woolf, Virginia 238n.51
Worcester, G. R. G. 203
World Peace Council 210–11
World War I 17
World War II 48, 48–9
Chongqing as Chinese capital during 1–6, 10–11, 50
Worm Ouroboros, The (Eddison) 111n.21
Wuguanhe, China 114
Xi’an, China 104, 132, 136 see also Chang’an, China
Xiang River bridge incident, Joseph Needham and 157–60
Xinjiang (Chinese Turkistan), Needham expedition to 103–48
Xuan Zang 137
Yang Lingwei, Chinese astronaut 275
Yangzi River 79, 92, 94, 263
Yellow River 121–2, 146
Ye, P. , letters from, to Joseph Needham 199n.39
Yibin, China 90, 91–2, 93–4
Yongle dadien (The Great Canon of the Yongle Emperor’s Era) 183n.36
Yongqiang, China 110–11
Younghusband, Francis 77
Yuan dynasty 188
Yunnan Province, China 161
Zhao Baoling 151
Zhejiang University 181–2 182
Zheng He, Chinese explorer 201
Zhongguo 233n.47 see also China
Zhou Enlai (Chinese Communist leader) 43, 61, 82, 182n.35
on China’s hygiene campaign and accusations against US of biological warfare use during Korean War 208–10, 215
friendship with Joseph Needham 98, 99–100, 103, 169, 243, 244, 208n.42
photos of 216, 244
Zhuangzi 170
Zhu Jingying 85–6
Zhu Kezhen (scholar), book and manuscript collection donated to Joseph Needham by 181–3
Zuckerman, Solly 34
Zunyi, China 181
1 There were many distinguished male researchers, too among them the celebrated geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, whose line from the famous essay On Being the Right Size still haunts many. He was describing what happens when a variety of mammals of different sizes are dropped down a mineshaft: A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.
2 Needham’s renowned ownership of Campbell’s mighty car led to a reported encounter with Chairman Mao in the 1960s which, if it did indeed take place, was to have an enormous impact on Chinese society and, incidentally, on global warming. The details of the conversation will appear later in this book.
3 The topic intrigued Dorothy Needham for the rest of her life. Her only book, devoted entirely to muscle movement, was published when she was seventy-six. It was called Machina Carnis, roughly translated as The Meat Machine.
4 Dorothy Needham was made a fellow seven years later giving the Needhams the great distinction of being the only husband-and-wife team to be accorded the honour, aside from the honorific appointments of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
5 The wife of Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect best known for creating the fantasy town of Portmeirion in north Wales (where the cult television series The Prisoner was filmed in the 1960s).
6 For twenty years, beginning in 1937, this remarkable organization tallied the ordinary details of British life, using volunteers to perform such mundane tasks as asking people what they kept in their trouser pockets, surreptitiously noting down the rituals of working-class courtship, and reading messages written on banknotes.
7 There was a period during the Cultural Revolution when it was officially deemed more truly proletarian and patriotic to have just a single given name. A Chinese with an abbreviated name like Chen Hong or Li Guan suggests the bearer was quite probably born during the late 1960s, with parents who obeyed the instructions of their local Red Guards.
8 To add a further layer of complexity: Needham wrote his dictionary using the venerable Wade-Giles system of transliterating Chinese pronunciation into English. The modern pinyin system is very different so the sound for electricity is not tien, as Needham had it, but dian, though in the same fourth tone; and tien, heaven, becomes tian, as in the usual contemporary spelling of the Beijing landmark Tiananmen Square.
9 The Japanese began softening-up operations in June, dropping experimental bombs on the Shanghai docks, and in the process rudely delaying Gwei-djen’s departure for London. It was only thanks to a passing British destroyer that stopped and gave her a ride down the estuary that she made it to her steamer at all: she was drenched with spray from the Zeros attacks.
10 Knatchbull-Hugessen is most fondly remembered for having been the victim, when later appointed British ambassador to Turkey, of the Cicero affair, in which his Albanian valet stole the keys to the embassy safe from his cast-off trousers. Defenders claimed that the injuries he suffered in Shanghai had rendered him so careless and forgetful. The obituary writer for The Times felt there was a deeper problem. The ambassador’s career had been a successful one, said its anonymous author, because Knatchbull-Hugessen was fortunate in never having had to meet a situation demanding more of him than he had to offer. Moreover, it was also a definite advantage that he had a mind which, while agile and resourceful, instinctively eschewed complexities and so saved him from the pitfalls which, especially in dealings with clever foreigners, beset the path of the overingenious intellectual.
11 One of the half-crown paperbacks put out by the club in 1939 was the story of the Levellers, a seventeenth-century grassroots political movement. The author was Henry Holorenshaw a nom de plume, it later turned out, for Joseph Needham (who also wrote a foreword under his own name, praising this little book of my friend, Mr Holorenshaw).
12 Samuel Wells Williams, a New Yorker with a lifelong fascination with the East, was the interpreter who in 1853 travelled to Japan with Admiral Perry, the American who helped bring about the end of the shogunate, the restoration of the emperor, and the beginnings of Japan’s modernization.
13 As indeed this one was. On page 107 of Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, Volume VI, Part I, Botany, there appears the first of many references to grafting techniques, starting with a description from the thirteenth century of how a Chinese gardener would make a graft on a red orange tree.
14 This principle had allowed the subjects of certain foreign imperial powers – Britain, France, Italy, and the United States among them – to be considered answerable only to the judicial systems of their home countries while living and working in China. British vessels operating on the Yangzi, for example, were subject not to Chinese laws but to the same laws that operated on the Thames or in the Bristol Channel. An American accused of assault in a bar in Shanghai would be judged by an American court, since Chinese justice was considered peculiar and suited only to Chinese citizens.
15 Winning a Cambridge ‘Blue’ – for competing against Oxford in a sport – was often as important a qualification as an academic degree. George Hogg, an old China hand, wrote once of his surprise in learning that ‘a Double Blue is a necessary qualification for the best colonial posts, while two college game colours (squash rackets acceptable as one) will do for the Indian Civil Service’.
16 One of the other guests, with whom he briefly shared quarters, was the brilliant Dutch sinologist and novelist Robert van Gulik, who was stationed in Chongqing as counsellor at the Netherlands embassy. Van Gulik’s main claim to fame was a series of Chinese detective novels centred on the exploits of a seventh-century magistrate, Judge
Dee. Needham and van Gulik became firm friends, their relationship cemented by their vast intelligences, and a shared interest in erotica.
17 Old-timers reported that Chongqing’s rats invariably had bright red bellies; when found in hotels they would be chased away by kitchen boys who would throw vats of boiling water over them. This would scare them but not kill them. The scalding water would, however, instantly turn them bright pink, bellies and all – a phenomenon that gave the kitchen boys an opportunity for great sport.
18 These would be made for them by specialists at the Indian Geological Survey in Calcutta from samples sent down from China.
19 The first of the thousands of figures was discovered quite accidentally by a farmworker digging a well in 1974. When Needham visited the city thirty years before, it was known for its array of architectural relics – immense city walls, huge gates, temple complexes, royal tombs, and countless tall pagodas – attesting to its greatness as Imperial China’s one-time capital and – under its former name, Chang’an – as the eastern terminus of the Silk Road.
20 Needham was a strong advocate of the use of power alcohol, distilled from rice, maize, or molasses, and had his truck’s engine converted to employ this fuel, which he found satisfactory ‘even over the great mountain roads’. This was not the case with the many Chinese buses that had been converted to burn charcoal, and that would work properly only on the flat. Petrol, though costly and difficult to come by, was made in some refineries from tung oil, or by a more complex process from pine tree roots and stumps.
21 Needham’s diaries are positively littered with reminders of the breadth of his interests. At one point in his journey across the Red Basin of Sichuan he notes that the landscape reminded him of ‘Morna Moruna in Wm. of Ourob’. The cryptic reference turns out to be to a mountain in a book of high fantasy, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), by Eric Eddison – said to have inspired Tolkien to write The Lord of the Rings.
22 By this time the century-old China Inland Mission (CIM), set up to promote the interdenominational evangelization of China by missionaries who were expected to live in as Chinese a manner as possible, had some 350 stations across the country, offering Christian hospitality to travellers like Needham. They had reached their peak in 1934, having weathered the Boxer rising and the revolution and the sundry depredations of warlordism. The Japanese war caused the CIM immense trouble, and by the time of the Communist revolution the number of stations had dipped to fewer than 100. They were eventually branded as havens for imperialist spies. The remaining missions were shut down, and the last missionaries left by way of Hong Kong in 1953.
23 At least, they were until 1949. After the Communist revolution Alley had to keep his inclinations hidden, since they were illegal. He was compelled to return to the closet, a fate that he found vexing.
24 Needham had taken Alley along for a ride to find new and safer quarters for a new Baillie School, since the Nationalists were starting to harass Shuangshipu, trying to press-gang boys into joining their battle-depleted army. In the end, and with Needham’s help, Rewi Alley did find a new location in the old Gobi Desert town of Shandan. George Hogg, the English headmaster, then led the sixty children across the mountains on foot, a 600-mile epic that ranks with the achievements of Gladys Aylward in the book The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, which recounts her trek with similarly displaced children to an orphanage in Xi’an. George Hogg himself died of tetanus en route after cutting his toe while playing basketball with the children: he was just twenty-nine. The Canadian director Roger Spottiswoode added a sprinkling of fictional elements to the saga and turned the story into a film, The Children of Huang Shi, in 2008.
25 Precisely why so many Chinese men were so entranced by bound feet has never been satisfactorily explained. Women’s tiny lotus-shaped shoes were said to thrill some men – but most of these same men were aghast if a woman removed her shoe to display the wrecked foot inside. The so-called lotus gait of women with bound feet was also said to attract some erotic interest. Gladys Aylward, the missionary whose life was famously told in the book and film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, was an early campaigner against the practice: her grandfather in London had made boots for the disabled.
26 His usual Chinese name, Li Yue-se, had by now been augmented with two others given to him along the way – Shi Xin Dao Ren, which translates as ‘the Taoist of ten constellations’; and Sheng Rongzhi, which very roughly translates as ‘the master who is victorious over confusion’. He had the Lanzhou carvers make all three, and used them sometimes to sign his letters, causing much confusion.
27 This lovely old walled town was where Rewi Alley eventually decided to move his Baillie School, down from its threatened site at Shuangshipu. George Hogg and the sixty young pupils walked where Needham had driven, reaching there eventually (though without George Hogg, who died) after much adventure and heartache – sufficient of both to fascinate Hollywood.
28 Among these was Langdon Warner of Harvard, an art historian who in due course carried off twenty-six of the Dunhuang caves frescos, and did so with such dash and swagger that he became one of Steven Spielberg’s models for Indiana Jones.
29 The Foreign Office swiftly removed Bryan from Beijing, despite his having performed so ably in 1949 during the crisis over the Communists’ capture on the Yangzi of HMS Amethyst, and offered him instead a post in the British embassy in Lima. They told him that because of his views he could never return to China as a diplomat. He chose instead to take early retirement. Perhaps it was as well: he had already irritated the British ambassador by complaining that lavatories at the embassy in Beijing were designated for Chinese or non-Chinese, a form of Asian apartheid.
30 Their southbound route was not without interest: on their first day they found themselves praying out loud as their truck inched carefully over a mountain pass near Zunyi so steep that the road had no fewer than seventy-two consecutive hairpin bends. A relieved Needham, attempting nonchalance, wrote later that the pale blue irises in the next valley were especially beautiful.
31 Three months before Needham travelled towards the front, the Japanese advance westward had been halted, decisively, at the famous battle of Kohima in the Indian state of Assam, described variously as the ‘Stalingrad of the East’, ‘Britain’s Thermopylae’, and ‘one of the greatest battles in history’. Between April and June 1944 a small British contingent held off thousands of Japanese, the climax coming in the legendary ‘Battle of the Tennis Court’, hand-to-hand fighting in the gardens of the deputy commissioner’s bungalow, ending on the tennis court’s centre line. Kohima was the most westerly point the Japanese ever attained: after June they were being relentlessly pressed back towards Tokyo, and fought like tigers as they went. In Kohima there is today a simple cross to the fallen British: ‘When You Go Home/Tell them of Us and Say/For your Tomorrow/We Gave our Today’.
32 One hundred grams of the pressed juice of what is now generally known as the Indian gooseberry provides almost one full gram of vitamin C, and so not surprisingly it is widely available at health-food stores.
33 Lady Seymour had returned from her self-imposed wartime exile in Wiltshire to join her husband once the peace was signed and it was deemed safe for her to be back in Chongqing.
34 Until February 1945 the body was tentatively known as UNECO. During Needham’s visit to the United States in February 1945 he argued vociferously for the inclusion of science in its responsibilities, and handwrote a memo suggesting that it be called UNESCO instead. This was formally agreed in November.
35 Except for the roiling civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists, that ended in 1949 with victory for Mao and Zhou Enlai.
36 Two other works traditionally rival the Gujin tushu jicheng for length and magnificence. The Yongle dadien (The Great Canon of the Yongle Emperor’s Era) was produced in the fifteenth century, in early Ming times, and had 11,000 manuscript volumes, of which only a few hundred survive, most held privately; and the Siku Quanshu (The Complete Book
s of the Four Imperial Repositories) was produced by the Manchus of the mid-Qing dynasty and exists in no fewer than 36,000 volumes. The Forbidden City’s original, repaginated into 1,500 leather-bound volumes, is in the great National Museum in Taipei, with a photographic reprint at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, and with condensed facsimile copies – and a CD-ROM edition – available for considerable sums in folding money.
37 His favoured use of this elderly typewriter led to the accidental birth of a new Needham system of Chinese transliteration. Whenever he tried to type a word with an aspirated h – a word like Ch’iu – he found that his apostrophe would not work, and so he represented the aspirate with a double h – Chhiu. This made its way into print, and remained the case in all volumes of Science and Civilisation in China, his editors assuming that it was a deliberate invention of Needham’s rather than a shortcut necessitated by a problem of writing mechanics.
38 This has been a very popular commodity among rich Chinese for centuries; it became fashionable in the fourteenth century: records show that particularly impressive orders for quantities of this ‘thick but soft’ aromatic paper were issued in 1393. Large sheets, two feet by three feet, were made for general use at court; smaller and better-quality sheets, just three inches square, were designed for the more sensitive and economically shaped bottoms of the imperial family. Records show that the first manufacture of paper for such purposes took place in the sixth century.
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