The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist

by Simon Winchester

  So, without further ado, Needham wrote to this apparently very clever refugee. Could he type? Could he drive? Might he like to wander around China for a while—perhaps in fact for a rather long while? Might he, in short, take the job? Needham would be coming across to Chengdu—he might even already be there by the time this letter arrived. He would be staying with a local family named Luo. Perhaps in the next day or so Huang might drop in?

  The offer, said Huang, sounded “awfully attractive.” He had no doubt. He went to the Luos’ house with indecent haste, arriving before breakfast, and asked for their distinguished foreign visitor. It turned out that he was far too early. But still,

  after ten minutes Needham appeared. Wearing a loose blue Chinese gown, with his hair slightly disheveled, he loomed large and forbidding, but his manner softened as soon as he started to speak. I introduced myself. He took a blank card from his desk and proceeded to write my name in Chinese. After a couple of starts he wrote down all three characters correctly. He took out his date book, said he would be tied up all day, but he would be able to see me the next morning.

  The next day, at a more civilized hour, Huang presented himself again, this time for the interview itself. He was fretful. Though the idea of wandering across China with a man so evidently remarkable and curious was highly alluring, the truth was that he could neither type nor drive, and he doubted that he would be hired. Moreover, when he turned up, two others were waiting.

  Needham appeared, this time in an army khaki shirt and shorts—he seemed in a good temper, not least because he had had his breakfast.

  After what seemed an interminable wait, the visitors departed and my interview with Needham began. I told him about my background, education and interests. I confessed I did not know how to drive a car, but played down the fact that my typing skill was negligible. Fortunately he did not seem particularly concerned about these issues. He talked about the circumstances under which he had become interested in Chinese culture and language, the influence his younger Chinese colleagues at Cambridge had on him, his appreciation of the accomplishments of Chinese scientists under trying wartime conditions, and his effort to set up an organisation to help them obtain books, journals, equipment and materials from abroad. He expressed the hope that such an organisation could become the forerunner of an international science cooperation network after the war. An hour quickly passed.

  He said the job was mine if I wanted it.

  By the middle of May the embassy had confirmed Huang in his post, a dream job with a good salary and diplomatic privileges. He gave in his notice at the school and prepared to move to permanent digs in Chongqing. But the matter wasn’t quite as simple as that. Needham, perhaps inevitably, suggested that the two of them journey back to the capital together, by a route that would be as complicated and as scientifically fulfilling as possible. It was to be a dry run for the much more ambitious journeys that lay ahead. Excerpts from the two men’s diaries over the next twenty days of half-planned meandering provide an illustration of the manner in which Needham tried, relentlessly, to find out as much as he could from every encounter he ever made in China.

  So they headed south out of Chengdu, not east, as the direct route home would take them. They first made their way by road down the Min River valley, to a point where the Min joins the Dadu River at Loushan, an otherwise undistinguished mountainside town that was the temporary wartime home of the University of Wuhan, normally 600 miles away. They spent five days here—looking over the department of physics, which had been housed in an old pagoda; investigating the colleges of art and law, which were in a Confucian temple; visiting a forestry research station, which was in yet another temple; and looking over, at its temporary housing in a godown several miles away from Loushan, the only microbiology laboratory then existing in free China. In Loushan Needham met a plant physiologist named Shi who fashioned apparatuses of bewildering complexity out of scrap metal. Needham described Shi as very “Cambridgeish”—an apparent compliment.

  Needham was constantly delighted by the ability of the Chinese, at least in wartime, to improvise, which would have been a guiding principle of his late father’s. He was invited by the BBC to give a talk a few weeks after this journey, and he related what he had found:

  One may see, for example, a coal carbonization plant in which all the piping, scrubbing towers and metal parts have been constructed out of old gasoline drums. Or one may find a steel rolling mill operated by a salvaged river-steamer engine, and an excellent blast-furnace made with steel plates from sunken river steamers. When a university laboratory ran out of elements for their electric heaters they found that gunborings from a nearby arsenal would do very well as a substitute, and when microscope cover-glasses could not be had, they used slips of natural mica.

  Needham gave two hastily arranged lectures in Loushan, one of them followed by a short speech in Chinese, his first ever, which his listeners rather dutifully said they were able to understand “quite well.” He also gave a dinner party—one of the “cheering up” duties with which London had saddled him—and said he found it hilarious, partly because of the good Sichuan orange wine; partly because Needham loved playing the host, and ganbei-ing—making toasts—each time the bottle was poured; but mostly because of the number of women he was able to round up, far more than at a customary Chinese banquet.

  To Needham—with his wife in Cambridge and his mistress in New York—an abundance of women was an eternal delight, and their presence cheered him up enormously after a hard day at work. After this dinner he took the whole party, who were by then well in their cups, off to see a Sichuan opera, which he said later he found amusing but rather too noisy, and “sorely lacking in violins.”

  He and H. T. then pressed on south toward Yibin, stopping en route to see, at various places, a 360-foot carved stone Buddha, a new salt well, a factory for making ethanol out of grain, something called a wood dry carbonization plant (no explanation given), and a monastery. At the monastery they were introduced to and then had lunch with a group that included a “living buddha,” three itinerant Tibetan monks dressed in russet red robes, some rather sobersided Chinese monks kitted out in black, and the Australian ambassador to China, Sir Frederick Eggleston, who happened to be nearby, and hungry. Needham said he found it rather amusing that so austere a community was suddenly invaded by an antipodean diplomat and a fellow of the Royal Society, but imagined later that the monks had been less impressed than he, and had taken it all with properly spiritual equanimity.

  Later that day he and Eggleston went to a teahouse and sat outside in the sun chatting idly about the beauty of their situation. It was perfectly safe for them to do so. Long gone were the days when foreigners were subject to the kind of vilification and hostility that had marked Boxer times: in the 1940s the very few lao-wais who journeyed into the Chinese heartland were greeted with great warmth, the only inconvenience being, then as today, the occasionally overfriendliness of popular curiosity. Since Needham took great care to treat every Chinese he met with the same polite solicitude he would show to his own kinsmen in Cambridge—or perhaps with more reverence, considering the antiquity of their civilization—he was always well treated in return. Moreover, he remarked to Eggleston, in a conversation so notable that he would write about it fifty years later, there was little evidence of harshness in the conduct of China’s everyday civil affairs. Chinese villages might be poor, but their inhabitants were generally happy, and people went about their business knowing full well their particular standing in society, but never having to be overtly reminded of it or warned about it. Bureaucracy was deeply embedded in every aspect of Chinese civil life, and it underpinned all aspects of their society, evidently in a peaceable way:

  Seeing the common drain running down the middle of the village street, Sir Frederick exclaimed how mediaeval everything was, and said: “You could almost expect a knight and men-at-arms to come by.” I replied yes, indeed—but pointed out that it wouldn’t have been a knight, b
ut a civilian official, and the men-at-arms would have been represented by unarmed servitors carrying his titles and dignities on placards. It did not mean that the ultimate sanction was not force, as it has been in all human societies—but it was force much better concealed by the Chinese bureaucracy.

  Everywhere he traveled, Needham later said, he would see village walls covered with an inscription that, he felt, quite deftly summed up the Chinese people’s attitude toward their government: “May the Heavenly Officials Grant Peace and Plenty!” This is what both sides wanted. Authority was there, of course; and it could at times be exceptionally cruel. But to most Chinese the bureaucracy that sustained it was a benevolent entity, made up of men whose wisdom, tested in examinations, was accepted; whose propensity for corruption was kept within acceptable limits; and whose professed intentions for the common good and for the good of the nation were generally thought to be credible.

  It was sixty more miles by road to Yibin city, where they would meet the Yangzi and take a riverboat home. Rather than continuing along the highway, which was rutted and uncomfortable, Needham suddenly thought—in an impetuous moment of a kind that was later to be all too familiar—that it might be more amusing and valuable to go to Yibin by boat. So he persuaded Professor Shi, the “Cambridgeish” plant expert, who had connections—what in China are known as guanxi—to whistle up two of the river barges normally used for transporting salt and press them into service as temporary personal ferries.

  Needham, Huang, and a somewhat bewildered Professor Shi were the only passengers, and their trip downstream was thrilling. The Min is a furious river at the best of times, and in early June, with the Tibetan snowmelt beginning to run off, it was in dangerously full spate. While Needham sketched the design of the craft (three covered sections—one for the salt, one for passengers, one in the stern for the owners—and a sternpost rudder of a unique type that the Chinese first invented), H. T. watched the men rowing. There were four of them, and they stood in the bow, he wrote later, two on each side “like ancient Egyptians,” and used ultra-long trireme-size oars to help the steersman keep the boat straight in the rapids. They chanted lustily as they pulled away, the rhythm of their chantey reminding Needham of the first bars of the Song of the Volga Boatmen. The captain wore a long gray gown and a white turban and looked, wrote Needham, like Sinbad the Sailor.

  The journey down to the junction with the Yangzi, though only sixty miles or so, took two days, and it alternated between being an idyll and being a nightmare. Their companion boat was wrecked on the rocks and had to be repaired. Rapids, gigantic whirlpools, and boils terrified Needham, as did the constant threats of bandits, who were suspected of smuggling themselves aboard among the would-be river hitchhikers who swarmed onto the deck every time the craft stopped. And as if this were not enough, the weather, although it was almost midsummer, turned unexpectedly cold and rainy.

  Thereupon Professor Shi—a tall, lean figure with a wide range of interests and knowledge—decided that the passengers’ morale was falling, and that he ought to amuse them. He turned out to have an astonishing memory for poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties, and so he recited from memory stanzas which would amuse everyone—and which Needham immediately translated.

  One of the poems was cheerful and rollicking, about wine and women and good times, and in terms of its art, thought Needham, rather slight. The other, though, which had been written by the tenth-century poet Jiang Jie, had a peculiar melancholy about it that, in Needham’s off-the-cuff translation, seemed entirely appropriate to their present adventure. He managed to render the classic in better than passable English, and what he achieved stands as an impressive reminder of his growing skill with the language:

  As a young man, listening to the girls in a tower

  I heard the sound of the rain,

  While the red candle burned dim in the damp air.

  In middle age, travelling by boat on a river,

  I listened to the rain falling, falling:

  The river was wide and clouds drifted above;

  I heard the solitary cry of a teal borne on the west wind.

  And now in a cloister cell I hear the rain again,

  My hair is grey and sparse;

  Sadness and Happiness, separation and reunion, all seem one,

  They move me no more.

  Let the rain drop all night on the deserted pavement

  Till the day dawns.

  Finally they reached Yibin, a grubby little city known today for little else than a distillery that makes a disgusting Chinese version of Scotch whisky. It is here that the Min River joins the Yangzi, at a point that sailors generally think of as the effective head of navigation for the greater river. Yibin lies 1,800 miles from Shanghai and the East China Sea; and the Yangzi above the city turns menacing, with narrow, steep-sided canyons and a ferociously fast stream. Only a very few shallow-draft ferries with skippers who are courageous or foolhardy or both ever venture beyond the city limits. Needham prudently instructed his bargees to turn their boats smartly to the left as they entered the Yangzi, and to head with the current, downriver.

  Here they said farewell to the remarkable professor, who returned to Loushan by road. He left behind one testament to the pervasive marvels of Chinese culture: it turned out that during the still of the previous night, after his poetry recital, he had prepared two scrolls with the texts of the two poems he had taught his companions, each poem written in a calligraphic style appropriate to its mood. He also left a Chinese couplet of his own composition, which Needham for some reason translated in the style of Alexander Pope: “Nature from growing trees we best discern, And man’s estate from social order learn.”

  “Very Cambridgeish,” wrote Needham in his diary once again, as Professor Shi strode away to the bus stop. Shi was the kind of figure who is all too rare anywhere in the world, and who is nevertheless met almost at random in the Chinese countryside. “Really, China is an extraordinary place!” Needham exclaimed, neither for the first time nor for the last.

  Huang and Needham then caught a succession of steamers down the Yangzi toward Chongqing—and yet even on this journey, brief and quite routine though it might have been (traveling on one of the bustling ferryboats on the navigable Yangzi is for the Chinese as unexceptional as taking a public bus), Needham managed to sift a good selection of pearls from the commonplace.

  In the small town of Lizhuang, for example, they discovered a particular treasure. Nestled in the old town—a tiny area almost 2,000 years old, with classical temples and pagodas, courtyard houses, and narrow lanes paved with curious blue stones leading down to the river—there was a small German-Chinese University, whose professors positively fell on Needham as soon as they discovered he knew their language. (There was a Belgian embryologist on the staff, too, and Needham further impressed everyone by talking to him, in French, about the morphology of the developing human egg.)

  He also discovered, totally unexpectedly, an Institute of History in Lizhuang, an outpost of the Academia Sinica—an organization much like London’s Royal Society, or the Russian Academy of Sciences—whose offices turned out to be filled with the most amazing delights. And although one might easily say that Needham’s entire experience in China was made up of a series of epiphanies, this particular find was of a quite exceptional importance, for two reasons.

  The first can be discerned from his diary account of this unforgettable day, June 10, 1943:

  You wouldn’t believe the treasures they have there.

  The Archaeological section has plenty of Han-time bronze and jade objects, but the marvel is the famous oracle-bones of Shang time from the tombs at Anyang (1300–1100 BC) which have the most ancient writing on them. The people here are running out of tissue paper on which to make their rubbings, so I shall try to get some from India for them.

  Then the Historical section has lots of the bamboo tablets on which the Classics were written in Confucius’ time, and also marvelous Imperial Archives from the earl
y Qing dynasty, including letters to the Jesuits and decrees to Tibet and a document from the Chinese court appointing the Japanese shogun as King of that country. The Linguistic section has gramophone records of the dialects of every province. And so on and so on. The libraries are wonderful—authentic specimens of Song dynasty movable block printed books and the like….

  My numerous inquiries about the History of Science problems caused a general stir and various members of the Institute were running about digging out interesting stuff they’d come across, e.g. passages about firecrackers in 2nd century AD; accounts of great explosions; and decrees forbidding the sale of gunpowder to the Tartars in AD 1076, i.e. two centuries before Berthold Schwartz’s alleged original discovery in the west.

  His search for the Chinese origin of just about everything—the central obsession of his life, as both critics and admirers would later say—had thus been rewarded by this one visit to a small Yangzi-side town in central Sichuan. The Chinese invention of gunpowder was far older, he now suspected, than had hitherto been assumed.

  The second reason for the importance of the visit to Lizhuang was his discovery of a remarkable man, a chemist named Wang Ling. Wang had come to the impromptu lecture Needham had given on the history of Chinese science—and without waiting to be asked, he immediately set about “digging out interesting stuff” for the visitor. He sensed exactly what was needed, setting himself to find out once and for all what had never before been explained—the entire complex saga of his country’s discovery of and manufacture of explosives.

  Needham, when he was eventually told, promptly asked Wang to help him more generally with his research, and in particular to help him prepare the very first volumes of his great book. And so the name Wang Ling of the Academia Sinica appears on the first title page of the first volume of Science and Civilisation in China, and there is a long, fervent appreciation in the first preface—and all thanks to a chance encounter on a Yangzi riverbank in June 1943, and a lecture that, in one small sense, changed everything.