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

by Simon Winchester

  Needham then discovered a genius of the Han dynasty, Ma Jun, who lived around AD 206 and specialized in making automated figurines, “automata of dancing girls who played music, men who beat drums and played flutes, wooden images dancing on balls, throwing swords about, hanging upside-down on rope ladders, showing government officials in their offices, cocks fighting…and all continuously changing with a hundred variations.” Ma was a polymath: he also improved the silk loom, explained the operation of the south-pointing chariot (a nonmagnetic steering device that was already ancient in his time), irrigated gardens with man-powered square pallet chain pumps, and invented the rotary ballista, a flywheel with stones attached that was a kind of rock-hurling machine gun.

  And there was a profoundly simple but world-changing Chinese invention known in the West as the stirrup—a contraption just six inches high that weighed no more than a pound or two, but conveniently allowed a man to remain firmly and comfortably on a horse even though it might be going at full tilt and jumping every obstacle in its path. This was an invention that had an effect on mankind out of all proportion to its size and to its apparent early significance.

  Many early Chinese inventions were devised for idling and pleasure, or for elegance—for example, playing cards, tuned drums, fine porcelain, perfumed toilet paper,38 the game of chess. The origins of chess are still hotly contested: many people like to think that the game began in India or Persia, though Needham’s discoveries demonstrated that it began with the game of xiangqi, invented by the Chinese in the second century BC and exported westward to the Indian subcontinent. But the stirrup offers a reminder that China, despite its attention to the peaceable aspects of civilized life, was also involved in warfare, defensive and offensive, conducted internally and across its frontiers, from very early times.

  And then, at the beginning of 1950, Needham decided that he had found enough, or at least enough to get started. His first discovery period was officially declared to be over—though looking for and finding Chinese firsts would be a continuo throughout the making of the series.

  Needham was ready to acknowledge that, however long and impressive this list of firsts might be, the items and ideas on it did not necessarily constitute either science or civilization, but merely hinted at creative ferment within Chinese society. But what a ferment! Depending on the way the arithmetic is done—and considering only the most intellectually fertile phase of China’s history, between the Han and the Ming dynasties—Needham pointed out that in every century the Chinese dreamed up nearly fifteen new scientific ideas—a pace of inventiveness unmatched by the world’s other great ancient civilizations, including the Greeks. The nature of the inventions was remarkable enough, Needham wrote; but the rate at which they came was like nowhere else on earth, and like no other time in history.

  The role these firsts played in the actual construction of his book was crucial, because they were to serve rather like surveyors’ marks, flags that would show how the complex work would be encouraged to grow—which Chinese invention would be placed in what part of the new structure, which creation should by rights be close to which other, which fields of thought should be examined and in what order. And as in the building of any immense structure, the placing of these precise markers took time—in fact, most of the cruel English winter of 1947 was devoted to working out this structure, long before any real building could actually begin.

  By the early 1950s such markers as were definitely known were all firmly set down and the foundation trenches between them were dug—so that now the books themselves were ready to be organized, and the first of them could be written.

  Needham initially decided to arrange the work in seven sections. He would later call these the “heavenly” volumes of the series, the major topics of Chinese learning and invention, at least as he saw them. It was a neat blueprint, except that both he and Wang Ling seriously underestimated how out of control everything would rapidly become. Nearly every one of their seven major headings of knowledge would produce innumerable divisions and subdivisions of subsidiary knowledge, almost every one of which, on Needham’s close inspection, he thought deserved a full volume of its own. It was the making of these subsidiary books—which Needham came to call the “earthly” volumes—that caused the project to have such an elephantine gestation period.

  In the very early days, the initial magnificent seven volumes were somewhat shakily organized.

  Needham first suggested that Volume I, the Introduction, should address an overarching question: what science had emerged from China over the centuries? It should also address the context—the geography of China, the history of China—in which this question should be considered.

  Volume II would look at Chinese philosophy: how the Confucian and the Daoist traditions regarded science, and how the tradition of experimentation and observation—of deductive reasoning as compared with inductive reasoning—originated and then developed (to the degree that it did develop at all) in the Celestial Empire.

  Needham would devote much of Volume III to what he called the Chinese “pre-sciences,” or what today would be called the pure sciences—mathematics, astronomy, meteorology, geology, geography, physics, alchemy, botany, zoology, and anatomy. This one book would thus have an enormous span—though precisely how enormous Needham had, at this stage, precious little idea.

  Volume IV—a similar monster that in its early form would also hint at unimagined vastness to come—would examine Chinese technology, the impure or applied sciences, which included such topics as engineering, papermaking, ceramics, navigation, chemical technology (including the making of explosives and the details of the long argument over who made gunpowder first, and for precisely what purpose), biochemistry (including fermentations and the science of nutrition), mining, metallurgy, architecture and painting, agriculture, medicine, pharmacology, and martial technology, including the science of making war.

  Volume V would investigate the “Needham question.” It would try to fathom what changes suddenly occurred in the China of five centuries ago that made it necessary for modern science to develop not in China but elsewhere, principally around the shores of the Mediterranean. The reality was obvious: in the middle of the fifteenth century virtually all scientific advance in China came to a shuddering halt, and Europe then took the leading role in advancing the world’s civilization. Why might this be? The various factors—geographical, hydrological, social, economic, bureaucratic, linguistic—that might have played a part in China’s sudden change would each be considered in turn. Did China’s reliance on an ideographic writing system, for example, inhibit the development of Chinese science? Did the immense bureaucracy play a part? Could the huge imperial investment in controlling the annual flooding of the Yangzi and the Yellow rivers have any bearing? Joseph Needham planned that this volume would offer all the answers.

  According to the original plan, Volume VI—given the overall scheme for looking at China’s development in relation to the general history of civilization—would examine other societies that had developed in parallel to the Chinese: the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Babylonians, the Indians, the Aztecs, the Maya, the Japanese. It would note, in detail, similarities and major differences.

  And then, as the grand finale, Volume VII would ask quite simply and robustly: what next? What would be China’s future, its wealth, its political systems, its systems of beliefs, its place in the modern world? Could the nation possibly recover from the setbacks of five centuries before? Could China ever climb back to its once preeminent position in the world? Had the nation abrogated its position forever? Or could China once again set the direction for human civilization, as it had done so ably and for so long, thousands of years ago?

  Like all plans, this one mutated and evolved. By 1950, when Needham and Wang were finally assembling Volume I and the book was well on its way to completion, the six succeeding volumes had already substantially altered their focus. All had expanded hugely. Many of them had spawned offspring.
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br />   For example, in 1954 the table of contents for Volume II, which was as yet unfinished, illustrates how enormously complex the study had become, and how just one volume had to be extended out of all proportion to its original dimensions.

  The initial plan for Volume II might have seemed relatively simple: to describe Chinese philosophical approaches to science, and how the Daoist and Confucian attitudes toward experiment, observation, and theory varied over the centuries. By 1954, however, matters had become infinitely more complicated.

  Confucianism, according to the plan, was to be first delineated and described in eight sections—“Theories of the ‘Ladder of Souls’”; “The Ambivalent Attitude toward Science”; “The Humanism of Hsün Ch’ing”; and so on. Daoism was then to receive the same treatment—“Daoism and Magic”; “Ataraxy”; “The Return to Cooperative Primitivity”; “Gymnastic Techniques”; “Sexual Techniques.” Scores of pages were then allotted for a thorough examination of “The Fundamental Ideas of Chinese Science” with essays on such topics as omen books, trigrams, hexagrams, the Book of Changes, and the Chinese knowledge of “Pythagorean” numerology and symbolic correlations.

  And this was not even a quarter of the way into just one planned volume. Before Needham and Wang were done, there would be essays on such unrecognizable arcana as “Scapulamancy and Milfoil Lots,” “Oneiromancy,” “Glyphomancy,” “Wang Chun’s Struggle with the Phenomenal-ists,” “The Judicial Trial of Animals,” “The Neo-Confucianists and the Supreme Ultimate,” and “The Buddhist Evangelisation of China.”

  When the volume finally appeared, in 1956, it was almost 700 pages long. The essay on “Tantric Sexual Techniques” alone took up seven full pages, and it included authoritative paragraphs showing how tenth-century Daoist manuscripts with titles like The Book of the Mystery-Penetrating Master and Important Matters of the Jade Chamber could offer reassurance to anxious Chinese men. The manuscripts calmed them by offering messages such as “Sexual continence is as impossible as it is improper” and “Celibacy is a practice that leads to neuroses.” For titillation—probably unintended, despite Needham’s personal leanings—the same chapter in Volume II also offered a catalog of exotic Daoist bedroom behavior from 1,000 years ago that beggars belief today.39

  Needham had decreed early on in the process, as he watched each volume begin to swell and threaten to burst out of its covers, that no one volume should be “too big for a man to read comfortably in his bath.” But it was happening nonetheless. Whereas Volume I had been 248 pages long, with thirty-six illustrations, fifty pages of bibliography, and twenty pages of index, Volume II ran to 698 pages and Volume III to 680, with 127 illustrations, a bibliography that was 115 pages long, and an index that was itself as long as a novella, at fifty pages. The books were developing an alarming case of middle-age spread, and something had to be done.

  The consequence of all this was a rapid onset of cell division40 (somewhat dismayingly for the beleaguered Cambridge University Press, which was obliged to tolerate the constant expansion of the project). One book became two, three, or four. Volume V, a special case, became not five, but thirteen formal subsidiary parts, each one of them big and complicated enough to be made into a separate, self-standing, and equally enormous new volume of its own.

  The books are all about detail. They were assembled with a painstaking concern for even the smallest facts of Chinese life, and each volume was an exploration, as Needham put it, “of the limitless caverns of Chinese scientific history.” He thought the individual volumes should demonstrate that they had been assembled using an approach “which tried always to avoid generalizations, and instead lingers lovingly on the fineries.” The archives Needham left behind in Cambridge offer some clues about how each of the books was so scrupulously assembled. The volume that most admirers consider the shining example of Needham’s craft was published to nearly universal acclaim in 1971: Volume IV, Part 3, Civil Engineering and Nautics.

  The book’s organization is elegance itself, with its two basic themes segueing into each other quite seamlessly. The formula is deceptively simple: first there is stone, then there is water. Civil Engineering, which opens the volume, covers the making of Chinese roads, walls, and bridges—creations that are largely fashioned from stone. Next comes a graceful transition provided by the history of the Chinese canals over which these bridges pass—water and stone, combined. And finally comes the beginning of Nautics—water itself, alone—which tells first the story of the Chinese ships, rowing boats, and junks that use these canals, and then discusses the evolution of Chinese navigation, propulsion, steering, and the “techniques of peace and war”—under which heading are included such topics as anchors, moorings, dock and lights, towing and tracking, caulking, hull-sheathing and pumps, diving and pearling, the ram, armor plating, grappling irons, and the tactics of firing naval projectiles.

  Most amazing is the detail, and the sheer variety of topics undertaken by the authors—who were listed on the title page as Joseph Needham, Wang Ling, and (after her return from her UNESCO duties in Paris in 1957) Lu Gwei-djen, the project’s holy trinity. Some of the chapter headings hint at the scale and scope of the volume: “Constructional Features of Junks and Sampans.” “Star, Compass, and Rutter in the Eastern Seas.” “The Mat-and-Batten Sail: Its Aerodynamic Qualities.” “Sculling and the Self-Feathering ‘Propeller.’” “China and the Axial Rudder.” “Armour-Plating and Grappling Irons.” “Sluice-Gates, Locks, and Double Slipways.” “Water-Tight Compartments, Hull-Shape and Its Significance.”

  Inside are diagrams and woodcuts, ancient scroll paintings and explications. For example, one page begins: “Then, before 1450, as we shall see, came a fundamental change in policy. The anti-maritime party at court, for reasons still somewhat obscure, got the upper hand, and the long-distance navigations were at an end.” This was Needham’s briefly discursive history of the fifteenth-century decline in Chinese exploration, brought about after Zheng He’s famous expedition, which got as far as Mogadishu (some say a great deal farther), bringing home booty that included a hapless African giraffe which Zheng thought might amuse the emperor, but which in fact frightened him unconscionably.

  The manner in which the trio worked on the volume—the years of research, the months of writing, the ceaseless flow of arcana—is just hinted at by the contents of the boxes of papers now sedulously cataloged at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, in which are held all the letters and documents that Needham was able to use in deciding what to write.

  One of the countless boxes, selected at random, contains the following:

  A collection, held together with a rusting paper clip, of articles about coracles, including a long description of such a vessel from Cochin-China, which was caulked with a mixture of cow dung and coconut oil.

  A picture of Lord Montgomery of Alamein inspecting a Chinese catamaran.

  A letter from a correspondent in France (telephone BAlzac 3839) about Indo-Chinese sailing rafts.

  A book entitled Floating Objects.

  A collection of ten monographs, Le Jonque Chinoise by L. Audemard.

  An advertisement clipped from the communist newspaper The Daily Worker for books on Chinese sailing vessels by G. R. G. Worcester.

  An essay, “The Exploits of Sir Francis Drake.”

  Notes written on a table napkin, calling for definitions for the terms lee-shore, double-canoe, Lepanto, tonnage, slavery, bamboozle.

  On a sheet of writing paper, a rhetorical question in Needham’s hand: “How much did Ancient Egypt influence the design of the Chinese junk? Perhaps F. H. Wells in China Journal of 1933, he adds, has the answer?

  Tsao-Fang’s paper On Canal-Boats and Canals Generally.

  Dictionary of Sea Terms (1933).

  A painting from 1672 of a European cargo barque, said to be the first Chinese representation of a foreign vessel.

  Notes on Viking vessel design.

  A book, The Sung Navy, 960–1279 AD, by Lo Jung-pang.


  A paper “On the Techniques of Straddling Shots.”

  A letter from a Mr. John Saar, of 30 West 75 Street, New York 23, offering information on junks and remarking that on a recent visit to Caius College he had been “so well treated that he had lost all his left-wing and anti-elitist prejudices.”

  Day by day Needham, Wang, and in due course Lu Gwei-djen collected such material, sifted it, filed it away, then inserted it into the proper places as the chapters were planned, organized, and written. The material in this particular Nautics box might have been placed, perhaps, somewhere in the four pages devoted to “The Aerodynamic Qualities of the Mat-and-Batten Sail” or the eight allotted to “Textual Evidence for Early Chinese Use of the Axial Rudder” or the seven diagrams and drawings and essays on the subject of “Oars.” Or maybe it was not used at all: maybe it was discarded, replaced by even richer sources, by even better evidence that has been consigned to others of the scores of boxes lying in the institute’s archives, cataloged in detail awaiting their examination by some thesis writer of the distant future.

  “I sometimes despair,” Needham wrote once, “that we will ever find our way successfully through the inchoate mass of ideas and facts that are so hard to establish.”