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

by Simon Winchester

  Then his caregiver asked if he was frightened. “Oh no,” he replied, weakly. Christopher Cullen, his successor as director of the institute, asked him if he was in pain. “No, no pain,” he returned, quietly. Stanley Bish later wrote that a friend and neighbor, the distinguished historian of literature and science, Elinor Shaffer, came by, though she had wondered if she should, since she had a bad cold. She brought a daffodil, a sign that the brisk March weather was nonetheless the start of another spring, the ninety-fifth through which Joseph Needham had lived.

  She sat close to him, said Bish, telling him of her recent lecture tour, and believing that he understood the gist of what she was saying. At eight forty-five two nurses arrived, and someone told Joseph how lucky he was to have two beautiful young girls looking after him. He grinned wickedly, impishly, happily. A few moments later Elinor Shaffer got up to leave, having been invited to have a cup of tea in the living room next door to Joseph’s bedroom before venturing out into the cold.

  She stood up, and according to his caregiver grasped Joseph’s hand, squeezed it, and said happily: “Good-bye, Joseph—I’ll be in to see you soon.” And with that Noël Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS, FBA, sighed once, very slightly—there was no pain, no gasping, no more than a weary acceptance of the inevitable—and died.

  It was eight fifty-five p.m. He had lived for ninety-four years and a little over three months. It had been a very full life indeed. It was a life during which, and all in consequence of his love for a Chinese woman, he had worked single-handedly to change the way the people of the West looked on the people of the East. In doing so he had succeeded, as few others are ever privileged to do, in making a significant and positive change to mankind’s mutual understanding.

  And now that was done, and his appointment at the Gate of Honour had finally come due.

  Written in elegant calligraphy beside the fireplace in Needham’s old college room is the famous four-character Chinese aphorism:

  The Man departs—there remains his Shadow.

  Such is the reverence for history in Cambridge it is likely that this singular memorial to Joseph Needham will remain in place for decades, and maybe for centuries.

  Epilogue: Without Haste, Without Fear

  Four thousand years ago, when we couldn’t even read, the Chinese knew all the absolutely useful things we boast about today.

  —VOLTAIRE: THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY, 1764

  Much has changed in China since Joseph Needham’s battered old transport plane first touched down there in the spring of 1943. The city where he was based, Chongqing—or Chungking, as it was written then, when it was the capital of Free China—is now like few places on earth, growing so fast and so furiously that it is hard to keep up with the speed of the changes. Chongqing is now by far the most populous city in China, and by some counts can be regarded as the biggest city in the world. Thirty-eight million people live crammed within its metropolitan limits. The frantic rhythms of their lives capture the concentrated essence of everything, good and ill, about the awe-inspiring, terrifying entity that is today’s new China.

  The Yangzi still sweeps through the city, as ever, a turbulent winding sheet of thick brown sludge busy with countless hundreds of ships, sampans, junks, barges, and any number of other kinds of lumbering or scurrying watercraft. But the Yangzi is perhaps the only thing that someone returning after many years would recognize today. Now eight new bridges swoop over the river, and eight sparkling new monorail lines on stilts run along beside it. Clusters of skycrapers have sprung up in each of the half dozen commercial centers, all of them glittering by day, and at night becoming a pulsing, flashing, Technicolor light show, a gaudy urban entertainment, with neon stripes of vivid yellow and royal blue racing up and down the sides of the taller buildings, the highway crash barriers winking pink, purple, and green, the tops of buildings flashing stars and with sinuous curves of colored light crowning replicas of some of the world’s best-known buildings: the Empire State, the Chrysler, the Grande Arche of La Défense.

  Perhaps the Needhams and Gwei-djen would still just recognize the Liberation Monument, a pillar and a clock (that used to chime “The East Is Red” but now merely booms in the style of Big Ben), which was there when they were, dedicated in the 1930s initially to the memory of Sun Yat-sen; today it memorializes the defeat of the Japanese invaders in 1945. They might just remember the structure—but not its surroundings. There are hundreds of restaurants, selling popcorn and ice cream and various unidentifiable meats; there are cell-phone shops, gleaming department stores, and lines of young men and women holding placards advertising skills—translating, painting, cleaning earwax, walking dogs, bricklaying, personal training—that they will perform for extra cash. There are teeming masses of people, happy-looking, prosperous, loud, boisterous, well-dressed, well-coiffed, and well-fed, and all Chinese, flooding the square as though every day were a holiday and every moment fashioned for them alone, just to be enjoyed. Young policewomen weave their way through the crowds on roller skates, keeping a wary eye: and in the alleys there are riot police with dogs, just in case. All seems happy. All are watched.

  Current figures attesting to Chongqing’s size, growth, and standing are little short of stupendous. They are of a scale and sweep that Needham, working diligently among the ruins and devastation of sixty years ago, could never have imagined. Sixty years in the life of a city that, like Chongqing, is 1,500 years old might seem like nothing—London has changed dramatically in its past six decades, as have Paris, Cairo, Moscow, and Rome: yet in their essence these western cities are still today much the same as they always were, recognizable physically, familiar in the way they feel, sound, and smell. But this is manifestly not so for Chongqing: the same interval has brought about for this city changes few other urban centers in the world have ever experienced, creating a future world, part Blade Runner, part Shinjuku, part Dickensian London, that is profoundly unrecognizable, a place to take away one’s breath.

  The entire municipal entity that is known as Chongqing incorporates both the crowded inner city and an officially city-governed semirural hinterland, the two together occupying about the same area as Maine, a little bit less than Austria, slightly more than Tasmania. The population of 38 million puts it in a league not so much with other cities as with entire respectably sized countries—it is more populous than Iraq, for instance, bigger than Malaysia, bigger than Peru.

  The arithmetic is relentless. Every day 800 babies are born in Chongqing and 500 people die—many of them from emphysema, since the air quality is so bad, or by their own hand, so firmly have the new urban phenomena of angst and anomie taken hold. Thirteen hundred of the rural poor stream into the city each day to try to grab for themselves some of the riches that are so clearly being generated within. Thus some 1,600 new people every day are added to the population—the equivalent of all the people of Luxembourg welding themselves onto the city every year.

  To accommodate these numbers new skyscrapers are being flung up with furious abandon. Developers rule. The old houses, the charming little slum lanes known as hutongs, Buddhist and Confucian temples, Soviet-style factories, schools built in the 1950s—all of them fall these days to the wreckers’ ball and the bulldozers, and out of their ruins rise gleaming shopping arcades, office towers, and forests of apartment buildings, a ceaseless building frenzy.

  There was a brief pause in the spring of 2007, when an engagingly defiant couple in Chongqing caused a fuss by refusing to move from their well-worn row house, the compensation offered being too miserly, they said. Their property then remained untouched for weeks, a solitary island of brick on its tower of foundation earth standing alone in the center of a vast pit of mud, with the developers of the new project—an office building—waiting on the sidelines like vultures until the courts voted to tell the old owners to go. Inevitably, the courts did that—although the fate of what came to be known as the little “nail house”—since it looked like an unhammered nail, stic
king up inconveniently and preventing all forward movement around it—became a worldwide sensation. It was pictured on the front page of the New York Times no less, and people said sagely that it demonstrated the battle for the rights of the Chinese individual over the rights of commerce, greed, and progress.

  In the end, however symbolic the battle, the individuals lost and the developers won, and the march of Chinese progress resumed. Chongqing became a little bit more modern and its skyline a little bit more impressive; the nail house was forgotten; and the old couple, now seen as more querulous than engaging, took their money and moved to a new development somewhere out of town. An immense tower now stands where their cottage once squatted.

  Chongqing is also a place of the most crushing poverty, a melancholy state of affairs made even more so when viewed against the knowledge that the city’s economy grows by $14 million each day, and that there will be 150,000 square feet of new office floor space completed each evening. It is all the more painful when it is seen—a crippled beggar here, a sickly ragamuffin there, a hollow-faced and hungry street musician waiting for coins—against a backdrop of lines of gleaming BMWs waiting in traffic jams, scores of construction cranes whirling against the skyline, elegant Thai restaurants jammed at lunchtime with young models wearing the gipao, nightclubs that breezily demand an entrance fee of $100 and are packed and heaving with local people until the small hours.

  The dark side of Chongqing is very significant, too, if largely unseen. On the street corners, and noticeable everywhere if one chooses to look, are members of the ragged army of unemployed ban-ban men, freelance porters with thick bamboo shoulder poles at the ready, game for any job carrying anything, from a giant wardrobe to a sparrow in a birdcage. There are said to be 100,000 of these men, who will be lucky to earn a dollar a day—and the work ensures that they will die long before they are fifty. There are beggars, Dumpster divers, sickly-looking prostitutes, buskers, and an alarming number of children selling flowers—six-year-olds working late at night while their mothers complete their shifts as waitresses in the local hot-pot restaurants, or as bar girls in the dubious hostelries clustered down by the docks.

  And of course there is the ever-present pollution, so dreadful as to be barely credible. There are days when one wakes and cannot see a single building through the thick brownish yellow fog, and the sun even at its midday brightest is often just a vague coppery glare. Chongqing is one of the very few Chinese cities that have long been entirely devoid of bicycles—the steep mountainsides see to that—and so its streets are jam-packed with cars and annoying motorbikes that sound like insects, all of them belching gases into the foul air and making matters decidedly worse. The city produces 3,500 tons of rubbish every day, none of it recycled, all carted away to be buried in enormous holes dug on the outskirts, where garbage, landfill, and plastic sheeting are sandwiched together in a repeating pattern like lasagna until the void is full, the area is covered and seeded, and a golf course is built on top.

  Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen came back to Chongqing in 1982, and they spent an afternoon doddering about, looking in vain for the little house where he had lived forty years before. Even in the 1980s the city was in the throes of monumental change, and the lane where his embassy cottage was seemed to be no longer there; nor was it or the cottage to be found on any maps. The elderly pair left the place after an hour or so, muttering to themselves about the progress that had engulfed the old city.

  They were more rueful than critical, though: Needham had always thought that China would turn out like this, sooner or later. It was simply a matter of time—and the Chongqing they saw in 1982 was for them a hint of the future he had predicted, rather than a keepsake of the past he mourned. Only its great river, rolling past so solemnly, with the steam tugs yelping and the long sea freighters moaning their way past the docks, presented them with a scene that was comfortingly unchanged.

  Still, much else about China, even today, resists alteration. The rivers and the landscape will always be there, of course, to provide a backdrop, a climate, and indelible tracts of geology and topography. Some man-made creations have remained much the same over the years as well, no matter what prosperity may have done to China superficially.

  The written language, for example—the very thing that so fascinated Needham when he first met Lu Gwei-djen in 1937—remains intact, essentially unaltered from its origins more than 3,000 years ago. The cuisine is much the same—wheat noodles in the north, rice in the south, and chopsticks used throughout the country as they have been for thirty decades. The music, unique in register, timbre, tone, and rhythm, may bend with the styles of the day, but a song from the Tang would be perfectly recognizable today, and even the most modern of Beijing operas is deeply influenced by the archaic and the traditional.

  The physical appearance of the Han Chinese people survives, too. Maybe the Chinese are not so racially homogeneous as the Japanese or the Koreans. But as a continental people they remain distinct from many others—Americans, Russians, Europeans—in obviously belonging to one race, which is largely disinclined to dilution or change, and whose people much prefer (as the Tibetans can all too readily attest) periods of long-term ethnic stability and a cautious but relentless expansion.

  Within this framework of changelessness there is also, entirely discernible, something else that resists change—something that can only be described as an attitude. It is a Chinese state of mind, and one which outsiders—and all who are non-Chinese are very much outsiders here—may occasionally find infuriating and insufferable, but which certainly exists, and at no great depth beneath the Chinese skin. It is an attitude, one might argue, that has been born of the very achievement which Joseph Needham attempted to catalog and describe in his series of books. It is an attitude of ineluctable and self-knowing Chinese superiority, and it results from the antiquity and the longevity of the Chinese people’s endeavors.

  A list of Chinese endeavors—one version is to be found in Appendix I—illustrates how in almost every aspect of their lives, the people of old China seem to have been imbued with a deep desire for cultural improvement—for making life easier, better, and more truly civilized than it is anywhere else in the world. In that one sense the cumulative consequence of Needham’s list is incontrovertible: by inventing a stirrup, a compass, a sheet of printing paper, a wheelbarrow, or a suspension bridge, the Chinese were always bent on making life steadily more comfortable for themselves.

  Yet at the same time there was invariably a downside to this unending achievement—at least, so far as outsiders were concerned. The very fact that the Chinese achieved so much and so quickly (fifteen major inventions a century, Needham once calculated) appears to have created a sense of self-satisfaction and superiority—a kind of national smugness that led Emperor Qianlong to remark so famously to Lord Macartney, “We possess all things…. I have no use for your country’s manufactures.” And this self-congratulatory complacency, this hubris, inevitably contributed to the problems which caused the empire in time to flounder and fall, and which led to the poverty and backwardness that characterized China for so long.

  But China is neither poor nor backward anymore; and it is one of the ironies of history that the success of modern China derives in large measure from this very same sense—which aggrieved westerners like Lord Macartney might say was a peculiarly and infuriatingly Chinese sense—of self-certainty, of an unshakable confidence about its position at the center of the world. And all this certainty derives from the sturdy foundation of civilization that China built for itself so very long ago. Needham cataloged in the finest detail the robust antiquity of that civilization, illustrating the reason for all the self-confidence and self-assurance—the unique degree of self-knowledge that helps to make China China.

  For silk, tea, bureaucracy, and the early invention of the compass as such do not make China what it is. What makes China different is the case-hardened sense of inner certitude that this vast array of invention has given to i
t.

  Joseph Needham acknowledged and confirmed all this, and yet he fretted for decades over one single aspect of China’s inventive history that seems at odds with the main story: the curious fact that after centuries of scientific and technological creativity, everything in China suddenly ground to a halt.

  The Chinese of the distant past—the ancient Chinese who lived before Europe’s Christian era, the old Chinese living when Europe had its Dark Ages, and the medieval Chinese en masse of the twelfth and thirteenth European centuries—did essentially all the inventing. Come the sixteenth century, when the Renaissance was fully under way in Europe, the creative passions of China suddenly seemed to dry up; the energy began to ebb away and die.

  Ever since that moment—AD 1500 is regarded as the approximate turning point—nearly all modern scientific advance transferred itself to where it remains today, becoming the nearly exclusive preserve of the West.

  This intrigued Needham from the time he first discussed it with Lu Gwei-djen in Cambridge in the late 1930s. It haunted him so ceaselessly, and it pervaded so much of what he later wrote, that it was to become his memorializing eponym: it became known as the “Needham question.”

  Why, Needham asked—if the Chinese had been so technologically creative for so very long, and if they invented so much in antiquity—why did modern science develop not in China but in Europe and the West? Why was China unable to hold on to its early advantage and creative edge? Why was there never a true industrial revolution in China? Why was there no firm embrace of capitalism? Why, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was China a nation known principally for being backward, hostile, and poor? How did the brilliant early nation evolve into Emerson’s later “booby nation”?