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

by Simon Winchester

  9The 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.

  10Knatchbull-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.”

  11One 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.”)

  12Samuel Wells Williams, a New Yorker with a lifelong fascination with the East, was the interpreter who in 1853 traveled 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.

  13As indeed this one was. On chapter 3 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.

  14This 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.

  15Winning 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.” An Oxford Blue, awarded to sportsmen competing against Cambridge, would of course have the same value.

  16One 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 centered 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.

  17Old-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.

  18These would be made for them by specialists at the Indian Geological Survey in Calcutta from samples sent down from China.

  19The 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 onetime capital and—under its former name, Chang’an—as the eastern terminus of the Silk Road.

  20Needham 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 which had been converted to burn charcoal, and which would work properly only on the flat. Gasoline, 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.

  21Needham’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.

  22By 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 travelers 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.

  23At 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 which he found vexing.

  24Needham 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.

  25Precisely 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.

  26His usual Chinese name, Li Yuese, 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.

  27This 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.

  28Among these was Langdon Warner of Harvard, an art historian who in due course carried off twenty-six of the Dunhuang caves frescoes, and did so with such dash and swagger that he became one of Steven Spielberg’s models for Indiana Jones.

  29The 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 bathrooms at the embassy in Beijing were designated for Chinese or non-Chinese, a form of Asian apartheid.

  30Their 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.

  31Three months before Needham traveled toward 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 center line. Kohima was the most westerly point the Japanese ever attained: after June they were being relentlessly pressed back toward 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.”

  32One 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.

  33Lady 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.

  34Until 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 on in November.

  35Except for the roiling civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists, which ended in 1949 with victory for Mao and Zhou Enlai.

  36Two 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 Books 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.

  37His favored 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, all editors assuming that it was a deliberate invention of Needham’s rather than a shortcut necessitated by a problem of writing mechanics.

  38This 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.

  3939 Needham’s known interest in the erotic tempted more than a few letter writers to make contact. One communication, in the spring of 1948, came from Mr. P. Ye, who described himself as a ’38-year-old virgin male” from Fudan University in Shanghai. He was concerned that because of ’sexual radiation” his eyelids oscillated whenever he masturbated, as he did five times daily. He wrote a lengthy technical inquiry, but its arrival was delayed, mainly because he had addressed it to ’Dr. Joseph Needham, Cambridge University, London.”

  40A series of separate monographs also emerged from the overmatter. Among them were The Great Astronomical Clocks of Mediaeval China, published in 1960; The Pre-Natal History of the Steam-Engine in 1962; and, most commercially successful of all (not least because of its clever title), Celestial Lancets: A History of Acupuncture.

  41The deliciously eccentric British architect—always dressed in breeches and canary-yellow socks—who created, among other magical places, the Welsh fantasy village of Portmeirion, and advised Needham on building techniques.

  42So close were the men that Needham dedicated the first of the two volumes of Science and Civilisation in China devoted to military technology—Volume V, Part 6—to Zhou, for his role as “a constant encourager of this project.”

  43Other research using live biological agents was also conducted in eight American cities between 1950 and 1966, according to testimony given before a Senate committee in 1976—a disclosure that shocked most of America at the time and led to widespread popular revulsion against biological weapons generally, and a widespread reaffirmation of a decision by President Nixon in 1972 to ban the possession of such weapons by the United States.

  44Needham’s letters and other papers relating to the commission are preserved not in the Cambridge University archives, but, in consideration of the sensitivity of the topic of germ warfare, in the rather more secure surroundings of London’s Imperial War Museum.

  45By chance my own copy of Joseph Needham’s book Science Outpost, which recounts his four wartime years in China, once belonged to Gene Weltfish. He had inscribed it, “Gene! With love from Joseph, Jan. 1949. Write me how you like it.” Senator McCarthy and the regents of Columbia would doubtless have found its possession a useful piece of additional evidence for their crusade.

  46A strawberry-growing relative of Punnett’s invented the small wooden basket now known, shorn of its terminal t, as a punnet.

  47There is still much resistance to the use of the pinyin name Beijing for the current Chinese capital. Not only are very few outsiders able to pronounce the word accurately; its use also flies in the face of the more general use in English of “English” names or pronunciations for distant cities or countries. Roma is called Rome, Deutschland is called Germany, Suomi is called Finland, and Zhongguo is called China. Many who accept this logic would like Peking returned to common currency, but doubt that it will ever happen.

  48The United States finally bowed to reality on this issue in 1971. Since then, Taiwan has been excluded from the UN, and it is regarded now as a part of the People’s Republic, which has the single Chinese seat in the General Assembly and on the Security Council.

  49Britain was not so rigid in
its approach to China as America during the cold war. London had recognized the People’s Republic almost immediately after its inception, but had exchanged diplomats—junior officials sent as chargés d’affaires—only from 1954 onward. This halfhearted approach, which nonetheless managed to survive the Korean War, finally evolved into the sending of a full ambassador in 1972.

  50Cort was told to leave, and suspecting that he would be arrested if he returned to Senator McCarthy’s America, settled in Czechoslovakia instead.

  51The vastly admired Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) was begun in 1885–under the editorship of Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell–and sought from its inception to include essays, some decidedly opinionated, on anyone of significance or notoriety in British life since Cassivelaunus, the chieftain who tried to oppose Caesar’s second invasion in 54 BC. The present edition, which runs to sixty volumes, includes 55,000 lives. Queen Victoria’s entry is the longest; among the many more obscure biographies is that of an eighteenth-century wrestling harpist, the Welshwoman Marged ferch Ifan.