The Man Who Loved China

The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

Simon Winchester

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061795886
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"— New York Times Book Review ) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"— Time ) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country.

No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair.

He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire. He searched everywhere for evidence to bolster his conviction that the Chinese were responsible for hundreds of mankind's most familiar innovations—including printing, the compass, explosives, suspension bridges, even toilet paper—often centuries before the rest of the world. His thrilling and dangerous journeys, vividly recreated by Winchester, took him across war-torn China to far-flung outposts, consolidating his deep admiration for the Chinese people.

After the war, Needham was determined to tell the world what he had discovered, and began writing his majestic Science and Civilisation in China, describing the country's long and astonishing history of invention and technology. By the time he died, he had produced, essentially single-handedly, seventeen immense volumes, marking him as the greatest one-man encyclopedist ever.

Both epic and intimate, The Man Who Loved China tells the sweeping story of China through Needham's remarkable life. Here is an unforgettable tale of what makes men, nations, and, indeed, mankind itself great—related by one of the world's inimitable storytellers.

ONE

The Barbarian and the Celestial

On the Worldwide Repute of Early Chinese Bridges

Foreign admirers of Chinese bridges could be adduced from nearly every century of the Empire. Between AD 838 and 847 Ennin never found a bridge out of commission, and marvelled at the effective crossing of one of the branches of the Yellow River by a floating bridge 330 yards long, followed by a bridge of many arches, when on his way from Shandong to Chang’an. In the last decades of the 13th century Marco Polo reacted in a similar way, and speaks at length of the bridges in China, though he never mentions one in any other part of the world…. It is interesting that one of the things which the early Portuguese visitors to China in the 16th century found most extraordinary about the bridges was the fact that they existed along the roads often far from any human habitation. “What is to be wondered at in China,” wrote Gaspar da Cruz, the Dominican who was there is 1556, “is that there are many bridges in uninhabited places throughout the country, and these are not less well built nor less costly than those which are nigh the cities, but rather they are all costly and all well wrought.”

—JOSEPH NEEDHAM, 1971
From Science and Civilisation in China, Volume IV, Part 3

Joseph Needham, a man highly regarded for his ability as a builder of bridges—between science and faith, privilege and poverty, the Old World and the New, and, most famously of all, between China and the West—was obliged to make an early start in the craft, as the only child of a mother and father who were ineluctably shackled in a spectacularly disastrous Edwardian marriage.

Joseph Needham, the father, was a London doctor, a steady, unexciting, reliable sobersides. It was as a lonely widower, in 1892, that he met the young flame-haired Irishwoman who was to become his second, and singularly ill-chosen, wife. It took him only six weeks to decide to marry Alicia Adelaide Montgomery, the daughter of the union between the town clerk of Bangor, County Down, and a French gentlewoman. It took him the better part of thirty turbulent years in the genteel London suburb of Clapham to repent.

Alicia Needham was generously described as having “an artistic temperament,” which in her case meant a combination of wild, childlike exuberance and the staging of almighty tantrums, which were colored by her liking for throwing things (plates, mainly) at her husband. She was profoundly erratic, moods blowing up like storms, her torrents of tears being followed by gales of cackling laughter. She was fascinated by psychic phenomena, knew all of south London’s local mediums, read tarot cards, held séances, was interested in ectoplasm, and took photographs of spirits. She spent money like a drunken sailor, her spending binges frequently bringing the family close to ruin.

It was eight years before she became pregnant. The son who in the closing days of 1900 entered this most fractious of households was to be their only child. Trouble began at the font: such was his parents’ animosity toward each other that each chose to use a different Christian name for the boy: from the four he was given at birth his mother selected Terence; his father, perhaps mindful of the time of year the child was born, instead chose to use Noël. The boy would sign letters to each with the name each preferred; but when finally left alone to choose, for both convenience and filial compromise generally used, and eventually settled on, Joseph.

His was a solitary, contemplative childhood, lived out in his fourth-floor room, where he played alone with his Meccano erector set and his building blocks and a large model railway layout, and was bathed, shampooed, and dressed by a humorless French governess shipped in direct from Paris. But it was also an intellectually stimulating upbringing. His severe and learned father, to whom he was by far the closer, saw to it that he had a solid grounding in worlds both bookish and practical. He taught the boy how to write when Joseph was little more than an infant (his mother banging hysterically on the locked door protesting that the child was far too young), leaving a lifetime legacy of the neatest handwriting, perfectly legible and elegant. He taught him woodwork, bird-watching, the geography of Europe, the taxonomy of the back garden, and an antimaterialist philosophy that would remain with him all his life: the need to “give things only a passing glance.”

Noël Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham and his leashed cat at home in Clapham, southwest London, 1902. Dresses for boy toddlers—a convenience for mothers and maids alike—were much in style in Edwardian England.

There was spiritual instruction, albeit of an unusually rigorous kind. The family took the clanking steam train up to the medieval Templars’ church in the center of London each Sabbath day to hear the controversial mathematician and priest E. W. Barnes preach one of his so-called “gorilla sermons.” Barnes, who would later become bishop of Birmingham, was at the forefront of a movement to remodel Christian doctrine in the light of scientific discovery—most notably Darwinian evolution, from which the “gorilla sermons” took their name.

He was an uncritical supporter of Darwin, denied the existence of miracles, opposed the fundamental beliefs about the sacraments, and outraged the orthodox members of the Church of England, who accused him of heresy and demanded his condemnation by Canterbury. And the schoolboy Needham listened to him enraptured. In an interview much later in life Needham explained the legacy that Barnes had left, summing it up by saying he had basically liberated religion from the “creepiness” that put off so many other people. Barnes and his modernizing zeal transformed faith, thought Needham, into the best of good sense.

Not content with keeping up the academic pressure on his son even on Sundays, the elder Joseph Needham also took the boy to France on study holidays. The parents, ever fighting, invariably (and prudently) took separate holidays, and young Joseph, fearful of being embarassed by his high-strung mother, rarely went with her, except for a couple of times when he traveled to see a rather pretty niece who lived in Ireland. So much did he like France that he eventually spent a term at school there, at Saint-Valérysur-Somme, and was able to speak passable French by the time he was twelve, with some help from his gloomy governess.

It was also in France that, when he was twelve, he had his first social encounter with the working class from whom his parents had tried so sedulously to shield him. He and his father were stranded on a remote railway station platform in Picardy, in the village of Eu. The hotels were full, but a track worker cheerfully took in the pair. “I remember how he invited us in to his humble home and made us most welcome there.” That men from classes shabbier than his own could be so decent came as something of an epiphany for the boy: he would reflect many years later that this small event in France played no small part in the construction of his later political sympathies.

A respect for tidiness, order, punctuality, and routine was also instilled in the boy by the fussy, kindly old doctor—but in the Needham family, unlike so many Victorian and Edwardian households, it was done affectionately, not harshly. Maxims helped: “Never go upstairs empty-handed,” his father used to say. “Never have three helpings of anything. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. More flies are caught by honey than by vinegar.”

The library his father had built up at home was prodigious, and books spilled off the shelves in almost every room. Young Joseph was captivated by the collection, and consequently his reading habits were precocious in the extreme—he remarked that he was only ten when he swallowed up Friedrich Schlegel’s The Philosophy of History in one go (learning to speak German en route).

There was one figure, a family friend, who helped nudge the youngster toward his lifelong fascination with science. He was a diminutive, Napoléon-like Cockney anatomist who had originally been named John Sutton and was the son of an impoverished Middlesex “farmer, stock slaughterer and amateur taxidermist.” He later adopted the surname Bland-Sutton, won a knighthood, and when he became a constant teatime visitor to Clapham Park owned the kind of name and profession that the socially ambitious Needhams very much liked: he was now Sir John Bland-Sutton, baronet, surgeon.

The schoolboy Joseph found Bland-Sutton’s tales endlessly fascinating—how he had dissected no fewer than 12,000 animals, from fish to humans, and had investigated the anatomy of more than 800 stillborn babies. How he had developed a diet for pregnant zoo animals, had found a cure for rickets in lion cubs, and had discovered that lemurs were unusually liable to cataracts. And how his peculiar early love for teeth, jaws, and tusks was in time supplanted by a growing surgical fascination with the genitalia of women.

Bland-Sutton essentially invented the hysterectomy, though was widely criticized at the time for being a “criminal mutilator of women.” He wrote two definitive books: one on ligaments, the other on tumors. He entertained on a Lucullan scale, and built a house in Mayfair that had thirty-two columns topped with bulls’ heads and was modeled after the temple of Darius at Susa, in Persia. He had few close friendships other than a robust closeness with Rudyard Kipling—the pair, both top-hatted, were regulars on the London social scene.

When the boy was considered old enough—nine—Bland-Sutton let him attend a simple operation, an appendectomy, at Middlesex Hospital, and paid him a sovereign for assisting. And though Needham soon decided he would never himself make a surgeon, he worked in the operating theater as an assistant to his father during his teenage years, handing instruments and catgut to the nurses while his father attended to the flows of ether and nitrous oxide that kept the patients asleep. Needham came to have a thorough knowledge of human anatomy as a result.

And then, in August 1914, with the German attack on Belgium came the outbreak of the Great War. Joseph Needham was swiftly sent off to Northamptonshire, 100 miles to the north, to study at one of England’s oldest, costliest (he won no scholarship), and most distinguished public schools, Oundle. The education he received there was, for the time, unusual and excellent, and was due mainly to the school’s still fondly remembered headmaster, F. W. Sanderson.

“Think,” Sanderson would proclaim to his boys in every welcoming speech and in every valedictory address: “Think in a spacious way. Think on a grand scale.” H. G. Wells was one of those in Edwardian England who heard the message and decided to send his sons to Oundle; eventually he wrote an admiring biography of Sanderson. It was an echo of the message that was then being conveyed by another Edwardian hero, Admiral Jackie Fisher of the Royal Navy, who often exhorted his audience to “think in oceans.” Put aside the mean and the pettifogging, the details and the trivia, Sanderson would say: just stand back and think big.

While he was at Oundle, this child of two determinedly bourgeois parents first began to declare a real sympathy for the ordinary working-class man, and first began to display hints of the firmly socialist views that would eventually define his political life. His brief contact in Picardy four years before had suggested some early stirrings. Then one day in 1917 when he left school to visit a dentist in Peterborough, about thirty miles away, he opted to go by train, and delays forced him to wait for several hours. A kindly railwayman, who Needham recalled in old age was named Alfred Blincoe, took the bored youth up into his locomotive, stood him on the footplate in front of the controls, and taught him how to drive. After a few minutes of instruction, Needham remembered, “I could…take over the regulator and the Westinghouse brake and crack a walnut (as they say) gently between the buffers.”

A passion for steam trains was born that moment—a passion for railway locomotion that would underline another of his father’s axioms: “No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised.” But the hours he spent that day talking to Alfred Blincoe also spawned in Needham an enduring belief that politics based on enlightened ideology could perhaps alleviate the very obvious trials of the laboring classes. It convinced him that he had a moral duty to become party to such ideologies as could help improve the lives of his country’s workingmen.

Besides, this was 1917—a year that was most decisively marked by the events of the Russian Revolution. The teenage Needham immediately supported the Bolsheviks, and later horrified his father by marching into the family home one winter evening with a friend from Oundle, Frank Chambers, declaring that the Russian communists were “a jolly good thing,” and that the dictatorship of the proletariat was the way of the future. How he came to this view intellectually puzzled him: he had never read any of the Marxists’ classics, and in later years he suggested that his voracious appetite for the works of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, whom he came to know well, led him to believe in the possibility of a political utopia. Perhaps, he remarked later, his socialism was born more from an emotional response to his encounters with laboring men like Blincoe than from listening to theory or studying radical polemics.

It was also in 1917 that Needham formally acknowledged his talent and interest in science, and applied to a university with a view to studying medicine and, like his father, becoming a physician. He was accepted quite readily in 1918, and despite being inducted into the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as an acting sublieutenant—the armed forces were by now critically short of medical personnel and tried to press into service anyone who knew how to tell a tibia from a fibula—he was able, by the great good fortune of the war’s coming to its end in August of that year, to make it into the university in October. He chose Cambridge: it was here that his entire life would undergo a profound and utterly unimaginable change.

Cambridge University was a quiet, intense place, solemn and depleted at the end of the Great War, but brimming with brains and ambition. And perhaps in no other college was this more true than the one that had readily accepted Needham—the fourteenth-century gem known formally as Gonville and Caius, more generally referred to by its second name only, and that pronounced like the original surname of its second founder, John Keys.

Needham knew little enough of Caius when he applied. A friend at Oundle, Charles Brook, had opted for the college, and one summer afternoon, while he and Needham were idling in the long grass in the school fields, he had suggested that Needham might profit from going there too—not least because the Master was then a doctor, Hugh Anderson, a specialist in the muscles of the eye, and Needham had thoughts of becoming a doctor himself.

His first days there were far from inspiring. Most of the rooms were still occupied by staff officers who had been billeted there during the war, their quartermasters apparently having forgotten about them. So Needham was given the only place available—a miserable ground-floor room, C-1, in what was then a most unfashionable college court, Saint Michael’s, in a gloomy new annex across Trinity Street from the principal building.

As if being consigned to the college’s social Siberia wasn’t bad enough, in November 1918 Needham promptly came down with the flu—becoming one of perhaps 50 million victims of the infamous Spanish influenza epidemic. His college tutors took his infection with the greatest seriousness. One, W. T. Lendrum-Vesey, a somewhat mad minor Irish aristocrat who was a sportsman and classicist, very generously fed the patient grapes—but he tied them to the end of a borrowed walking stick and proffered them through the door in order to avoid approaching Needham’s bed and catching his germs.

Initially Needham remained the shy and introspective young man he had been at school, given to taking himself for long walks into the wintry countryside, pondering the great questions of science and medicine—and also, more important, the great questions relating to God. His Anglo-Catholic upbringing, half forgotten while he was at Oundle, reasserted itself in Cambridge, and he found it a comforting balm, a means of helping assuage his loneliness.

He joined a variety of societies that brought him into contact with churchly matters: he belonged to the Sanctae Trinitatis Confraternitas, for example,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• For Setsuko
• Contents
• Map
• Maps and Illustrations
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• chapter One
• chapter Two
• chapter Three
• chapter Four
• chapter Five
• chapter Six
• chapter Seven
• Epilogue: Without Haste, Without Fear
• Appendix I: Chinese Inventions and Discoveries with Dates of First Mention
• Appendix II: States, Kingdoms, and Dynasties of China (Principal Unified States in Capitals)
• Suggested Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• Books by Simon Winchester
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher