The Man Who Loved China (11 page)

Just how ancient was something Needham would determine later—and by patient detective work he would discover that the abacus was not only of far greater antiquity than any calculating engine ever made in the West (Blaise Pascal is generally given the credit for making the first, a machine devised in 1642, when he was twenty-one), but far older than had previously been assumed by scholars.

Students of Chinese science working in the West had concluded from documents—most notably a picture in a book dated at AD 1436—that the abacus was a fifteenth-century invention. Not so, Needham declared after just a little more digging: a treatise written more than 1,000 years before, in either AD 190 or AD 570, had references to a calculating phenomenon which in English was translated as “ball arithmetic.” A further few days of detective work uncovered a full description, from a commentator named Chen Lun, of a device made “of a board carved with three horizontal divisions, the upper one and the lower one for suspending the travelling balls and the middle one for fixing the digit.”

Within days of his arrival in Kunming, in other words, Needham was making discoveries about China that very few—whether Chinese or foreigners—had ever managed to make before. As a result, he was becoming ever more convinced. With no more than just a little inquiry he—a biochemist! an amateur!—was finding out things about China that the Chinese themselves didn't know, and that even the most revered members of the small
corps d'élite
of Chinese scholars in the West didn't know either. He was in consequence coming to the very firm conclusion that the book about which he and Gwei-djen had spoken so many times truly deserved to be more than just a vague notion. It needed to be written, if for no other reason than to establish once and for all a just and proper reputation for China.

All this was a very long way ahead. But it was already beginning to seem as though nothing Needham would see, hear, or read over the coming years would go to waste. His late father's often-repeated saying, quoted here yet again—“No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised”—had obviously remained with him.

And there was one other thing: if he had begun falling in love with China while he was still in Cambridge, there was no doubt about his feelings now: this brief sojourn among the western hills of Yunnan had rendered Joseph Needham entirely and hopelessly smitten.

 

Toward the end of March, Needham finally reached Chongqing, the Chinese capital, where his work would really begin. It was a measure of his importance to the government at home that he was escorted there by the same King's Messenger, Pratt, who had met him at the airport a month before. Members of the Corps of Messengers are usually employed to hand-carry secret documents to British embassies around the globe; only very occasionally are they ordered to ensure the safe passage of critical personnel.

But Needham was a critical man—he had been directed there by Winston Churchill. So it was Pratt who, on March 21, came with Needham on the excessively bumpy three-hour journey; Pratt who watched nervously as the plane put down on the sandspit in the Yangzi that was the city's main wartime aerodrome; and Pratt who, after crossing the swaying pontoon bridge to shore clambered with Needham up the famous 480 granite steps, through the mobs of quarrelsome
ban-ban
men, the porters with bamboo shoulder poles eager for custom, to where the embassy motor cars were waiting. The messenger, like everyone else in the corps a former military officer, then saluted stiffly, his responsibility at an end; with the handshake from a waiting attaché, Counsellor Joseph Needham was now formally a member of the British diplomatic mission to China.

He found the embassy a welcoming sanctuary, though it was a good deal less grandiose than most other British legations he had visited around the world. There were no marble pilasters and caryatids and no gilt chandeliers here; the embassy was a ramshackle agglomeration of long, narrow buildings on a bewildering variety of levels on a steeply terraced hillside on the right bank of the Yangzi. At the center was the reasonably imposing chancery building, with a proper porte cochere and a flagpole, and rooms at the back that led to caves carved into the mountainside, in case of an air attack. The half dozen other buildings where the lesser staff worked, and which were connected to the main embassy and to each other by a network
of steep staircases running through the woods, had a cheap, temporary look, all lath and plaster and with bamboo sunshades. It was as though the Ministry of Works had built a temporary welfare payment office destined for some dreary English suburb but had set it down in China by mistake.

Visitors were dismayed by the dilapidation: plaster had fallen off several of the walls, exposing the bamboo matting beneath, and some of the buildings leaned alarmingly, especially those perched at the top of fast-eroding slopes that crumbled down to the riverbank. Moreover, the humidity for which Chongqing was notorious had wreaked havoc on the equipment inside all the offices, coating leather shoes, attaché cases, typewriter covers, and the plaster walls with a greenish mold. Happily this mold burned off once the hot weather arrived—though there was no such luxury as air-conditioning; electricity for the fans was uncertain; and comfort was all too seldom the order of the day. The gardens of the embassy were home to some unfamiliar flowers, including some very fragrant ones that, Needham learned later that year, the local children turned into posies for men—selling them for one yuan at a time, to help mask the smell (like boiled meat, the Chinese complained of westerners) of their summertime perspiration.

The ambassador, Sir Horace Seymour, was a career diplomat of the old school, having come to China from Tehran, where he had been the British minister. Needham described him as self-effacing—in fact, “so shy that by a sort of mumbling he tries to prevent you hearing what he says.” He had just struck what was perhaps the most important deal of his career: a few weeks before, on January 11, he had signed a document which formally ended all British claims on Chinese territory (except for those on Hong Kong), and which abolished all rights to the curious concept of extraterritoriality.
¹⁴
He was in consequence a mightily popular figure locally, being
seen in the capital as the man who had given back to China its long-sought birthright. He lived high on a hill overlooking the city, in a grand mansion which had been lent to the British by Chiang Kai-shek, the generalissimo. The setting was spectacular: both the Yangzi and the Jialing could be seen from the drawing-room windows; and from the dining room the magnificent mountains of Yunnan, blue and misty, could be seen in the far distance.

Needham spent his second night in Chongqing there, in an atmosphere straight out of Tunbridge Wells, with chintz sofas and curtains in old-rose cretonne, gold-edged and royal-crested Doulton china, and silver-edged portraits of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. No Lady Seymour was present, though: she had elected to sit out the war in Wiltshire. But Needham did meet one of British diplomacy's dashing characters, the flamboyantly enigmatic explorer-cum-special agent Sir Eric Teichman, who had been at Needham's college, Caius, and had won a Blue
¹⁵
in 1903 for steeple-chasing.

Teichman had been invited along to describe for Needham the challenges of travel in remote corners of China. Few were better qualified. Like other Central Asian luminaries of the turn of the century, men like Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin, and Sir Francis Younghusband, Teichman was a traveler of enormous resourcefulness and courage. In 1935, despite having severe arthritis and still suffering the lingering effects of a youthful riding accident, he traveled by truck thousands of miles across the Tarim basin to the far western Chinese market town of Kashgar, then pressed on with a pony and on foot across the Pamirs and the Karakoram ranges to Gilgit, before finally reaching New Delhi. He said that this journey was his swan song as a traveler in Asia—for it was the last, the longest, and the most ambitious of his solo expeditions. He had been doing this sort of thing, disappearing
on “special missions” and “fact-finding journeys” into this forbidding corner of the planet, since before the Great War.

The advice he gave that night proved invaluable, as would become clear during Needham's later epic voyages through China. And Needham was hugely impressed—as much by Teichman's oddities as by his offer of assistance. Teichman, he wrote home, “is bent almost double, has a face reminding one of E. M. Forster, [and] comes out with a voice like a kind of harsh bell, extremely definite and clear and imitable.”

The dinner over and the socializing eventually done with,
¹⁶
Needham promptly found his office, assembled such staff as he had been allotted, and got down to work. At first nearly all his tasks involved his official duties for the Sino-British Science Cooperation Office, of which he was the director, and which was housed in a tiny prefabricated building at the top of the riverbank. He enjoyed the assistance of only a driver, a part-time secretary from India, and one older man of uncertain responsibilities. The organization would grow, and mightily; but at the beginning, Needham and these three did all the work.

And the work, at least in the early days, was grueling. By Easter Needham was grumbling to his diary, if reasonably amiably, about both the scale of the task ahead of him and the practical exigencies of performing it in the still besieged wartime city. While others might be taking their ease during the dawn hours on the Monday holiday after Easter, for example, Needham had not gone to bed at all: he was still up, writing in his journal—in part to get his frustrations off his chest, in part to offer up an illustration of the duties he had to perform.

On the Saturday before, he wrote, he had had an “exhausting” two-hour interview with China's minister for war, and had then had to return to his office and write letters to a variety of bodies—one being the Potter
ies Trade Research Association in England—as well as to several local addresses. He then rushed out to dinner with “medical people”; came back and worked until past midnight; then slept fitfully until the moment when, very early the next morning, Easter Sunday (a day not celebrated by the Chinese):

Chongqing is a city defined by its hills. It rises like the prow of a ship, a great pyramid of jumbled rock and humanity, at the meeting point of two of China's mightiest rivers, the Yangzi and the Jialing. Even though it is fully 1,500 miles from the sea, the Yangzi is still immense here—a great gray winding-sheet of a stream, littered with sailing junks, in places a quarter of a mile wide, in parts boiling with currents, in others slow and limpid, roaring imperturbably down from the Tibetan hills to where it pauses here in Chongqing, heavy with mud, on its passage through the great Red Basin of central Sichuan.

The confluence of any two gigantic streams often provides a natural place to build a city; and so Chongqing is understandably ancient, having
first been settled in the fourth century BC, and it has been one of the country's greatest inland cities for at least 1,000 years. Foreigners were permitted to settle there from the beginning of the 1890s—it was the first of China's interior cities to be obliged by treaty to provide concessions for traders and diplomats. Most of them liked the place—it was always lively; the people were peppery and amusing; the food was spicy; the women were said (except by supporters of a rival claim from the eastern city of Suzhou) to be the prettiest in the nation. The major problem was the weather: Chongqing is one of China's three “great furnaces,” blisteringly hot from April until November, the air like bundles of heated cotton-wool, thick and barely breathable.

In the early spring of 1943 the weather was not the major issue. The ruin and depredation caused by two years of nearly continuous Japanese bombing had pounded the city almost to death, and it was only now struggling painfully back to life, the people emerging from their underground shelters, blinking, into the smoky sunlight. Between 1939 and 1941 there had been no fewer than 268 bombing raids, much of the central city had been gutted by firestorms, and thousands had died—more than 4,000 in one terrible two-day raid at the very beginning of the Japanese campaign.

The Chinese behaved with memorable stoicism during the bombing—which was arguably more sustained and terrifying than any other aerial bombardment inflicted on any other city in history. Robert Payne, a writer and teacher who befriended Needham in China—and who came briefly on one of Needham's great expeditions—talked in 1943 to an elderly Chinese professor who managed to put the campaign into the kind of perspective that Needham would have welcomed. Payne was discussing the American bombing raids on Tokyo the year before, somewhat approvingly, and the Chinese sage was nodding his head in a way that Payne assumed signified complete agreement. It was only after the man began to speak that he realized “for the thousandth time since I came to China that a man who nods his head may actually be expressing
the most profound disagreement: