The Man Who Loved China (12 page)

Such conversations fascinated Needham, and as with the grafting of the plum tree and the making of the abacus, he avidly noted the details. But it turned out that he was not so interested in whether or not the Chinese felt pity for the Japanese, or in their views on the supposed indignity of bombing campaigns. It was the old man's idea that a Chinese inventor had come up with an airplane, and that other Chinese scientists knew all about poison gas—and so these two nuggets of information, two Chinese “firsts,” if they were provable, went into the notes he was preparing, and also went into his ledger with a simple notation: “Research this further.”

 

The mission, which was officially to occupy Needham's next four years, was defined in all its aspects by the mechanics of the war that raged through China. By the time he arrived in Chongqing it was a conflict that had already steadied itself into an uneasy stalemate, and with the arithmetic pointing to one pitiless conclusion: Japan was going to lose.

Everything had changed after the attacks of December 1941 on Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, and Singapore, when the Chinese government had at last declared itself officially at war with the invading armies from Tokyo. The Allies' coolheaded military analysts swiftly concluded that as a consequence the eventual outcome was inevitable: insofar as China was concerned, Japan had embarked on a war that for one simple reason—China's immense size—was absolutely unwinnable. China, 4,000 miles from Shanghai to Kashgar, 3,000 from Hainan Island to the Gobi Desert, was like a vast, shapeless sponge for any invading army: it could soak up,
enfold, and suffocate endless supplies of men and matériel and still itself remain healthy, whole, and intact.

Joseph Needham remarked on this years later. There had evidently come a point in the conflict, he said, when Tokyo also reached the same very simple realization: that even after it had fought over and then secured some town or village somewhere in China, its commanders would be obliged to leave behind sentries to guard bridges and culverts and tactically important sites: “and have you any idea how many bridges and culverts there are in China? Do you think Tokyo ever thought of this? Uncountable thousands. More men would be needed than Japan has in her entire army. The fact is, China is just too big, too complicated, for any other people in the world to come and dominate and control it. Japan was on a fool's errand, and by 1941, it had come to recognise that.”

The Nationalist government in Chongqing had therefore decided to spend less of its time and effort in the early 1940s fighting the Japanese, and instead let the sheer size of China wear the invaders down. Chiang Kai-shek had chosen the redoubt of Chongqing as his capital deliberately, with this very fact in mind. Even if China were to lose fifteen of its eighteen provinces, he once famously said, “if we hold on to Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan,” where Chongqing lies, “then we could defeat any enemy, recover the lost land, restore our country, and accomplish our revolution.”

There was an additional reason for Chiang's optimism. Because the Allies would be fighting Japan on the other fronts that had opened up since their attack on Pearl Harbor, Tokyo would be obliged to detach soldiers from its garrisons in China, weakening its presence in and its hold on China and so reducing the likelihood that China would lose any more territory. Therefore, a military policy of containment and survival became Chiang Kai-shek's priority—that and defeating Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and their Communist battalions, whose own ideological power had been growing steadily during the first four years of the war.

However, one major problem remained for the government in Chongqing—the supply of critically necessary food, weapons, and ammunition.

A fair amount percolated through the 2,000-mile frontier between free and occupied China, with Japanese troops sometimes colluding in the
smuggling. However, since the Japanese had attacked and occupied the northern part of French Indochina, the main railway between Hanoi and Kunming—which had been China's lifeline, used for bringing in huge quantities of badly needed supplies from India—had been severed. The only other supply routes passed along the immensely difficult caravan trails from Russia into the deserts of Xinjiang, and were seen as wholly impracticable. China—and its army—thus faced a real risk of being slowly starved to death.

In an attempt to remedy this the Allies constructed the legendary Burma Road and the Ledo Road, hacked through well-nigh impenetrable jungles between India and China, in one of the most heroic engineering feats of any war, anywhere. They also arranged—most relevantly to this story—the air bridge over the Hump, the bridge by which Needham had traveled into China in February, and by which he would now want to bring in supplies for his own official mission. To do that, he would need permission. For his was a rather different task. The Allies were concerned most of all with keeping China's body alive, fed, and in as fair a shape as could be expected. Needham's duties were much more concerned with keeping the Chinese mind in good health, too—with making sure that the finest brains in the eastern world, legatees to the greatest civilization on the planet, were kept nurtured and in good spirits during all the trials of battle.

The specific official task of his Sino-British Science Cooperation Office—later called SBSCO—was to bring succor and comfort to China's academic community. He was to “cheer them up a bit” as Jimmy Crowther of the British Council had put it in London. He was to remind them they were not alone, that the world was thinking of them. But fine words butter no parsnips: what was really needed, Needham discovered as he made his first rounds of the ramshackle capital city, was supplies—laboratory equipment, reference books, and scientific journals. The universities inside free China needed to know what was going on in the world outside, and thus informed, they needed to begin their own research all over again. Such considerations were uppermost in Needham's mind as he settled in at his new billet.

Once he had got its measure, he found that the city was not at all as he had imagined. He wrote:

Some people might suggest that Needham was wearing rose-colored glasses, since most visitors to Chongqing in wartime, even though they liked its hugger-mugger spirit and zest, found it much less congenial and terribly dirty. It had dingy steps, slime-slippery alleyways, the stink of sewage, rats the size of small dogs,
¹⁷
piles of rubbish spilling down the hillsides, scrofulous children, a million people crowded into a space originally meant for a third that number, and a cluster of immigrants and refugees so impossibly varied that communication was difficult, commerce frustrated, and service all but unobtainable. Moreover, the telephone service was virtually nonexistent, the electricity supply was fitful, there were no taxis, and living conditions generally were only tolerable. Because this was China, it was wartime, and everyone sent off to live in the capital had been forewarned that a stiff upper lip was a sine qua non, stoicism was part of the furniture, and fatalism went with the territory.

 

But soon after Needham arrived he was able to effect an escape. Late in May the ambassador asked him to drive 200 miles to the west, on a first mission to practice the art of spreading good cheer in the capital city of Sichuan, Chengdu. It was a journey he anticipated with some eagerness—not least because one of the secretaries at the embassy, picking up quickly on his fondness for pretty young things, had written to tell him of the attractive women he might meet there. “If you like to see a beautiful girl, Lettice Huang…. Miss Kimmie Gao is also beautiful…. Don't bother to see her unless you are inclined to have some female company.” He left the weary old ruins of Chongqing for the foothills of Chengdu with a certain spring in his step.

His route went west through the fields and paddy terraces of Sichuan to the city in the foothills of the Tibetan plateau. Nowadays, on a seamless superhighway, it is a trip of less than three hours, but in the 1940s it was a three-day journey. On his way, Needham found that, to his great delight, he was once again able to indulge his academic curiosity as he had done so freely in Kunming. He dropped in on an alcohol factory (where he was able to speak in fluent German to the senior manager, who had trained in Frankfurt), he inspected a brine works, he gave lectures at two local universities, and he ferreted around in shops for old books—collecting on this first expedition a grand total of nine venerable volumes, including treatises, unavailable in any library back home in England, on the history of Chinese mathematics and astronomy, as well as books on Daoism and alchemy. After studying them, he slipped the volumes into the weekly diplomatic bag—the privileged embassy postal system—and eventually they made their way to Cambridge to await his return.

When he reached Chengdu, the situation was precisely as the secretary at the embassy had told him. He enjoyed his stay hugely—in part because he did indeed find beautiful women there. Wielding his two techniques of flattery and breathtaking directness, which would soon become familiar to their many victims, he flirted, and not infrequently he pounced. “I can't help writing to say what a charming person I think you are!” he wrote to one young woman, Zhu Jingying:

There is no record that he ever met Miss Zhu again; nor is there any record of her reaction to this declaration. We shall never know whether she saw it as an honest and innocent expression of admiration, or as an artfully devised mash note.

 

Whatever the fate of that particular meeting, a much more significant encounter took place during Needham's brief stay in Chengdu. On this first westward venture, Joseph Needham met the young man who would be his secretary, confidant, and constant companion during most of his subsequent years of travel—and who would produce one entire volume of
Science and Civilisation in China
more than half a century later.

He was Huang Hsing-tsung, generally known as H. T., and at the age of twenty-three he was working as a science teacher at a technical school just outside the city. He had been there for two years, after a somewhat dramatically interrupted career.

He had been born in 1920 into the Chinese community of Malacca, on the south coast of the Malayan peninsula, and had gone to Hong Kong University to take a degree in chemistry. Shortly after he graduated, however, Japanese soldiers invaded and overran the tiny British colony—whereupon Huang decided to escape.

He was first smuggled in a boat up the Pearl River. Then he managed to get himself, by walking or by begging lifts in passing carts, into the uncertain and ever-shifting no-man's-land between the Japanese and the Nationalist Chinese lines. Then, after almost a year of wandering and considerable privation, and by managing all the while to stay one step ahead of the invaders, he fetched up in the far western city of Chengdu, and comparative safety. He presented himself at the closest local boys' school, which was known as a Baillie School, after the Scots-American founder. Here, since he had a degree, spoke good English, and was evidently a man of considerable courage and initiative, he was hired as a teacher, almost on the spot.

A few months later, and quite unexpectedly, he received a letter from Chongqing—a letter that was notable chiefly, he said, “for its prominent seals and stamps, one which stated ‘Sino-British Science Cooperation Office,' and which endowed it with an undeniable air of authority.” It was from Needham, and it was brief and to the point. He wanted a secretary, desperately.