The Man Who Loved China (22 page)

It must have been the deepest of sleeps—because Needham's next notation reports the outcome:

They had escaped just in time. Two days later the Hengyang bridge was blown up, and the east bank of the Xiangjiang was irretrievably lost. Within a matter of days, just as had been feared, the entire Chinese salient in eastern China was forcibly folded into the Japanese empire. Chongqing, the country's capital, would now be totally cut off from the east for the remainder of the war.

Needham decided to take the long way home. He spent time with his old friend Alwyn Ogden (H. G. Wells's look-alike), the consul in Kunming, which was still untouched and just as peaceful as before. He reconnected with a woman friend there, who had a week's vacation owing. The couple went deep into the Yunnan countryside, walking in bamboo forests, gathering wild strawberries, and bathing nude in the natural hot springs—all in the name of recovering from having been so close to a Japanese army that so unexpectedly had gone on the offensive.

And then, on July 1, with the Ogdens' help, he managed to find a seat on a flight to the capital. He ended his account of his great Southeastern
Journey simply, and laconically: “There was no-one to meet me, but got a lift in Brigadier Wilson-Brand's car. Found Dophi at dinner.”

 

Needham would make many further journeys around the country, though none so ambitious as these. The most dangerous was the one he undertook in 1944, when he tried to get to the Burmese frontier. Fighting was continuing there, between the Japanese on one side and the British and Americans on the other. The Japanese were now in deep trouble,
³¹
and were fighting with the tenacity of the cornered and the desperate. Yet it was not war but the region's geological instability, and the resulting landslides, that presented Needham's expedition with its greatest nuisance. It did not help matters that his truck crashed and overturned while he was zooming down one side of the Mekong River valley. The party lost much of its equipment, but no one was hurt.

During this tropical adventure he visited botanists, plant physiologists, and nutritionists—finding out, among other things, that they had just discovered the world's richest source of vitamin C, the plant
Emblica officinalis
, which was known locally as the Chinese olive, “but which in fact belongs to the Euphorbiaceae.”
³²
Others were working on ways to improve the resin production of the lac insects, from which shellac is made. Someone
was producing a “Guide to the Caterpillars of Yunnan,” “with special reference to the pests”; and someone else was about to finish a comprehensive guide to Yunnan's flora.

And that was in only one building. In another he came across scientists who were looking at the electric responses of plants, at the underground fruiting of the peanut, at the metabolism of silkworms, at creating a taxonomy of mushrooms, at how wheat blight is spread, and at making a vast catalog of the pharmaceutically useful plants found in China—this last project being conducted in an old village temple with a gigantic image of Guanyin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion, gazing down with impassive approval.

Many of the scientists were French speakers, a fact that reflected France's colonial influence in this corner of China, and the closeness of the Cochin-Chinese territories of
l'Indochine
. The European tradition was strong: all the courses in the medical school were being taught in French, and one of the researchers in the biology department had been raised in Germany, and talked to Needham in her adopted tongue about her studies into the anatomy of frogs' noses.

Outside the city, in a town called Lufeng, Needham spent time with the geologists who had just astonished the world by finding a nearly complete fossil of the small plant-eating dinosaur that is now called
Lufengosaurus
. He also bought a number of pairs of scissors, since before Lufeng became associated with the beasts of the Jurassic, it was famous for its cutlery, and its sharp edges were treasured throughout the old empire.

In a Confucian temple nearby he then found dozens of statisticians working under a stern image of the sage inscribed on a golden tablet. Needham, delighted beyond words with his visit, remarked in his diary that Confucius would have been pleased to see his temple so used, in the service of a people of whom he had once, in Analects 13, so famously written, “Enrich them first, then educate them”; and in Analects 12, “What is needed in governing is sufficient food and sufficient weapons; as for the people, make them sincere.”

Yet Needham did find moments to stop, and wonder. The most important came just as he was leaving the city for his failed attempt (thanks to the later truck accident) to reach the frontier. In his diary he considers
that although Kunming showed how the learned Chinese have a fathomless capacity for inquiry, there remained one mystery: why, if the Chinese were so clever and so endlessly inquisitive, inventive, and creative, had they for so long been so poor and scientifically backward?

Why had the kind of inquiry into the natural world, which Needham's research suggested they had been pursuing for a thousand years and more, evidently become moribund for so very long? The question bothered him, nagged at him, vexed him—and always stayed in his mind, no matter how impressive the efforts of places like Kunming might be today. It was an expansion of the note he had scribbled on the BBC letter two years before:
“Chinese sci. Why not develop?”
Something had happened, perhaps hundreds of years ago, that somehow blighted the promise of those earlier times. Needham vowed that one day he would determine just what that something might be.

This would later become famous as the “Needham question.” It is a puzzle that manages to define China and Chinese history. And as far as the world's academic community is concerned, it is a puzzle that also helps define Joseph Needham.

 

Joseph Needham would remain in China for eighteen months more. By the time he left he had visited 296 Chinese institutes, universities, and research establishments; he had arranged for the delivery of thousands of tons of equipment and chemical and scientific journals; he would read, endlessly and voraciously, the various thousands of documents which he had collected and which he felt certain would enhance his knowledge of China; and he spent much of his final months laying the foundations for a diplomatically privileged organization to support Chinese science—an organization that would continue to function without him long after he had left.

Despite now having Dophi with him he was rather lonely. He missed Gwei-djen sorely: he wrote loving notes to her in his diary, and there are moments of great poignancy that seem almost to have brought him to tears. He recorded a moment in western China when he came across an American forces' post exchange, where he could buy shoes to replace his
own—if he could pay in American cash. In his wallet he found one five-dollar bill, left over from his trip to New York to see Gwei-djen two years before. He was overwhelmed, he wrote, by a sudden, terrible wave of nostalgia. Needham wrote her a long letter, one she later said she treasured above all others. It remains as much as anything his testimonial to China:

But then there came an unexpected opportunity to see her. By chance in early 1945—when it was clear the war was winding down—Needham was asked to fly to Washington for a regional diplomatic meeting and to discuss a postwar plan for the United Nations which would later involve
him. A succession of military aircraft brought him to the American capital. Once his meetings were done he took the Pennsylvania Railroad express to see Gwei-djen in Manhattan, and told her immediately how intolerable it was for him to be apart from her. She, to his great delight, then asked if perhaps she could come out to China. Her work at Columbia was done, after all, and she would very much like to come to her home country, to be with him and perhaps, once the Japanese were defeated, to see what had happened to her family.

And so, late in 1945, Needham cunningly contrived to have Gwei-djen sent to China from New York, to be brought onto his staff as a salaried employee, classified as an expert on nutrition.

The war was over by then—Germany and then Japan had surrendered—and as a newly impressed diplomat Gwei-djen was able to come to China by air, quickly and fairly easily. Needham was impatient for her to arrive, and he wrote “Groan!” in large letters on the closing page of the diary he kept on his last major trip, to the Chinese north, when he got back to the embassy and found that she had not yet arrived. But a few days later she did make it; and Dophi records the two of them taking afternoon tea together with the ambassador's wife
³³
in early December. Dophi goes on to note that her husband's mistress spoke eloquently that afternoon on the need for China to be allowed to import “the right kind of soybean,” not a low-fat variety that some foreign firms were then trying to sell. Joseph Needham's love life was evidently back to normal.

But the arrangement did not go down at all well with his colleagues. Gwei-djen's appointment caused a fluttering in the diplomatic dovecotes because it seemed so blatantly nepotistic. There was no pressing academic need for Gwei-djen to come to China, and she remained there only long enough to take one trip across the south.

No complaint was as vitriolic in tone as one formal memorandum that found its way back to the head office in London, having been written by one of the more remarkable—and angriest—members of Needham's team, the biologist Laurence Picken.

Picken, who died in early 2007, was a polymath like few others. He started his career in biology as a specialist—rather like Dorothy Needham—in the elastic properties of muscle. He joined Needham's team in China in late 1943 as a biophysicist and an agricultural adviser. But then, fatally for his biological career, he learned to play the
qin
, a seven-string Chinese zither. From that moment, muscles had to move over. Picken became hooked on music—especially its ethnology, ranging from the social aspects of birdsong to the modern adaptability of Tang dynasty court music.

A colleague of Picken's at Cambridge recently described him as “a bachelor don of the old school, an established scholar in the fields of biochemistry, cytology, musicology, Chinese, Slavonic studies and ethnomusicology, world expert on Turkish musical instruments, Bach cantatas, ancient Chinese science and reproduction of cells. You could pick up from him an amount of knowledge on any number of subjects—from Baroque keyboard ornamentation to the vinification of Burgundy, from the wave structures of the benzene ring to the translation of the Confucian Odes, from Frazer's theory of magic to the chronology of Cavalcanti—and the very irrelevance to the surrounding world of everything he knew made the learning of it all the more rewarding.”

But in the autumn of 1945 it was evident that Picken was a man with a mean streak. His memorandum, sent to London and addressed to a mandarin on the British Council, Sydney Smith, was a rant of some style: