The Man Who Loved China (25 page)

 

But aside from such meetings as these, what exactly was Joseph Needham doing in his rooms? Just what was he trying to sift out from all the material he had gathered, and from all his memories? And, once he had it all, how exactly would he go about assembling all the building blocks into this massive, multivolume work?

He decided initially to make a great historical list, a list of every mechanical invention and abstract idea—the building blocks of modern world civilization—that had been first conceived and made in China. If he could manage to establish a flawless catalog of just what the Chinese had created first, of exactly which of the world's ideas and concepts had actually originated in the Middle Kingdom, he would be on to something. If he could delve behind the unforgettable remark that Emperor Qianlong had made to the visiting Lord Macartney in 1792—“We possess all things…. I have no use for your country's manufactures”—if he could determine what exactly prompted Qianlong to make such a claim, then he would perhaps have the basis of a truly original and world-changing work of scholarship. But he needed evidence, and a great deal of it.

Accordingly, he and Wang Ling spent the remaining months of 1946, and most of the next five years, searching for every invention and original idea that was mentioned in the ancient Chinese literature.

Needham proceeded in a patient, methodical, ruthlessly efficient way. He was an extraordinarily well-organized man. He was, for a start, a copi
ous and fanatically driven note taker and file maker. In the piles of boxes that remain today in his archives in Cambridge are dozens of green steel card indexes, most of them filled nearly to bursting, not with index cards bought by the quire from stationers, but with menu cards from teahouses that he was forever cutting up in a process he called “knitting”—snipping, slicing, and folding—which would drive mad those uninitiated few who might accompany him to the café for a cup of Typhoo and a toasted tea cake. He would sit there cutting, cutting, smoking, and cutting—and a day later the cards would all be stacked in their boxes, each one covered with details, in his almost perfect copperplate, about arcane creations from China's distant past. On the reverse side would be a half-legible copy of Today's Special Lunch or Today's Fare for Afternoon Tea.

And one by one, he and Wang began to find things. True, he had made discoveries while he was in China—the antiquity of the abacus, for example, and techniques of grafting plums. But buried among the papers and the documents he had assembled in Cambridge there was much more. He was able to note excitedly:

Needham first found a geographer of the Song dynasty named Shen Gua, for instance, who, in a document firmly dated at AD 1088, described the technique of using a magnetized needle suspended from a length of a
silk to determine the direction of south—a full century before the first reference (in AD 1188) to the use of a magnetic compass anywhere else in the world. “I shall never forget the excitement which I experienced when I first read these words,” Needham wrote later. “If any one text stimulated the writing of this book more than any other, this was it.”

He then found that Chinese ironworkers experimenting in the sixth century BC had managed to make iron that was malleable and not brittle, and that farmers had fashioned a plow from this metal, and added a moldboard to it, thus making a plow that was a vast advance on the primitive scratching device known as an
ard
, which was used in Europe at the time.

He uncovered old writings and drawings showing that the Chinese had invented breast-strap harnesses for horses in the third century BC, when Europeans still had their horses and oxen drag plows by the cruel and inefficient means of a rope looped around their necks. The Europeans would continue to use neck ropes for at least 1,000 years more.

He found that Chinese emperors, goading their subjects with the familiar valediction—“Do this, tremble, and obey!”—had built immense dams, irrigation projects, and canals (like the Grand Canal, which was started in the fifth century BC) hundreds of years before people in the waterlogged rest of the world (Mesopotamia excepted) thought they might be able to control their own rivers. Needham found documents showing that the Chinese created a tradition of subduing nature's excesses while people in the West were simply lying back and cursing the inevitability of fate.

The Chinese learned how to cast iron, for example, and to smelt it with coal. From the fourth century BC on, they were able to make long-lasting pots and pans, axes, chisels, saws, and awls—and a number of tall pagodas, some still standing today. In the seventh century after Christ an ironworker made a palace tower 300 feet high and weighing 1,300 tons, topped with a massive iron phoenix and covered with gold leaf. In the tenth century, when Chinese ironmaking was unequaled, foundrymen working for the emperor in Hubei province in central China made him an enormous commemorative cast-iron lion, twenty feet high and weighing forty tons, which still stands as a memorial to a defeat of Tartar invaders.

But the founding of cast iron marked only the start of China's remark
able metallurgical progress. By the second century BC foundry workers were managing to produce a much more malleable and less brittle version of the metal, which today is called wrought iron, doing so by way of a process to which they gave the culinary term
chao
, since it involved “stir-frying” the molten mass very slowly for hours at a time, to remove the excess carbon. Contemporary ironworkers would call the technique puddling. To further strengthen the puddled iron—which could be used by a blacksmith to make such things as stirrups and swords—some Chinese engineers of 2,000 years ago reintroduced a very carefully calibrated amount of carbon by hammering particles of it into the metal surface, producing a kind of crude steel.

The puddling method, which the classic encyclopedia of the second century, the
Huainanzi
, called “the hundred refining method,” was often fancifully reckoned to be the
fons et origo
of the Bessemer process. The myth seemingly started because in 1855 the American steelmaker William Kelly hired a number of Chinese “experts” to work alongside his ironmasters in his mills in Kentucky, to give advice. In fact these “experts” were no more than manual laborers hired from a teahouse in New York City, men who had no special knowledge of steelmaking of any kind. They were simply cheaper to hire than the local Kentuckians. China had indeed an advanced and very ancient ability to make useful iron and some primitive kinds of steel—but Henry Bessemer's process, like William Kelly's, was entirely homegrown.

Countless other clever devices followed. Chains were invented—permitting, among other conveniences, the making of the chain drive, which Needham discovered appearing in Chinese life in the tenth century, seven centuries before it was first seen in Europe. Long before that, in the first century, illustrations started to appear of the mysterious-sounding square-pallet chain pump—an enormously practical device that allowed farmworkers to raise water from rivers and streams by as much as fifteen feet, and so allow the irrigation of waterless fields. To operate it men drove their feet against large wooden paddles attached by sprockets to a chain of small wooden buckets: the device is in universal use in China today, so perfect a creation that it remains essentially unchanged after 2,000 years. Chains also meant chain suspension bridges, aeons before western suspension
bridges were first made. Many of these Chinese bridges also remain today—the most famous being the nearly legendary Luding Bridge, which was built in 1701 across the Dadu River in Sichuan.

In those corners of the empire where iron was less easy to obtain, engineers contrived to use stone for bridges crossing rivers, creating what is now known as the segmental arch bridge, a type of construction that remains perhaps the greatest feat of China's early civil engineering.

Three hundred years before the Italians copied it, entirely thanks to the close observations of Marco Polo, this one type of Chinese bridge was to have an influence on communication and architecture like few others. The principle behind the bridge was first established in the seventh century by a northern Chinese engineer, Li Jun. Li had built many ordinary arch bridges—like those built by the Romans as early as the first century after Christ—but he realized that a bridge incorporating only the very top of a circle into the arch could be stronger, lighter, and more enduring than a tall, stone-hungry semicircle-arch bridge. He began experimental constructions at the end of the sixth century, and his first completed and truly segmented arch bridge, more than 120 feet long, was thrown across a river in Hebei province outside Beijing. It is still standing today—1,400 years after its construction in AD 605, and after centuries of floods, battles, and earthquakes.

Less obvious and less dramatic improvements in human life were being made in China all the while, and Joseph Needham worked patiently during 1946 and 1947, through the most terrible British winter of all time, when most of the world outside Cambridge was flooded and miserable, assiduously chronicling each of the discoveries.

Some were purely practical: the wheelbarrow, for instance, or the fishing reel. The sternpost rudder came about in the first century after Christ; and once the compass had been perfected it was possible for Chinese sailors to venture, as they did, to Australia, to Mogadishu, around the Cape of Good Hope, and on rather less daunting adventures to the Philippines and Indonesia. Then again, the rolling of the ships at sea caused a problem that another Chinese domestic invention neatly solved: it was a device of interlaced metal rings which keeps a light permanently upright and which is generally known as a set of gimbals, later used to hold a compass, a chro
nograph, and the ship's gyroscope. And there was much, much more: the umbrella, the spinning wheel, the kite—and the sliding measuring instrument that engineers in the west copied and called a pair of calipers.

Needham then discovered a genius of the Han dynasty, Ma Jun, who lived around AD 206 and specialized in making automated figurines, “automata of dancing girls who played music, men who beat drums and played flutes, wooden images dancing on balls, throwing swords about, hanging upside-down on rope ladders, showing government officials in their offices, cocks fighting…and all continuously changing with a hundred variations.” Ma was a polymath: he also improved the silk loom, explained the operation of the south-pointing chariot (a nonmagnetic steering device that was already ancient in his time), irrigated gardens with man-powered square pallet chain pumps, and invented the rotary ballista, a flywheel with stones attached that was a kind of rock-hurling machine gun.

And there was a profoundly simple but world-changing Chinese invention known in the West as the stirrup—a contraption just six inches high that weighed no more than a pound or two, but conveniently allowed a man to remain firmly and comfortably on a horse even though it might be going at full tilt and jumping every obstacle in its path. This was an invention that had an effect on mankind out of all proportion to its size and to its apparent early significance.

Many early Chinese inventions were devised for idling and pleasure, or for elegance—for example, playing cards, tuned drums, fine porcelain, perfumed toilet paper,
³⁸
the game of chess. The origins of chess are still hotly contested: many people like to think that the game began in India or Persia, though Needham's discoveries demonstrated that it began with the game of
xiangqi
, invented by the Chinese in the second century BC and exported westward to the Indian subcontinent. But the stirrup offers a reminder that
China, despite its attention to the peaceable aspects of civilized life, was also involved in warfare, defensive and offensive, conducted internally and across its frontiers, from very early times.

 

And then, at the beginning of 1950, Needham decided that he had found enough, or at least enough to get started. His first discovery period was officially declared to be over—though looking for and finding Chinese firsts would be a continuo throughout the making of the series.

Needham was ready to acknowledge that, however long and impressive this list of firsts might be, the items and ideas on it did not necessarily constitute either science or civilization, but merely hinted at creative ferment within Chinese society. But what a ferment! Depending on the way the arithmetic is done—and considering only the most intellectually fertile phase of China's history, between the Han and the Ming dynasties—Needham pointed out that in every century the Chinese dreamed up nearly fifteen new scientific ideas—a pace of inventiveness unmatched by the world's other great ancient civilizations, including the Greeks. The nature of the inventions was remarkable enough, Needham wrote; but the
rate
at which they came was like nowhere else on earth, and like no other time in history.

 

The role these firsts played in the actual construction of his book was crucial, because they were to serve rather like surveyors' marks, flags that would show how the complex work would be encouraged to grow—which Chinese invention would be placed in what part of the new structure, which creation should by rights be close to which other, which fields of thought should be examined and in what order. And as in the building of any immense structure, the placing of these precise markers took time—in fact, most of the cruel English winter of 1947 was devoted to working out this structure, long before any real building could actually begin.